| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 台灣語文學系 === 105 === Love between two males, in the past literary and cultural vision, had been placed under the table and received little attention in academic researches. However, after gay issues, gender consciousness and sub-culture that symbolizes the new generation gradually obtain a speaking position in the mainstream society, “Boy’s Love” as the theme of literature and cultural discourse, and also as a concept of community, steps into the horizon of society and the mass people.
From the surface meaning of the term, Boy’s Love seems to be related to male homosexuality, but in Taiwan, the emergence and development of the fiction of BL is closely connected to girls’ cartoon and romance. Then when does the phenomenon of BL enters the reading habits of female romance readers? Since cartoon and fan fiction became the subject matters of academic researches, BL has also attracted the attention of the academia. Previous researches begin with the perspectives of romance studies, exploring gender and power relationship in the texts of BL and romance. But we have to be aware that the characteristic of popular culture is in constant changes in the course of time.
If BL can be regarded as a sub-genre of romance fiction in Taiwan, why is it that after the existence of two decades, it is still popular? This study therefore intends to analyze commercial BL in Taiwan and the ways male romantic love and male images can contain subversive implications in terms of female authors writing about male bodies.
Questions are raised regarding how female authors can express erotic flows through the representation and performance of the male body and in what ways the male body has become a cultural signifier. By what means the difference and contrast between masculinity and femininity are reproduced and transformed to such an extent that the male body can be a playful and pleasurable object of female gaze?
This study will analyze and discuss the changes taking place over the past two decades regarding male romantic discourse, the images of the male body, masculinity, and desire. The theoretical perspectives of Judith Butler, in particular the notion of gender performative, will be used in order to examine whether or not BL, according to previous research results, reproduces heterosexual hegemony without any changes in the course of time. If there have been changes, what are their significances?
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