ABSTRACT
Online space is gendered. Since the 2000s, a number of new net phrases have been invented in China to describe women. Cyberspace has also brought into light many previously marginalized gender identities and enabled new discourses of gender and sexuality. The online narrative of sexuality and the body intermingles with the feminist, intellectual, popular, and commercial discourses. This chapter focuses on the online/offline, cross-media constructed-ness of gendered imagination through a reading of four web fiction and dramas: Nirvana in Fire, The Biography of Zhen Huan, Startling by Each Step, and Go Princess Go. The ideal man in Nirvana in Fire, however, is devoid of sexual desire and detached from love fantasies. Palace romance, a popular online genre, centers on the drama of one male figure and many women who compete for his favor, and hence power. Online fiction is full of the paradoxes of modernity and tradition, progressiveness and backwardness, and liberalism and conservatism.
