Between Thailand, Japan & the Philippines: Transnationalising “Boys Love” media

Mechademia, 2020

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South East Asian Research, 2019

This article explores the adaptation of Boys Love (BL), a Japanese genre of homoerotic media produced for heterosexual female audiences, to the Thai mediascape through an analysis of Lovesick, The Series (2014). This lakhon represented a watershed moment in representations of queer sexuality in Thai mainstream media, inaugurating a new genre of media known as series wai. Through an investigation of the narrative of the first series of Lovesick, this article shows how the narrative conventions of Japanese BL are ‘glocalized’ to conform to the heteronormative narrative focus of typical lakhon. The article argues that the series’ ‘wavering’ narrative focus between queer and heterosexual romance and its characterization of its male protagonists as stereotypical heterosexual men (phu chai) responds to the need for lakhon to privilege heteronormative romance. But the article also reveals that Lovesick sits within a broader social process whereby Japanese popular culture has come to influence Thai conceptualizations of sexuality. The article thus also shows how the lakhon educates its users into the affective reading practices of Japanese BL fans, introducing queer readings into the Thai mediascape. Overall, the article charts the historical development of a new, affirmative representational queer politics in the Thai mediascape.

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Continuum Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 2023

Focusing on the online fandom of a Thai Boys Love (BL) drama in Japan, called tai-numa, this exploratory study examines its background, fan practices and experiences, and negotiations between fandoms and the mass media and within the fandom. Through interviews with 19 fans active in the fandom, which was shaped by external and internal factors, such as mediascape, characteristics of consuming BL, and the global pandemic, this research argues that the fandom is a transnational, transcultural, and transsubcultural contact zone, enabling fans to create, learn, reflect, negotiate, and update each other's values. Fandom activity was facilitated because it was equal and non-hierarchical, allowing for the engagement of a heterogeneous mix of fans from different subcultural backgrounds, and it offered a sense of simultaneity. Through fan voice and discussion, this paper suggests the potential impact of fandom activities on real life and what is needed for such fandoms to be established and sustained.

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Southeast Asian Media Studies Journal, 2022

During the community quarantine in the Philippines, numerous trends arose online and one of those was the Thai Boys' Love (BL) series. Its popularity grew exponentially a few months after the start of the lockdown, leading to independent studios producing the first Pinoy BL series or what I term the First Wave Pinoy BL. This paper aims to investigate how the Pinoy BL genre differentiated itself when it glocalized Thai BL. Through conducting content analysis of the first five Pinoy BL series, namely Hello, Stranger (2020), Gameboys (2020), Gaya Sa Pelikula (2020), Quaranthings (2020), and In Between (2020), it was found that Pinoy BL removed and rejected some crucial tropes of Thai BL such as putting a villain edit on women, trivializing the act of coming out, and featuring the seme-uke dynamic. It is argued that these differences were attributed to queer creators and actors being primarily involved in the production, the rise initiated by nonmajor production studios, and an absence of productions' linkage to the book industry. This is an initial, yet crucial, research project as Pinoy BL is still a relatively new phenomenon worthy of future studies.

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Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, 2023

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Queer Southeast Asia, 2023

The last several decades have seen a growth in the transnational circulation of Japanese queer popular culture such as Boys Love Media, bara manga, and pornographic videos. Since the 1990s, the Philippines have emerged as an important market for Japanese media with queer themes. Drawing upon interviews with 31 Filipino fans of queer Japanese popular culture from a variety of gendered and class backgrounds, this presentation explores how Filipino consumers engage with fantasies of Japan as an “aspirational resource” that challenges experiences of societal heteronormativity. I reveal that Filipino consumers especially value the queer popular culture of Japan as it provides an affirming representational politics that they believe is absent within Philippine mainstream media, producing fantasies of Japan as an “LGBT paradise”. These fantasies, I suggest, play an important role in contouring how Filipino fans affectively experience and conceptualise their queerness, producing sexual knowledge grounded in Japanese popular culture. In particular, I chart how fans’ initial encounters with Boys Love and gay male pornography helped facilitate their identification with same-sex attraction and provided them with a vocabulary to express and make sense of their desires. I conclude the chapter by juxtaposing the informants’ attitudes towards the queer popular cultures of Japan and the US, which was a common theme in interviews. I specifically expose how the informants’ disavowal of the US as a site of queer liberation and their privileging of Japan reveals shifts in the “libidinal economy” of the Asia-Pacific within which the Philippines are situated.

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Media in Asia: Global, Digital, Gendered and Mobile, 2022

This chapter explores how thinking gender and sexuality transnationally can help us make sense of “queer” media, practices and performances proliferating across East Asia and Southeast Asia through two prominent examples – South Korean popular music (K-pop) and “boys love” (BL) media. Thinking gender and sexuality transnationally is useful for making sense of the overlapping processes of queer K-pop and BL media fandom, consumption and (re)production, whether this means fans identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or cis-heterosexual. After situating K-pop within the spread and global phenomenon of the Korean Wave and its androgynous elements, the chapter provides an overview of queer K-pop consumption and performance in Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and the Philippines. Beyond Japan, transnational BL fan cultures are situated in specific cultural, historical and geographical contexts and need to be interpreted differently from Japanese BL fandom.

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Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2023

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On 6 September, 2018, Section 377 was ruled unconstitutional by The Court. It took quiet a long time to decriminalize same sex intercourse; something that should not have been the larger society’s concern in the first place. Section 377 states “Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine” (1). In this research paper, we will concentrate on the phrase “against the order of nature”, and understand how media can help destabilize such social constructs and power structures. This dissertation aims at studying the representation of Gay characters in five Asian Television Dramas- The Untamed (China), and I told Sunset About You (Thailand), in order to understand if such TV dramas/ movies could prompt real social change- greater acceptance of sexual minorities in this context.

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2019

Studies of the popularity of Hallyu concentrate almost exclusively upon Northeast Asian nations, disregarding their popularity within Southeast Asia, an area still defined as 'Asian' yet often ignored in favor of the more economically prominent East Asian nations. This article attempts to expand discussions of Hallyu through an analysis of the reception of South Korean television dramas among different consumers in Thailand. It draws upon evidence gathered from qualitative interviews with Thai fans to illustrate how diverse consumers use these foreign products as a means to assess and critique their own position within contemporary Thailand and actively engage with changing constructions of Koreanness, Thainess and Asianness as a means to do so.

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