A wen-wu Approach to Male Teenage Chinese Sports Fans’ Heteronormative Interpretation of Masculinity

Abstract

This article analyses how performatively heteronormative, male teenage Chinese fans consume sports games through the prism of masculinity, using secondary school students’ engagement with the NBA (National Basketball Association) as a case study. Drawing on focus groups of twenty-three participants, we discover that male teenage sports fans constantly evoke elite NBA athletes as male ideals to define a desirable, heteronormative wen-wu masculinity specific to the post-reform era. In this process, they often engage in a double-standard practice, manifesting as their appropriation of the CP (coupling) rhetoric to ‘ship’ athletes and their problematisation of heterosexual women and LGBTQ fans’ similar usage of it. This double-standard practice constitutes an attempt to monopolise the interpretation of masculinity both within and outside of the sporting context. It sheds light on the heteronormative male cohort’s rejection of alternative masculinities, underscoring how aspects of gender politics unfolding in wider society are reflected in China’s teenage sports fandom.

collaborative collaging

“…With unthemed ‘Currents’ issues, the practice of reading pieces in relation to one another in the absence of a pre-existing theme often yields enlightening and creative responses. For instance, the interlocking seams that appear on the cover of ‘Currents’ Issue 134 (Feminist Review Collective, 2023a) represent the imagery of borders, fences and nets (basketball and otherwise) as complex mechanisms of enmeshment and separation, which was evoked by Juno’s reading of both Altman Yuzhu Peng, Zhen Troy Chen and Shuhan Chen’s ‘A wen-wu approach to male teenage Chinese sports fans’ heteronormative interpretation of masculinity’ (2023) and Olga Cielemęcka’s ‘The grammar of belonging: bodies, borders and kin in the Belarusian–Polish Border Crisis’ (2023).…”