New member phenomenon : an ethnography of the first "boys' love" stage play in Taiwan

Abstract

New Member is the first Boys’ Love (BL) stage play in Taiwan to be affiliated with its own series of BL cultural products and activities. The popularity of the show and the unique cultural events around it led to an unprecedented phenomenon in Taiwan. New Member has attracted to the theater a huge number of new audiences from among funü, who are the female fans of BL culture.

In New Member phenomenon, the boundaries between the producers and consumers have blurred and the funü fans act as the “prosumers”. The findings of this thesis will draw a model to illustrate the interrelationship between the producers and the funü consumers. In this thesis, the funü consumers could be divided into three types: authorized producers who collaborated with the troupe to write and publish novels related to the play, tongrenzhi creators whose tongrenzhi was not only adapted into new scenes of the stage play but also shared with other funü fans to promote the show, and other funü fans who are not only the consumers, but also take part in the discussion in the funü fans community in which the ideas of tongrenzhi are usually born. So that the tongrenzhi are never the independent work created by the tongrenzhi creators, other funü fans also participate in the producing process of the immaterial stories and ideas of tongrenzhi. Therefore, all of the funü fans become both consumers and producers – prosumers. The funü fans’ active participation in the processes of producing, promoting, and circulating the play is evident in the case study. The findings of this dissertation may provide insights into the phenomenon that the conventional opposition between producers and consumers does not apply here: funü fans not only consumed the cultural products, but also actively created their own BL products, which were bought and absorbed as additional plots by the producers and were shared in funü subgroups to attract more potential consumers.