Non-BL Shipping: Cultural Negotiations of Queernarrating in Shōnen Anime

Shōnen, which literally means “young boy,” has evolved into a key marketing category and genre in Japanese media, primarily targeting boys and adolescent men.¹ Among the four principal demographic categories of manga (shōnen, shōjo, seinen, and josei), shōnen remains the most commercially dominant in Japan.² Its core themes are readily encapsulated by the slogans of major shōnen magazines: “friendship, perseverance, and victory” for Weekly Shōnen Jump³ and “courage, friendship and fighting spirit” for CoroCoro Comic.⁴

Editorially, shōnen manga is strongly associated with action, adventure, and the triumph over enemies, whether monstrous, ideological, or fantastical.⁵ In fact, certain texts are often labelled shōnen not based on their target demographic, but rather on their thematic emphasis on action and heroism.⁶ Yet, despite its strong association with battle narratives, shōnen manga exhibits substantial genre diversity – including comedy, romance, crime, slice-of-life, and sports – especially when compared to the narrower generic structures of many Western comic traditions.⁷

Even within the dominant action genre, shōnen manga has explored a range of narrative modes. These include historical epics, science fiction, fantasy, and critiques of militarism.⁸ For instance, Demon Slayer (Kimetsu no Yaiba) by Koyoharu Gotouge reimagines the samurai ethos through a deeply emotional, postmodern lens – foregrounding themes of grief, familial loss, and moral ambiguity. While it retains the aesthetics of swordsmanship and demon-slaying heroism, the series departs from traditional jingoistic portrayals by emphasising empathy, trauma recovery, and the psychological toll of violence. Its protagonist, Tanjiro Kamado, is driven not by nationalist duty or vengeance, but by compassion and a desire to heal rather than destroy – challenging earlier portrayals of samurai masculinity rooted in stoicism and militarism. In this way, Demon Slayer revitalises the figure of the swordsman as a vehicle for introspection and moral complexity rather than uncritical valorisation of combat.

Several quintessential shōnen manga, many later adapted into animated series, exemplify the genre’s defining traits and its lasting impact on both literary and visual storytelling.

One Piece (Eiichiro Oda, 1999)

While shōnen narratives often strive to promote messages of friendship and peace, critics such as Hayao Miyazaki have questioned the genre’s reliance on simplistic moral binaries and its latent glorification of violence. These critiques underscore the ideological tensions within the genre – between heteronormative, nationalistic coding and emergent, subversive fan readings that queer or complicate these texts.

The emotional reconfiguration of masculinity in contemporary sports anime such as Free!, Haikyū!!, and SK8 the Infinity offers fertile ground for global fandoms to engage in “queernarrating” – the imaginative act of mapping queer desire onto male-male bonds in otherwise heteronormative narratives. These series, while ostensibly centred on athletic competition, prioritize intimate emotional connections, mutual growth, and affective interdependence between male characters. For instance, the emotionally charged dynamic between Haruka and Makoto in Free!, the fierce yet tender rivalry of Kageyama and Hinata in Haikyū!!, or the intensely coded partnership between Reki and Langa in SK8 the Infinity all gesture toward relationships that exceed conventional friendship. Despite lacking overt boys’ love or yaoi content, these interactions have inspired massive fan-driven shipping cultures across Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Through fanfiction, fanart, and memes, global audiences transform these homosocial bonds into queer narratives that reflect broader desires for queer visibility and representation.

These acts of non-BL (boys’ love) shipping not only resist the erasure of queer intimacy in mainstream shōnen but also illuminate the affective labour of fans as co-narrators who imagine new possibilities within the constraints of existing genre frameworks. In doing so, queernarrating sports anime becomes a transnational cultural negotiation – at once subversive and complicit – within the global circuits of gender, power, and desire.

This paper is guided by the following key questions:

• How do non-BL shippings queernarrate male-male attachments in mainstream anime without explicit textual confirmation?
• How do these shipping practices reflect broader tensions surrounding gender, desire, and queer visibility in both Japanese and global fan cultures?
• What power dynamics emerge when global fans ship characters against or outside authorial design, and how do these dynamics engage with issues of queerbaiting, erasure, and representational labour?

Non-BL shipping practices in anime fandoms queernarrate mainstream shōnen series by resisting heteronormative pairings and reframing homosocial bonds as queer desire, thereby simultaneously challenging and sustaining entrenched gender and power dynamics. These practices, especially visible in the fandoms of numerous virile portrayals, highlight how queer readings are not only acts of resistance but also forms of affective world-making that complicate the binary between subversion and complicity.

This study focuses on three internationally popular shōnen sports anime: Free! (Hiroko Utsumi, 2013), Haikyū!! (Haruichi Furudate, 2012–2020), and SK8 the Infinity (Hiroko Ustumi, 2021). While these series do not fall under the BL or yaoi genre, they have generated vibrant shipping cultures concentrated on male-male pairings. The paper limits its analysis to canonical pairings that have gained significant traction in online fan spaces, including but not limited to Haruka/Makoto (Free!,), Kageyama/Hinata (Haikyū!!), and Reki/Langa (SK8). The study also restricts itself to English-language fan discourse primarily circulating on platforms such as Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. It does not intend to make claims about the intent of original creators or the reception of these series in Japan per se, but rather concentrates on transnational fan interpretations and their implications for queer cultural production, authorship, and representational politics.

Queernarration as Fan Rewriting

At the heart of this study is the concept of queernarration – a fan-driven interpretive practice that reimagines or decodes queer subtext in ostensibly heteronormative media. Queernarration occurs when fans, often operating in digital spaces, produce alternative readings that revolve around queer desire, intimacy, and identity within texts that do not explicitly affirm them. This process challenges the boundaries of authorial control and expands the narrative possibilities of the source material, especially in media genres like shōnen anime where queerness is often subtextual, displaced, or erased.

Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s foundational work in Epistemology of the Closet, queernarration can be understood as a practice of reading between the lines – a reparative and resistant mode of engagement that foregrounds queer possibility even where it is formally denied. Sedgwick argues that the oscillation between the “closet” and visibility generates a tension in representation that fans often seize upon.⁹ Similarly, Judith Butler’s theory of performativity highlights how gender and sexuality are not innate truths but repeated acts¹⁰ – a framework that aligns with fan practices of re-performing character dynamics to expose their queer potential. Fan-produced queernarration thus performs its own type of “gender trouble,” disrupting stable identities and authorial teleologies.

Recent work in queer fan studies elaborates this by conceptualizing queernarration as a form of cultural labour that not only decodes queerness in media, but actively produces it through transformative acts such as fanfiction, shipping discourse, and visual fan art. Theorists like Alexander Doty, Katherine Sender, and Kristina Busse assert that queer readings are not passive readings but participatory, imaginative, and affective interventions that challenge mainstream media’s regulatory norms. Doty argued that queer readings are valid interpretive strategies that exist even within ostensibly heterosexual media.¹¹ Sender discussed queer cultural production and its role in challenging heteronormativity in media economies.¹² Lastly, Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse outlined transformative fandom and the concept of fan authorship as participatory cultural labour.¹³

A literary corollary to this can be seen in “‘The I inside ‘her’”: Queer Narration in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet and Wesley Stace’s Misfortune, which explores how narrative voice itself can function queerly, resisting conventional identity categories through unstable narration and disidentification.¹⁴ This formulation is crucial in understanding how fans engage shōnen anime: the queer “I” within “her” becomes analogous to the queer reading within the heteronormative film. In fan queernarration, the voice of the fan-watcher takes on narrative authority, disrupting the seamlessness of the original and offering space for non-normative relationalities to be imagined and felt.

Through this lens, queernarration is not simply about interpreting queer subtext – it is an act of embodied reinterpretation, a kind of affective authorship that complicates binaries between reader and writer, canon and fanon, text and paratext. It is within this interpretive space that non-BL shipping in anime fandoms gains critical significance: as a transgressive yet generative form of queer cultural production that challenges dominant structures of gender, authorship, and narrative closure.

While queernarration functions as a dynamic interpretive tool across cultures, its application to Japanese shōnen anime introduces significant cross-cultural tensions. As fans globally engage in non-BL shipping practices – such as pairing Haru and Makoto from Free! or Kageyama and Hinata from Haikyū!! – they often decode homoerotic subtext and emotional intimacy as queer representation. However, such readings must be situated within the broader context of localized gender and sexuality constructs in Japan, which do not always align neatly with Western queer frameworks.

Katsuhiko Suganuma, in Reading Mark McLelland: Queering Japan, Queering Ourselves, argues that the West’s interpretive dominance can lead to the “misrecognition” of Japanese queerness. Rather than viewing Japan’s gender performances through indigenous logics, Western fans often read them through Euro-American lenses of identity politics, privileging outness, sexual identity labels, and explicit representation. This impositional queerness risks erasing the nuanced, often non-identitarian expressions of same-sex intimacy embedded within Japanese media. In many shōnen narratives, emotional closeness between male characters is deeply embedded in homosocial structures rather than an overt queer politic – what Suganuma refers to as latent queerness, shaped by cultural norms of relational ambiguity rather than disclosure.¹⁵

Similarly, Kazumi Nagaike highlights the phenomenon of the “yaoi gap,” a term coined to describe the dissonance between how yaoi/BL is consumed domestically in Japan versus how it is interpreted and mobilized globally. For Japanese readers, yaoi often serves as a symbolic space for the exploration of gender fluidity and affective detachment from rigid sexual roles.¹⁶ In contrast, global fans – especially in Anglophone contexts – tend to demand representational legibility: characters must “be” gay, narratives must be “about” queerness. This can lead to the essentialization of Japaneseness, where Japanese creators are either accused of queerbaiting (withholding queer payoff) or celebrated as covertly progressive, depending on how well they align with Western expectations.

The practice of shipping characters like Reki and Langa (SK8 the Infinity) or Oikawa and Iwaizumi (Haikyū!!) often exists in this tension. Fans may view certain scenes as undeniably queer-coded or emotionally romantic, but such readings may not consider the editorial constraints, genre norms, or cultural conventions at play in the anime’s production context. What appears as queerbaiting to some Western fans may be, from a Japanese media logic, an acceptable expression of male friendship, affective camaraderie, or nanshoku heritage – a traditional mode of same-sex intimacy that precedes Western gay identity models.

Thus, queernarration becomes a site of both empowerment and cultural friction. On the one hand, it allows global fans to insert queer meanings into mainstream texts, resisting heteronormative closure. On the other, it can unintentionally flatten complex local expressions of gender and sexuality into consumable queer archetypes. This is particularly fraught in the context of non-BL shipping, where the absence of explicit representation creates a vacuum filled by projective desire – a desire that may overlook or overwrite the original cultural and narrative grammar.

Recognizing these dynamics calls for a more reflexive queer fandom studies, one that acknowledges the asymmetries of power between centre and periphery, between textual encoding and fan decoding. It also requires a decolonial queer reading practice – one that attends to translation, mediation, and the politics of cultural legibility when queernarrating across national, linguistic, and ideological boundaries.

Reading Between Queer Narratives

Sports anime, a prolific subgenre within the shōnen category, often constructs its narratives around intense male friendships that are simultaneously competitive, emotionally intimate, and physically charged. These representations align closely with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of homosocial desire, which she defines in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire as the spectrum of male relationships that span from platonic friendship to erotic bonds – relationships that are socially sanctioned so long as they remain within heteronormative bounds.¹⁷

In Sedgwick’s framework, homosociality refers to social bonds between men that are structured by rivalry, mentorship, alliance, or camaraderie, but which are haunted by the potential for homoeroticism.¹⁸ These relationships are often mediated by a triangulated structure – where male bonds intensify in the presence of a female figure or goal, enabling same-sex intimacy to flourish under the guise of competition or teamwork. In the context of sports anime, the female mediator is frequently absent, and what remains is a direct, unfiltered emotional exchange between boys or young men. This creates what some scholars have called “safe zones” for queer affect, where male closeness is permissible precisely because it is coded as part of the sports narrative rather than as romantic or sexual.¹⁹

Series like Haikyū!!, Free!, and SK8 the Infinity provide particularly salient examples of this. For instance, the relationship between Kageyama Tobio and Hinata Shōyō in Haikyū!! begins as one of fierce antagonism but develops into a deeply interdependent partnership – one that frames their growth as volleyball players as contingent on their emotional synchronization. Sedgwick’s insight into “male bonding through opposition” applies here: the competitive drive between them becomes the very channel through which intimacy is allowed to surface. This dynamic is frequently visualized through intense eye contact, prolonged physical proximity, and shared personal breakthroughs, all rendered with romantic or emotionally heightened cinematography. Importantly, these scenes are open to multiple interpretations – coded by the text as rivalry or friendship, but read by fans as potential queer desire.

The Best Haikyū Ships (Zuzumi, 2024)

Similarly, in Free!, the relationship between Haru Nanase and Makoto Tachibana is structured around emotional dependency, bodily intimacy (such as swimming and showering scenes), and non-verbal modes of connection. Their relationship lacks a clear external goal or female intermediary, allowing the emotional bond to dominate the narrative space. These character dynamics are not framed as “romantic” by the creators, but they are imbued with the aesthetic vocabulary of romance – blushing, longing stares, and melancholic separation – creating an interpretive ambiguity that invites queer narration.

Me and My Bsf (Rin matsuoka’s gf, 2024)

What distinguishes sports anime as a critical site for examining homosociality is its reliance on bodily interaction, shared physical stakes, and emotional catharsis. The sports match becomes not only a metaphor for male emotional expression, but also a ritualistic arena where queer desire can be safely encoded and consumed. Touch, trust, and teamwork are necessary for narrative progression, yet these same mechanisms are also read as evidence of unspoken longing by fans engaged in non-BL shipping.

Andrea Giannini, Oikawa’s Insane Set to Iwaizumi

Andrea Giannini, Oikawa’s Insane Set to Iwaizumi

Thus, homosociality in sports anime serves as a dual structure: it stabilizes shōnen narratives within the acceptable bounds of male bonding while simultaneously destabilizing them through visual and emotional codes that echo queer desire. Sedgwick’s framework allows us to see how the closet functions not only as a site of repression but as a space of generative ambiguity, where queerness emerges not despite the text but because of the structures that deny or defer it.

In this way, sports anime represents a fertile site for exploring how queer possibilities live within the interstices of genre, gender norms, and fandom interpretation – where homosociality is both a narrative device and a queer potentiality waiting to be activated by the reader.

Langa and Reki

The Ambivalence of Queernarration

While queernarration in non-BL shipping practices can be understood as a form of resistance to heteronormative constraints, its operation within global fandom is neither wholly radical nor wholly innocent. It inhabits a space of ambivalence, where the act of reading or producing queer meaning in ostensibly heterosexual texts simultaneously disrupts and reproduces dominant structures of gender, desire, and power.

At its core, queernarration is a fan-driven interpretive practice that challenges the presumed heterosexuality of mainstream media. As theorized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet²⁰ and Judith Butler in Gender Trouble,²¹ the presumption of heteronormativity is not just a narrative default, but a performative one – it is maintained through repeated iterations of norm-compliant relationships, roles, and desires. By queering homosocial bonds in shōnen anime, fan communities resist these normative scripts and open up narrative possibilities that the original texts suppress or refuse.

In this light, queernarration offers a form of textual liberation: a way for queer audiences to see themselves, to imagine alternate futures, and to claim representational space in genres historically dominated by heteromasculine paradigms. It enables what José Esteban Muñoz calls “queer world-making” – an imaginative praxis that refuses closure and normativity in favour of desire, ambiguity, and alternative kinship structures.²²

In shipping characters like Reki/Langa (SK8 the Infinity) or Kageyama/Hinata (Haikyū!!), fans resist reductive readings of male friendship and assert affective, embodied, and often erotic attachments that are not reducible to sportsmanship or camaraderie. The “what if” of queernarration becomes a political gesture that reclaims visibility for queer desires and challenges the implicit heterosexuality of most shōnen narratives.

However, this resistance is not without contradictions. Many fan practices also draw on entrenched tropes, such as the seme/uke dynamic, which reinscribes rigid binaries within queer pairings. Borrowed from yaoi/BL aesthetics, the seme (dominant/top) and uke (submissive/bottom) roles often replicate patriarchal gender hierarchies, feminizing one male character while masculinizing the other. These pairings can flatten queerness into familiar heterogendered scripts, reducing complex identities to legible roles that remain palatable to both straight and queer audiences.

Moreover, this dynamic can perpetuate fetishistic representations of gay male relationships. In many cases, especially among heterosexual female fans, male-male pairings are not rooted in lived queer experience but serve as aesthetic and emotional spectacles. This results in what Kazumi Nagaike and Akiko Mizoguchi have critiqued as “heteronormative homoeroticism” – a consumption of queerness that satisfies affective and sexual desires without engaging in the lived politics of queerness itself.²³

The Best Haikyū ships (Zuzumi, 2024)

Another problematic dimension of queernarration in shōnen fandom is the erasure of female characters. In many shipping discourses, canonical or implied heterosexual pairings are dismissed or vilified to make way for popular male-male ships. Female characters are often relegated to the margins of the narrative, reduced to obstacles, or ignored altogether. This sidelining reinforces a problematic dynamic in which female presence is viewed as a threat to queer male intimacy, paradoxically reproducing the same heterosexist framework that queernarration ostensibly seeks to challenge.

Compilation of Characters. Each set of characters has at most two female figures having minimal intimate relationship with male characters. They provide professional support or have familial resemblance to at least one of the masculine characters.

Compilation of Characters. Each set of characters has at most two female figures having minimal intimate relationship with male characters. They provide professional support or have familial resemblance to at least one of the masculine characters.

This exclusion also contributes to the invisibility of queer women in anime and fandom. While male-male ships receive widespread attention and cultural capital, yuri or lesbian pairings are often trivialized, hypersexualized, or dismissed as fan service. The queernarrative focus on male-male intimacy thus raises questions about which queer stories are granted emotional complexity and visibility, and which are left out.

Finally, queernarration is shaped by the power asymmetries between global (often Western) fans and Japanese media producers. When fans rewrite character dynamics or criticize creators for queerbaiting, they engage in a form of cultural intervention. While this can be empowering, it also risks flattening culturally specific understandings of gender, queerness, and intimacy in Japanese media. The assumption that Western liberal queer politics should dictate representation in anime overlooks Japan’s different historical and cultural contexts of sexuality and homoeroticism – leading to misreadings, cultural appropriation, or orientalist projections.

Assertion of the Narrative Power

The act of queernarration – where fans reimagine homosocial relationships as queer – is not just an interpretive pleasure; it is also a contested terrain of authorship and authority. Central to this conflict is the question: Who has the right to define the meaning of a text – its creator or its audience? This tension becomes especially charged when fan interpretations diverge from or subvert the intended narrative direction, particularly around the suggestion of queer relationships in mainstream anime.

Many anime creators and production companies have shown discomfort – or outright hostility – toward fan interpretations that focus on queerness. In the case of Haikyū!! and Free! fan pairings have become wildly popular across social media platforms. Yet official sources often go to great lengths to reassert heteronormativity, either by emphasizing female love interests, avoiding any “gay-coded” content, or explicitly denying romantic undertones between male characters. This reflects a broader anxiety in the anime industry, where mainstream profitability is still largely tied to heteronormative appeal.

In some instances, creators have publicly reacted against queer fan readings, sparking backlash. For example:

In Attack on Titan (2013-2023), Isayama Hajime faced criticism for not acknowledging queer interpretations of characters like Levi and Erwin, despite their intense emotional bond.

Yuri on Ice (Sayo Yamamoto and Mitsurō Kubo, 2016), while celebrated for its explicit queer romance, still faced scrutiny for how carefully it balanced fan service with plausible deniability before confirming Viktor and Yuri’s romantic relationship.

Jujutsu Kaisen (2020-present) creator Gege Akutami has remained notably silent or ambiguous about popular ships like Gojo/Geto, while simultaneously emphasizing heterosexual relationships in canon, prompting some fans to accuse the series of queerbaiting.

This pushback highlights the industry’s investment in controlling narrative interpretation – not merely for artistic purposes, but to protect commercial interests in domestic and international markets where LGBTQ+ representation may still be controversial.

These tensions are not only theoretical but play out in very real and public ways. Some creators have directly clashed with fan interpretations. In the case of Haikyū!!, the enormous volume of BL fanworks featuring characters like Kageyama/Hinata or Oikawa/Iwaizumi led to debates in Japan about the ethics of portraying characters in unauthorized pairings, with some fans and critics framing it as a violation of the creator’s vision or a misrepresentation of the characters.

There is also institutional censorship: in some countries (including Japan), BL doujinshi²⁴ and fanfiction have faced legal scrutiny, particularly when characters are minors.²⁵ Meanwhile, Western platforms like Tumblr, Twitter/X, and Archive of Our Own have seen battles over content moderation, age restrictions, and community standards, often fuelled by conflicting views on what constitutes ethical queer representation.

Importantly, queer fans themselves are not a monolith. Some resist overly romantic or idealized depictions of male-male relationships in favour of more complex, politicized portrayals. Others push back against Western shipping discourses that ignore the racialized and cultural dimensions of queerness, especially when Asian characters are consumed as exotic queer objects.

The concept of queerbaiting – where creators insert ambiguous homoerotic subtext to attract queer or slash-loving fans while refusing to confirm such relationships – has become a focal point of fan critique. As theorist Eve Ng argues, queerbaiting exploits queer affect without offering queer fulfillment.²⁶ In series like SK8 Infinity, where the intimacy between Reki and Langa is framed as a deeply emotional, transformative connection, fans feel simultaneously acknowledged and denied.

This creates a paradox: the suggestion of queerness is profitable, but its confirmation is risky. Such tactics reveal how deeply queerness is commodified and regulated in contemporary media – used as a tool to generate fan engagement while being withheld to avoid alienating conservative viewers. This strategy also reflects larger global tensions: while international fans often demand explicit LGBTQ+ representation, creators in Japan navigate a more ambivalent socio-political context where queer identities are less openly affirmed in mainstream discourse.

In both Japan and the West, queernarration and queer representation are often subjected to varying forms of censorship, both direct and indirect. In Japan, LGBTQ+ content is still seen as niche or subcultural rather than mainstream. Even when queer themes are present, they are often coded or displaced into fantasy contexts (e.g., BL, yaoi, or yuri genres), thereby isolating them from “serious” or “universal” storytelling.²⁷

Meanwhile, in Western platforms, queer fan content is frequently subject to algorithmic suppression or community backlash, particularly when it challenges dominant shipping norms or incorporates problematic tropes. This has led to intense discourse wars around who gets to write queer stories, what counts as “problematic,” and whether fan-made queerness is truly emancipatory or just another commodified spectacle.

Moreover, some Western fans impose liberal frameworks onto Japanese media, demanding “representation” in ways that may misread or disregard Japan’s own historical and cultural configurations of gender and desire. This leads to a neo-orientalist dynamic, where Japanese creators are either villainized for being “regressive” or exoticized for being “transgressive,” depending on how their work aligns with Western queer politics.

Despite these frictions, fans continue to assert interpretive control through practices like fanfiction, fanart, memes, and doujinshi. These acts constitute a form of cultural labour that reclaims narrative authority from the hands of creators. Following Henry Jenkins’ concept of textual poaching, fans act as both consumers and producers of meaning, reshaping stories to reflect their desires, identities, and critiques of power.²⁸

Yet even here, questions of voice, positionality, and access persist. Who are the fans most empowered to queernarrate? Whose headcanons are most widely circulated, validated, and canon-adjacent in popular discourse? Often, it is global Anglophone fans – particularly those who are white or part of the East Asian diaspora – whose interpretations gain the most traction. These fans tend to dominate platforms such as Tumblr, X (formerly Twitter), and Archive of Our Own, where visibility and algorithmic popularity often reflect broader patterns of digital privilege and linguistic accessibility.

This imbalance introduces a subtle but consequential hegemony within fandom: queernarrative practices become shaped not just by desire and identification, but by cultural capital and geopolitical privilege. As a result, many queer fans from the Global South, or from non-English speaking communities, find their contributions sidelined or dismissed as less “relatable,” less “progressive,” or insufficiently critical. What is often framed as a democratic, participatory space thus reflects – and reproduces – the global inequalities of cultural production and knowledge circulation.

Furthermore, the tendency of Anglophone fans to universalize their frameworks of queerness risks flattening or misrepresenting local meanings of intimacy, masculinity, and affect in the original Japanese context. As scholars like Kazumi Nagaike²⁹ and Akiko Mizoguchi³⁰ argue, Japanese BL and queer-coded narratives are embedded in culturally specific codes that do not always map neatly onto Western LGBTQ+ categories. When fans queernarrate without reflexivity about this cultural gap, they may inadvertently perform a kind of interpretive colonialism – one that reclaims queerness while disregarding the contexts in which those texts were produced.

Thus, queernarration is never simply about “seeing gayness where it was hidden.” It is also about who gets to narrate that gayness, whose narratives become dominant, and what forms of queerness are made legible or desirable in the global circulation of fan interpretations.

Endnotes