Neither queer, nor just a transaction: realignment speech and the pursuit of heteronormative intelligibility in otome cosplay commissions

The commercial rise of Chinese otome games has birthed a novel gig economy: ‘cosplay commissions’, where female fans hire female cosplayers to enact fictional romances. Drawing on 32 in-depth interviews, this study explores the tension in this novel fan practice: while the practice enables participants to experiment with a feminized, consumer-driven model of intimacy, where women actively orchestrate their ideal romance, it simultaneously triggers anxieties about violating scripts of heteronormativity. To manage these tensions, participants collaboratively enact a ‘sanitized romance’ through relational work that meticulously curates idealized heteronormative romance scripts (caring, pampering, and exclusivity), compensating for the perceived failures of real-world masculinity. More importantly, to secure moral legitimacy within China’s patriarchal constraints, participants produce what we term realignment speech, drawing symbolic boundaries to distance themselves from any association with sex work, queerness, or moral deviance. Through this boundary work, they reframe their actions not as ‘buying love’ or ‘loving a woman’, but as ‘immersing in pure love fantasy’. We argue that this ambivalent mode of intimacy – transgressive in practice yet normatively policed in self-understanding – demonstrates how realignment speech renders female desire intelligible and thus survivable within a rigid moral economy through both micro-resistance to dominant norms and creative reappropriation of their toolkit.