Jin Feng’s Romancing the Internet is a fascinating book about an art form most of us are unfamiliar with: internet-based Chinese romance novels. (Review Here: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/romancing/ ) 289 million people, or 45.8% of China’s online population, are using the web to satisfy their literary cravings, as of 2014, and the market for romance novels is huge. More importantly, it is interactive, with many of the sites encouraging direct interaction with, shaping of, and addressing the authors and fellow readers.

The traditional script for romance went something like this (and I am summarizing what I learned from Feng’s writing here and in what follows): heroine takes path of self-realization from her loss of social identity to its full restoration when she, after a series of misunderstandings and mishaps, eventually earns a love declaration and “unwavering commitment” from a super-masculine, “aristocratic” hero.  The Chinese model, in contrast, turns matriarchal, in an act of – I love the term – “textual poaching” “to describe the ways that members of a subordinate group appropriate from mainstream cultural products in order to resist, negotiate, or transform the system and products of the relatively powerful.” Women rule in these internet novels, succeeding not through love relationships but all kinds of career or power moves, often by means of time travel. Rather than being the sexual innocents they seek and receive pleasure, and help make the world a better place.

According to Feng’s research, romance novels “reflect the many contradictions inherent in contemporary Chinese society, they perform a number of important functions for their authors and audiences that include appropriating and subverting the more “masculine” cultural products that dominate China’s public sphere and, in doing so, expose patriarchal oppression and gesturing toward a “different structure of feelings.” Highly interesting – but what struck me as strange was the way they visually depict their subjects. The males on these websites are all boy-men, almost androgynous, or completely so, in some cases. I felt that was a match for today’s featured photograph of a very young warrior.