Emerging Online Spaces of Resistance: The Technology-Enabled Transgressive Participation of Chinese Fans in Global Fandoms Navigating Censorship

This paper investigates the intersection of gender, digital authoritarianism, and transgressive practices within Chinese fan communities, focusing on their engagement with global online fandoms, particularly in producing and consuming Boys’ Love (BL) fanfiction. Amidst China’s tightening online censorship, fans navigate restrictive digital infrastructures to create emergent spaces for cultural expression and resistance. By analyzing explicit and sexual content in fanfiction, we demonstrate how such works serve as effective indicators of the evolving boundaries of online censorship and the strategies fans adopt to negotiate these changes. Employing digital ethnography and textual analysis, we examine the evolving dynamics between power and resistance in fans’ practices: circumventing censorship to access original works, and producing/consuming translations. Under the former, we explore three tactics, ranging from the most transgressive and risky (using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to bypass the Great Firewall of China), to milder strategies like creating mirror sites and sharing resources within fan communities. Under the latter, we trace the development of fan translation from manual efforts to advanced machine translation with AI, which has democratized access to censored sexual materials. We find that these emerging spaces challenge conventional power dynamics, providing temporary spaces for marginalized groups to explore identity, desire, and alternative cultural narratives. These practices resist state and media censorship and social norms that marginalize LGBTQ+ content. However, these spaces are also precarious, often absorbed into regulated systems when perceived as threats. Despite this, the continuous generation of such spaces underscores the dynamic interplay between technological advancement, fan agency, and institutional control. By framing these practices within Raymond Williams’ concept of “the emergent,” we situate these digital spaces as fluid and temporary sites of defiance within authoritarian systems. Rather than viewing resistance solely as overt political activism, we foreground everyday practices that subtly challenge censorship through technological innovation and creative expression. We argue that fans go beyond navigating censorship to actively generate resistant spaces using technologies. Fans’ transgressive engagement in translating, sharing, and archiving erotic content not only tests the limits of censorship but also reshapes virtual geographies, turning the internet into a continuously expanding field of contestation. Our analysis highlights how gender and social reproduction intersect with digital authoritarianism, illuminating how censorship targets sexual and queer content while fans mobilize technology to resist erasure. In doing so, we emphasize the feminist and queer dimensions of this resistance, revealing the agency of marginalized groups in reclaiming online spaces. The practices we document, from bypassing firewalls to adapting translation algorithms, reflect broader global struggles against digital authoritarianism and the commodification of online platforms. Ultimately, this paper contributes to the comparative study of digital authoritarianism by demonstrating how fans use technology to create new and endless online spaces of resistance. It underscores the importance of considering gendered and queer perspectives in understanding how authoritarian regimes and platform capitalism discipline cyberspace. By analyzing these emergent digital spaces, we offer insights into how grassroots resistances redefine agency and foster alternative cultural imaginaries under censorship and surveillance.