Speaker: Kaixuan ZHANG (PhD student in Gender and Cultural Studies, CUHK

Chair: Professor Peichi CHUNG

Language: English

Registration: https://goo.gl/N5ZmzY

Abstract: Boys’ Love (BL) fan culture is an emerging phenomenon in the Chinese cyberspace, yet it has not been widely examined in the field of semiotics. The present paper attempts to understand the semiotic lexicon of BL fan culture through the case of WiFi fandom on Weibo, the Chinese counterpart of Twitter. Based on methodologies of Paris school semiotics and social semiotics, Section 1 introduces the research approach adopted by the present paper. Section 2 provides 4 examples of fan discourses, and then discusses the formation of typical signs in the lexicon. Section 3 sketches the basic formats of discourses in this multimodal fandom, and their relationship with different forms of typical signs.