Boys’ Love (BL), known in Chinese as danmei, refers to a genre of romantic or erotic narratives centered on male–male relationships, produced primarily by and for women. Scholarship once approached BL as a site of resistance, but more recently it has criticized fans of BL for voluntarily participating in commercial and regulatory systems. This article-based dissertation, beyond the binary of corporation versus resistance, focuses on the complexity of BL fans’ practices and asks how the complexity of everyday resistance among Chinese BL fans can be contextually understood within a platformized and censored digital environment. The study reveals how resistance operates through multi-layered tactical maneuvering within incoherent power configurations.

To answer this question, the study employs a grounded theory-informed methodology, combining three years of participant observation across multiple digital platforms with semi-structured interviews with self-defined BL fans. Data collection focused on key events, particularly the blocking of the fanfiction platform Archive of Our Own (AO3) in China and its aftermath, and traced fans’ memories of precarity and practices of migration and reconstruction. The analysis draws on Johansson and Vinthagen’s transdisciplinary approach to conceptualize everyday resistance.

The findings demonstrate that BL fans’ everyday resistance emerges within a layered power configuration shaped by state-corporate censorship, platform governance, and algorithmic regimes. Within this context, fans resist across multiple dimensions. Spatially, they engage in constant migration and reterritorialization across different platforms; temporally, they sustain attachment to BL narratives and communities through archival practices and continuation memories.

The findings reveal that what appears contradictory when viewed through binary frameworks becomes coherent when understood as tactical navigation of multiple, contingent governance regimes. Therefore, this dissertation proposes a layered framework to understand everyday resistance in a platformized censorship context, conceptualizing resistance as a dynamic process operating across three interconnected levels: the broader configuration of political and economic power; the cross-platform ecology in which fans move and survive; and the algorithmic mechanisms embedded on individual platforms that fans manipulate and appropriate.

By studying how subcultural communities sustain affective and creative practices under conditions of political sensitivity, this research offers a framework that can also apply to dispersed digital phenomena beyond the Chinese BL fandom case. It also challenges assumptions about resistance requiring clear oppositional consciousness or direct confrontation with power and demonstrates that scholars should not dismiss the resistant potential inherent in unfamiliar phenomena.