Women’s Affect and Queer Fandom in China Living as Rotten Girls

1. Seeing Rotten Girls in Post-socialist Queer Fandom 2. Feeling with the Rotten Girls: A Transcultural Affective Framework 3. Danmei-Adaptation 101: Perceiving Maifu through Post-socialist Structure of Feeling 4. CP Sensation: Queer Masculinity and Male Homosociality in Fan Videos 5. In-Between the Real and the Fantastic: Rotten Girls’ Fan Identity 6. And the future will be better: Rotten Girls as Killjoy Feminists in Chinese Patriarchy

Biography

Xiaofei Yang researches on Asian popular culture, gender, sexuality, and affect. Her works can be found in Feminist Media Studies, Continuum, and anthologies including Asian Celebrity Cultures in the Digital Age (Hong Kong University Press, 2025).

Unfolding the lives of young women known as ‘the rotten girls’ in contemporary China, author Xiaofei Yang vividly conveys the experiences of this networked feminine fan culture as they engage in affective, technologically informed creativity that subverts the sexuality of Chinese male pop stars. The ways that this often ‘killjoy’ fan culture has risen and fallen in the midst of a cultural context of patriarchy and governmental control/censorship is thoroughly compelling. 

Gregory J. Seigworth, Millersville University, co-editor of Affect Theory and Affect Theory 2 and Capacious: Journal of Emerging Affect Inquiry

 

Chinese queer fandom is growing fast and is changing how fans engage worldwide. This book explores Chinese “rotten girl” fan culture through theoretical framing, interviews, and author experience, taking fans’ affect seriously and considering lived experience from the fans’ perspective. It offers a timely, rigorous account with international relevance for scholars and fans.

Louisa Ellen Stein, Associate Professor, Middlebury College