A comparative study on the transcultural (re-)reception of The Untamed and its queerness with Chinese characteristics

Drawing on Stanley Fish’s concept of interpretive communities, this article explores the various transcultural interpretations of queer opacity, a Chinese variant of queerness within dan’gai web series. This study reveals that while viewers employ a shared interpretive strategy of queer reading to identify queer opacity, the effect of queer interpretation is contingent upon the queer interpretive subcommunities’ familiarity with Chinese culture. Moreover, different cultures possess sub-strategies of queer reading: visibility reading is often practiced in the global northwest to initiate visibility politics in society, while opacity reading is used in the global southeast in an unconfrontational manner within fictional worlds. By examining a layered interpretive phenomenon that involves transcultural reaction videos towards the Chinese dan’gai web series The Untamed (TU), alongside the danmu from Chinese viewers on these videos, this study contributes to scholarship on transcultural queerness through the lenses of queer opacity and transcultural reader reception.