Exploring the performance of identity by the Chinese diaspora in online spaces such as International Danmei Twitter

• Main Author: Lau, Jesslyn Jie Lin
• Other Authors: Luke Lu
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2023
• Subjects: Humanities::Linguistics
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/165175
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

As soft power through pop cultural exports rise for Asian countries like Mainland China, Japan and South Korea, there have also been an increase in voices of members of diaspora groups online. How do members of these diasporic groups construct and perform their identities in an online, global space? Through qualitative discourse analysis of the tweets of a community member in the international fandom of China’s Danmei, a genre of male-male romance novels which saw a boom in popularity in 2019 after the release of live-adaptation dramas, this study aims to explore how Chinese diasporas construct and perform a Chinese identity online in fandom spaces. The findings revealed that the choice of language used by the community member played a part in identity construction, but was not the sole determining factor of their Chineseness. Furthermore, this study explored the notions of Chineseness and found it to be fluid, supporting other studies conducted on the notions of Chineseness.