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Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia

2023; Michigan State University Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14321/qed.10.2.0172

2327-1590

Laura Miller,

Asian Culture and Media Studies

The term "Boys Love" is the genre name for manga (comics), literature, film, TV dramas, and other media about male–male romance and sex that is usually produced by and for heterosexual girls and women. Normally abbreviated to BL, it replaces an obsolete Japanese term yaoi (still in play, however, in some Anglophone settings). Although BL media in Japan has been theorized and studied by critics and scholars at least since the 1980s, this collection takes us on a ride across Asia, at times to previously unexplored pockets of production and fandom. This highly accessible and knowledgeable volume illustrates the way popular culture is modified in local contexts, creating new audiences, new meanings, and new mash-ups. James Welker, the volume's meticulous editor, uses the term "transfigurations" to avoid the baggage of prior research on transnational cultural flows that are often intertwined with colonialism or that might suggest a one-way path of transmission. BL media, we learn, can travel to and from Japan through multiple channels, both mainstream and underground. We also find that borders between BL communities are porous and not restricted by linguistic differences or nation-state boundaries.Welker faced a challenge in editing such a large collection of papers, yet successfully placed them into four broad overlapping themes. One is "BL as a transnational media phenomenon." After BL spread from girls' manga in Japan to other parts of Asia, both psychically and digitally, there was blurring of some media genres as well as evolution into new formats. A second theme is "BL as a disruptor of gender and sexual norms." Moving from a media form that allowed playful female engagement with sexualized male characters, BL eventually served as the vehicle for exploration of a variety of masculinities and sexualities. A third theme is "BL as a device for rethinking LGBT(Q) issues." Interest in BL media in some locations in Asia, particularly India and Indonesia, provoked fans to think about their own society's values in relation to homosexuality, often producing awareness and sensitivity. In some cases, fans become politically active in promoting LGBT(Q) issues and rights. The fourth theme is "BL as a sociopolitical force in the world." Although BL continues to be mostly apolitical in Japan, in places such as Taiwan or South Korea, BL media is visibly enmeshed in political discourses and activism.Queer Transfigurations is one of the most important edited volumes on popular culture in Asia to appear in decades. In the face of deniers who dismiss the importance of BL media and its fandoms as merely a niche market or a trivial obsession among scholars, the research in this volume proves otherwise. Popular culture reveals the issues that concern people at a given time or in a particular social setting. The widespread popularity of BL media makes it clear that people in Asia are struggling with culturally shaped gender scripts and expectations. The chapters, written by scholars from numerous disciplines covering locations across Asia, convince us that the BL genre has great potential as an intervention in ideologies of gender and sexuality. Researchers study popular culture because it does ideological work: it encodes cultural meanings and tells stories in different ways. These studies of BL media illustrate the power of stories to dislocate gender and sexuality norms by offering alternative models of intimacy and an upsetting of stereotypical gender roles. Although in Japan BL media was originally targeted towards heterosexual women or girls, its entrenched popularity has created "room to breathe" (2) for sexual minorities. One outcome of the spread of BL media is that it has raised awareness about LGBTQ lives apart from the BL fantasy realm, especially among fans outside Japan who are cocooned in highly religious or repressive locations. In some cases, this awareness resulted in BL culture fans becoming advocates for LGBTQ rights.This collection will be a valuable resource for scholars and students because it offers a counterpoint to studies dominated by understandings of the global spread of media based on mainstream feature films, television, and commercially published texts. Although many cultural studies and media studies scholars remain focused on the local reception of blockbuster films or bestselling novels, BL culture offers an entirely different persecutive on transnational media flows. Tracking consumption and fandom that often takes place off the grid, these chapters illustrate how fandom communities are created and sustained outside regulated channels, some of them illegal. BL media is able to evade repressive religious norms and other prohibitions through sharing at conventions and through online scanlations, fansubbing, and other technologies for media production. This is especially true for fans in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. BL media research also demands that we question a recurring popular culture studies distinction between culture producers, such as writers, filmmakers, artists, and consumers or audience members. The BL media world at times blurs these distinctions, because fans are often themselves the producers of BL media.Scholars often write about how popular culture can be "read" by different audiences in dissimilar ways, and that culture producers work to appeal to a diverse audience through layered meanings, irony, and humor. The research in this volume substantiates the way BL themes have become embedded in broad cultural contexts across Asia, from TV dramas to popular music styling. BL tropes might be very understated and not evident to all consumers, yet the widespread presence of subtle BL cultural pointers serves to acknowledge both BL fans and sexual minorities. A good example of this is the deluge of cultural products, both mainstream and underground, that appeared after the publication of historical fantasy novels by the Japanese writer Yumemakura Baku. The stories in his series Onmyōji included an implied romantic relationship between a male wizard and a male courtier. Many amateur BL manga created by fans featured the wizard coupled in romantic or sexual scenes with either the courtier or a famous rival wizard. A recent iteration, the 2020 Chinese film adaptation The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity, joins thousands of other transnational feature films, manga, TV dramas, games, novels, and fan art celebrating a male wizard–courtier duo. Although the mainstream cultural products are intended for a broad general audience, they wink to BL fan viewers. In other words, there is quite a lot of BL-infused themes or markers in media created by mainstream producers, not just in media produced by and for BL aficionados. Although it is critical to notice how mainstream media incorporates BL tropes, highlighting the financial clout of BL culture fans, it is not always clear in the book's chapters that some mainstream products might not be considered a part of authentic BL culture by BL fans themselves.Similar to other edited volumes, there are chapters that at times have material that is tangential to a focus on BL media, and there are the usual redundancies and differing understandings found in such a large collection. Even so, the expansiveness of the topics covered and the locations for research in the nineteen chapters is also a strong point of the volume, reflecting the diversity and the spin-off consequences of BL culture. The volume grew out of the first conference solely devoted to BL media in Asia, held at Kanagawa University in Yokohama in 2017. Editing a volume based on a conference is never an easy task, and here it is compounded by the multinational contributors and their subjects. However, this collection reflects expert editorial skills, because Welker has beautifully shaped chapters from many writers with various language backgrounds. Contributors wrote about BL media in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Vietnam, Thailand, The Philippines, Singapore, and India. Welker, a pioneer in research on BL media and Japanese feminisms, generously brought together scholars from multiple disciplines to both the conference and the book, including cultural studies, global studies, sociology, anthropology, history, digital studies, political science, and more. This volume is especially timely because of proliferating anti-BL manga discourse circulating among fan groups, in some cases promoted by TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). The publication of a collection of excellently researched essays is one method for counteracting this trend.Beyond its value to Asian studies, this volume is also a good resource for scholars in any field as a reminder of the EuroAmerican centrism found in much of the gender studies and sexuality studies research.