TY - THES ID - 137582298 TI - (Re-)writing (Wo)men: A Study on Slash Fictions of Romance of the Three Kingdoms AU - Li, Yang AU - Baetens, Jan AU - KU Leuven. Faculteit Letteren. Opleiding Master of Cultural Studies (Leuven) PY - 2021 PB - Leuven KU Leuven. Faculteit Letteren DB - UniCat UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:137582298 AB - The thesis focuses on how relationships between men are re-imagined in slash fictions of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Romance of the Three Kingdom is a historical novel believed to be composed in the 14th century. It has always been very popular and it is a very important cultural text in Chinese-speaking communities and Confucianism-influenced cultures. Using slash fiction, contemporary Chinese female fans of the Three Kingdoms culture redefine the male-male relationships in the canon. Slash fiction is a type of fan fiction that portrays a romantic and erotic relationship between two male characters from a popular cultural text. It first appeared in the fan works of Star Trek in the early 70s where they used Kirk/Spock to suggest the pairing. The slash fandom in China, as its global community, is a mostly female and queer community. This paper aims to show how slash fictions of Romance of Three Kingdoms rewrite and reevaluate relationships between men, and how the contemporary Chinese female fan community, by writing over the bodies of men, negotiate with the traditional bonds and values prescribed by Confucianism. In the first chapter, I explored the hierarchical nature of the lord-minister relationship and how it is mediated and transfigured in slash fiction. We find in Chinese slash the relationship between a couple is hierarchical, not equal. One distinct feature in character pairing is the characterisation device to differentiate the two male lovers: One is the gong (top) and other shou (bottom). As a result, Chinese slash is sometimes criticised for its heteronormative frame of thinking although it contains homosexual sex. I then look at the non-normative aspects of this fandom, represented by stories of father-son incest in Chapter 2. Analogous to the lord-and-minster, the father-son relationship in Chinese culture is highly hierarchical and is determined by the idea of obedience and filial piety. By slashing father and son, the incestuous stories reflect the anxiety over the traditional parent-child relationship and transgress the traditional ethos. It is a bold gesture writing back against the patriarchal norms. Finally, I looked at how the male-male bonds have been rewritten with a new vocabulary of love. Although the original novel presents a manly world in which Sedgwick's idea of "homosociality" permeates the text, it is in slash works that the emphasis has been moved from the public world to the private sphere. The historical characters are read through their emotions and desires instead of their worldly achievements or heroic deeds. This new discourse (in Foucault's sense) adopted by the female fan community, I argue, is important. It has fundamentally challenged the vocabulary rooted in Confucian values used to describe male-bonds (such as loyalty and righteousness) to focus on more ER -