The Perceptions of “Healing” in BL (Boys’ Love) Reading and the Situational Triggers

Abstract

Boys’ Love (BL) is a fiction genre now enjoying high visibility and popularity among the young women in Taiwan. Inspired by the reader response theory, this study adopted a grounded theory approach to analyze female readers’ perception of “healing” generated from BL reading. Based on the in-depth interviews with 22 readers, this study revealed three types of “healing” perception and four types of situations that prompted the emergence of the feelings. The three types of “healing” perception included the perceptions induced from the descriptions of interpersonal relations in the stories (i.e., the feeling of sweetness from reading about romantic love, coziness from reading about family love and friendships, and the pain and joy of looking back at the self’s past), perceptions triggered by storylines or story characters (i.e., feeling relieved, feeling soothed, feeling of completion and satisfaction, feeling hilarious, feeling pampering toward story characters), and perceptions triggered by visual or audio sensations. The four types of situations for the emergence of the healing perception included the matching of textual characteristics and readers’ romantic experiences, the matching of textual characteristics and readers’ life experiences, an atmosphere of tenderness and softness induced by textual characteristics, and the reading of derivative creation based on other popular original fiction works that bring about satisfaction and completion. Based on the findings, this paper further discusses on the significance of the healing effects generated from everyday pleasure reading as well as the contribution of the analysis approach used in this study for future genre reading research.