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ABSTRACT
Boys love (BL) media, a transnational Asian genre centring on male couples, is gaining global attention and academic discussion. As a queer genre, BL has received much positive attention due to its challenging of heteronormativity in a particularly marginalized context. However, scholarship on BL has not sufficiently addressed the issue of misogyny that is intrinsic to BL media and industry. Pointing to this persisting gap in scholarship, we interrogate this misogyny through the lens of representation in BL texts and industry engagement with female fans that complicate the subversive politics associated with the genre. We argue that naming and exploring misogyny in BL is important for the political project of celebrating its queer potential. Affectively engaging with the genre as ‘fandom killjoys’, we discuss key examples from Thai, Chinese, and Japanese BL series to identify major trends in the transnational genre. We further examine how the Thai BL industry, in particular, commercializes fan practices and directs fan affect to generate profit. In so doing, we identify significant limitations of BL media and the BL industry, contributing to ongoing scholarship on BL and its political potential.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. There are also other problems and visible hierarchies in BL narratives such as their circumspect class politics and inherent colourism, but we will be limiting ourselves to a discussion of misogyny in this article. We hope to address these other elements in future scholarship.
2. For example, on the popular Asian drama website MyDramaList, The Shipper has only 14,912 watchers, while 2together (Citation2020) has 58,933 and Bad Buddy (Citation2021) has 46,045 watchers. Moreover, on the popular media rating website IMDb, 2together and Bad Buddy are listed as number 2 and 3 respectively among the top GMMTV series, whereas The Shipper does not make it in the top 50. See https://mydramalist.com/39563-2gether-the-series; https://mydramalist.com/682589-bad-buddy; https://mydramalist.com/49747-the-shipper. See also https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?companies=co0737196