Dear colleagues and friends, I’m very pleased to share the publication of a new book that Tingting Hu and I have co-authored, **The Danmei Culture in Chinese Media and Society: Male-Male Romance, Resistance and Representation<https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003705741>**, published by Routledge as part of its Transmedia series. The book grows out of our long-standing research on Chinese danmei (boys love) culture and asks what this cultural formation can tell us about gender, sexuality, media industries, fandom, and cultural governance in contemporary China and East Asia. Rather than approaching danmei simply as a literary genre or asking whether it should be understood as inherently feminist, queer, misogynistic, or homophobic, we treat it as a historically evolving and internally contradictory cultural ecology. We trace its development from the late 1990s onwards, from online fiction and reader communities to web dramas, audio dramas, manga and animation. Across these different media forms, we are particularly interested in the uneven relations among women’s and queer desires, commercial adaptation, platform capitalism, fandom practices, and state regulation. One of the book’s central arguments is that danmei can be understood as 'a vital yet ambivalent counterpublic': a cultural space capable of unsettling dominant heteronormative and gendered scripts, while remaining vulnerable to commercial incorporation, ideological neutralisation, and its own exclusions and contradictions. We also develop the idea of a 'fractured transmedia system' to describe what happens when queer narratives move across media under conditions of censorship: official adaptations frequently erase or displace queer intimacy, while fans undertake forms of narrative and affective repair across platforms. Empirically, the book draws on several years of immersive digital ethnography, alongside survey research and extensive interviews with readers, fans and cultural producers. We write throughout from the position of aca-fans, taking seriously both the analytical possibilities and reflexive complications of studying a cultural world in which we have ourselves participated. Although the book is grounded in the Chinese context, we hope it will speak more broadly to conversations in media and cultural sociology, gender and sexuality studies, queer studies, fan studies, digital culture, and East Asian popular culture—especially debates about how intimate and political possibilities are made, constrained, commodified and repaired through popular media. If this intersects with your teaching or research, we would be delighted if you had a look, and of course very happy to continue the conversation. Warmest wishes, Liang - Dr Liang Ge (they/them), PhD, FHEA Lecturer in Sociology 2.068, Arthur Lewis Building, University of Manchester, M13 9PL Chair, Transcultural Digital Intimacies Network (TransDI)<https://bsky.app/profile/transdi.bsky.social> Honorary Research Fellow, Social Research Institute, University College London Executive Member, Race Equality Network (REN) Email: liang.ge@manchester.ac.uk<mailto:liang.ge@manchester.ac.uk> Tel: +44 0161 306 2816 Web: https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/persons/liang-ge Blog: https://www.liangge.blog Book Student Hours with me<https://outlook.office.com/bookwithme/user/fd73a2555d074f23a8f775bba8380232@manchester.ac.uk/meetingtype/EauCXfLQ9kawIPh4Ows0nQ2?anonymous&ep=mlink> Liang Ge - Google Scholar<https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&pli=1&user=wq4A_RUAAAAJ> My working hours might not be yours – please don’t feel obliged to respond outside your usual working time. Plz Check My New Publications here: New Book! Ge, L. (2027). Ambivalent Desires: Affect and Boys Love in China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. https://press.umich.edu/Books/A/Ambivalent-Desires3 Hu, T. and Ge, L. (2026) The Danmei Culture in Chinese Media and Society: Male-Male Romance, Resistance and Representation. London: Routledge. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003705741. New Article! Ge, L. (2026) Sympoietic creativity and the boundaries of qing: digital romance writers negotiating generative AI. AI & Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03253-w Ge, L. (2026). “In the Name of Pro-Women”: Intra-Women Surveillance and Internalized Misogyny in Digital East Asia. Media and Communication, 14, 12136. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.12136 Ge, L. (2025). Spectral imaginings and sympoietic creativity: AI hallucinations and the ethics of posthuman creativity. Big Data & Society, 12(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517251400696. Ge, L. (2026). Ambivalent desiring subjects: young women, agency and post-(socialist-)feminist sensibilities in China. Feminist Theory, 27(3): 369–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001251334949 Ge, L., Hu, T., & Ouyang, M. (2026). Digital literacies of intimacy: women’s engagement and learning in otome video games. Information, Communication & Society, 29(10): 2924–2946. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2025.2587132 Ge, L., & Hu, T. (2025). Gamifying intimacy: AI-driven affective engagement and human-virtual human relationships. Media, Culture & Society, 47(6): 1265-78. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437251337239