Danmei is a genre considered to be produced by “straight women for straight women”. Danmei readers refer to themselves as “rotten women”, nodding to the Japanese use of the term “fujoshi”, translated as “rotten girl” (Sullivan). The genre is considered by the state to be a “lowbrow deviation” from other genres and is qualified as an “internet fiction genre”. The genre is delegitimized because of the female-centered identity of its creators and readers.

Danmei is a very feminist genre, allowing women to escape the realities of a patriarchal society that “discourage[s] women from expressing and enjoying sexual desires” and to explore female-perspective ideals of the male body.

Devaluing this genre, the state then turns to monitoring, controlling, and criminalizing it.

Danmei might not even be a genre “by straight women for straight women” in China, but that any other-identified readers must remain unseen as consumers for the sake of remaining safe.

Danmei, as a genre, and the consumption of it is restorative resistance.

Authors and readers are able to find in androgynous bodies escape from strict gender norms and institutionalized expectations of gender roles in the workplace and in the home. Danmei readers and writers can engage in the survival literacy practice of fictive kinship, seeking comfort and validation in the identity, image, and actions of such characters where they are unable to in the “real world”.

Writers and readers utilize and engage with chronotopes in order to oppose delegitimization and censorship.

Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation is a danmei series by Chinese author Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. Examining the donghua adaptation of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, we see how chronotopes are used to circumvent censorship, thus pointing to the multimodality of survival literacies. 

Light novels, while not as overtly dismissed as the danmei genre, are still discussed on blogs and writing platforms as something “females gravitate towards” because “they are easy to read” and “the vocabularies used in writing are simple and easily understood”.

Both devalued and monetized, the light novel medium exists at a similar socioeconomic crossroads as the danmei genre.

Japanese female author Natsu Hyuuga first serialized The Apothecary Diaries on the website Shosetsuka ni Naro in 2011. Hyuuga has insisted on maintaining her serial release format of the story’s origin. This is an act of restorative resistance and imagination, allowing readers to not only define themselves through observing, but also literally through defining the characters and story.

Multimodality opens up an avenue to aggressively highlight, and consequently queer, traditional gender norms, particularly surrounding beauty. The chronotopes of “traditional” imperial Tang dynasty Chinese customs are used to directly challenge gender norms and roles.

Natsu Hyuuga, a Japanese author, portrays her character as rejecting beauty through the chronotope of freckles, which is predominantly more of a Chinese and Korean standard of “ugliness” than it is a Japanese one. Beauty here is something that is very notably superficial. The application of a “foreign” beauty standard allows both author and reader to queer the fixation on appearance. “Beauty” as enforced upon female bodies consequently becomes decentered.    

The text similarly employs the chronotope of eunuchs in the rear palace to challenge gender performance norms. Jinshi, the main male character of the story, serves as the overseer of this rear palace and is therefore, so far as the others are concerned, a eunuch. He is notably an object of great attention due to his beauty. 

 Jinshi, dressed as a woman and superimposed upon the memory of a female dancer, forms a Vitarka Mudra with his hand. It is commonly associated with female divinity or noble female performativity in TV shows, movies, stage plays, and other visual media.

The text thus appeals to the chronotope of the eunuch in imperial China to show moments where characters deny, oppose, or challenge “traditional” gender norms and, through doing so, experience success, wherein writer and readers are able to engage in gratifying moments of restorative imagination.

The collaborative writing and reading of The Apothecary Diaries becomes a communal act of restorative imagination. 

These two texts portray and comment on literacy normativities within their own stories, demonstrating a more manifest realization and understanding of the power of literacy and survival literacy strategies on the part of the authors and readers of these stories.

Wei Wuxian is confronted with the enforcement of a “right” way of doing things. Multiple voices are, within this context, suppressed or discouraged under the banner of being “unorthodox”.

The enforcement of literacy normativities upon the main character in unforgiving and authoritarian ways demonstrates that Mo Xiang Tong Xiu was aware of the harmful implementation of literacies against students and nontraditional bodies or ways of thinking.

Wei Wuxian also uses modes of literacy to his advantage, reframing or otherwise queering literacy normativities as modes of (literal) survival literacies. Thus, author Mo Xiang Tong Xiu seems likely to have actively recognized the power of literacy as both a restrictive and liberating tool.

The text also acknowledges an element of danger in possessing the “wrong” literacy and aims to critique the implications of suppressing this “wrong” literacy. The author acknowledges the norms and pressures surrounding access to certain literacies by certain demographics and aims to highlight ways in which this restriction negatively impacts women’s health of all social classes. 

Many other danmei and light novels aim to similarly engage with survival literacy strategies, such as The Scum Villian’s Self-Saving System and Violet Evergarden. The implementation of survival literacy strategies like fictive kin, chronotopes, multimodality, and counterstories is purposeful, utilized by authors and readers as active agents for the sake of critical restorative resistance and imagination.

I want to emphasize the very pressing issue of devaluing genres and publication technologies that are closely associated with female and queer authors and readers.

These individuals have successfully utilized survival literacies, but they must still navigate marginalized and criminalized modes of literacy intrinsically tied to their identities.

I therefore call for legitimization and a serious engagement with these marginalized texts, for a continued appreciation of the deft and purposeful survival literacy strategies authors and readers in this atmosphere utilize, and for an appreciation of the restorative resistance and imagination of writing and reading utopias that don’t quite fit the status quo.

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