Beyond a queer utopia: interrogating misogyny in transnational boys love media

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Boys’ love
• transnational
• Asian media
• misogyny
• fandom
• killjoy
• affect

Introduction

Boys love (BL) today has become a lingua franca of those familiar with queer pop culture in Asia, and increasingly around the globe, with an increasing heterogeneity of themes, genres, and places of origin. BL originated in Japan in the 1970s, where comics (among other media) of romance between androgynous young men were produced by and for (mostly heterosexual) women (McLelland et al. 2015). From there, BL has been exported and popularized across Asia, and increasingly, the global north. The popularity of BL has also attracted considerable attention in media and cultural studies. Existing scholarship has discussed BL largely in a positive light, emphasizing its political significance as a transnational/transcultural genre (e.g. Baudinette 2020; Ng & Li 2020, 2022; Ye 2022). In a recent anthology on BL across Asia, for instance, Welker (2022, 4, emphasis in original) argues that ‘BL is political.’ This is because not only do these queer media texts challenge heteronormativity, but their audiences often engage with BL in queer, creative ways: ‘some individuals who are not necessarily cisgender or straight have found room to breathe via this media and the amorphous sphere of its fandom. In that sense, it is queer twice over’ (Welker 2022, 2; emphasis added). It is this double queerness in the politics of BL that we interrogate and complicate in this article.

Specifically, we argue that while significant in its focus on queer representations and receptions in marginalized contexts, inherent in BL are certain limits, including¹ misogyny, which is our focus in this article. We approach these issues from the point of view of female BL fans from Asia, an identity that is invocative of our critical inquiry. For instance, Barbara Hartley highlights that ‘the homoerotic representation of beautiful boys permitted – and continues to permit – girls to express their emerging sexual identities without the need to confirm to the oppressive hegemonic paradigms of sex and gender’ (2015, 30). While this is a legitimate understanding of women’s engagement with BL that considers their agency, as women and BL fans, we find that our identification with ‘male characters – including in romantic and erotic scenarios’ is often a compromise for the impossibility of identifying with the problematically written women in BL works (Welker 2022, 7). In this sense, we propose that the (over)emphasis on and (over)celebration of gender fluidity, and women’s cross-gendered identification with men may cover up the misogynistic side of BL, thus obscuring BL’s complex cultural politics.

In this article, we first elaborate our methodology, which involves an affective engagement as ‘fandom killjoys’ (Pande 2018) and show how a sense of wrongness in our encounters with BL provoked us to explore and interrogate the misogynistic underpinnings of the genre. Then, we discuss the problems with existing scholarship on the subject that insufficiently engages with the issue and unpack dimensions of misogyny in BL textual representations and the BL industry, in the context of Thailand. In line with Mizuguchi envisioning BL as ‘mov[ing] the world forward (quoted in Welker 2022, 11)’, we argue that it is only upon the acknowledgement and contextualization of its problematics that BL will truly achieve its political potential.

Affective engagements as fandom killjoys

Our critical inquiry into the politics of BL starts from our fannish interests in this genre. Our introduction to BL media was made through different localized routes in China and India, respectively, finding these through a desire for non-heteronormative and queer media in our particular contexts a decade ago. We pursued our PhDs at the same institution on similar topics, relating to fans’ affective engagement with male homoerotic media texts. Out of a common passion, we started watching BL shows of diverse origins, starting from The Untamed (2019), a Chinese danmei-adapted drama, web dramas adapted from original danmei (Chinese term for BL) fiction. We were amazed at the deft handling of queerness in the storytelling, where explicit homosexuality between the two leading characters was downplayed due to Chinese media censorship on non-productive sexualities (Tian 2020), but by way of emphasizing the emotionality between them as ‘soulmates’. This, to us, paradoxically enshrined their affective entanglement that outlives the immediate satisfaction of overt desire (as per Sedgwick’s (2003) discussion on affect and desire). Our consumption of Chinese danmei-adapted dramas was followed by multiple Thai, Japanese and South Korean BL dramas where characters openly exhibit their sexual attraction to each other, overcoming obstacles of class (e.g. Not Me (2021)), or where questions of identity intersected with negotiations of sexuality (e.g. I Told Sunset about You (2020); KinnPorsche (2022); Cherry Magic (2020); My Beautiful Man (2021); Semantic Error (2022)).

Despite our enjoyment for BL dramas, we have always felt an unease. As we witnessed female characters coming and going, serving as a catalyst for male intimacy, a sense of being offended became evermore pronounced. As an aca-fan (academic fan) of colour, Pande (2018) establishes her position as a ‘fandom killjoy.’ Developed from Ahmed’s (2010, 2017) notion of the feminist killjoy (of colour) feeling wronged in a white, patriarchal society, Pande identifies fandom killjoy as a non-white fan who points out her own experience of alienation in the supposedly ‘inclusive, woman-centric, and queer-coded’ (2018, Introduction), but ultimately white community, killing the joy of other fellow fans. Yet for both Ahmed and Pande, by acknowledging their unhappiness and tracing its source, the killjoys uncover structural sexism and racism that weave together their socio-cultural trajectory, promoting feminist and anti-racist consciousness and politics towards a fairer horizon. Similarly, our failure to completely align with the apparently promising blueprint stitched together by queer narratives that ‘intervene[s] in conditions of heteronormativity and homophobia’ (Baudinette 2020, 103) that many BL fans reside in suggests that this blueprint has its own structural discriminations and exclusions. Our unease is our testimony that we, as queer women of colour, are at least in certain conjunctures being excluded from the double queerness of BL (Welker 2022) in both representational and receptive terms. By probing this unease further, we disclose the politics surrounding BL that sustain and complicate this double queerness. In other words, we do not negate the affective (e.g. pleasures), among other factors of socio-cultural significance (e.g. queer politics) that BL brings forth. Rather, we emphasize that there are also feelings of indignation and dissatisfaction in our affective engagements with BL, whose sources are its structural setbacks, whose sources we identify within a culture of misogyny.

We approach the politics of BL through commercial live-action dramas produced across Asia, including Thailand, mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. We acknowledge the heterogeneity of BL and its routes of development across different regions. For instance, BL has long included fan-made pornographic depictions of sex between men, often referred to overseas as yaoi, an older term that has sometimes been used as a label in Japan for specifically Japanese works. Nowadays, Thai ‘series wai’, commercial BL live-action dramas have become an important player in promoting a global BL fandom, drawing from the legacies of Japanese BL, South Korean idol culture, and Thai domestic BL (fan) fiction (Baudinette 2019; Prasannam 2019). Nevertheless, there is a constant and central focus on BL across Asia on good-looking male couples in texts that are officially picked up and distributed, primarily on web platforms. Thus, in this article we consider BL as an all-encompassing media culture incorporating works centring ‘cute boys’ for a largely female audience (Prasannam 2019, 71). Thus, in this article we include as our cases Chinese danmei-adapted dramas, Taiwanese, Japanese and Korean BL dramas, Thai series wai and lakhon, romantic TV dramas from which series wai has evolved (Baudinette 2019; Chan 2021) that feature homosexual romance. We adopt this loose categorization out of the consideration that BL texts often circulate transnationally, complementing each other, rendering it impossible to ‘categorise the communities as discrete and their texts as totally indigenous to a particular place’ (Saito 2022, 259). However, we focus on primarily the Thai BL industry as it is currently the most active in producing commercialized BL media to a transnational audience, significantly contributing to the queer genre’s mainstreaming and its global fan culture.

Misogynistic ideology in and around BL

Misogyny in modern capitalist society in the West, and increasingly in the East due to the globalization of capitalism, often takes the form of not only banishment of women, but also homophobia, despite the close homosocial bonds between men. Sedgwick (1985) and Kimmel (1994) identify misogyny in modern capitalist society as hatred against and oppression of both the feminine in men and women in general. This is because 1) the rise of the ‘science of sexuality’, as Foucault (1978, 70) has it, such as psychoanalysis upon industrialization renders sexuality a crucial (if not only) identity mark of Man, around which other relations of power functions; 2) capitalism as the dominant economic paradigm requires the stability of its basic economic and reproductive unit, i.e. the nuclear family. Under this agenda, men are to cooperate with each other in the heavily male-dominated social space of the marketplace, while simultaneously excluding both women (who are sent to the domestic sphere) and gay men (who are often considered as women trapped in men’s bodies, and who disrupt reproductive institutions) (Kimmel 1994; Sedgwick 1990). The purpose of this banishment of anyone that is not ‘manly enough’ is to secure heterosexual (white, middle-class etc.) male domination in resource distribution and reproduction of population.

In this article, we primarily look at misogyny as erasure and problematic engagement with women in BL, as homophobia has in the least been acknowledged and addressed in multiple ways in both commercial media production and consumption, and in BL scholarship. For instance, initial BL works in Japan were notorious for its ‘gay only for you’ narrative arc. This is latently homophobic (Hitoshi, 2015; Welker) and bi-erasing. As an evolution, recent commercial productions attempt to interrogate this trope by 1) acknowledging the characters’ queer identity upfront (e.g. Kinn in KinnPorsche (2022), Thian in To Sir, with Love (2022)), and 2) openly referring to LGBTQ civil rights in the narratives, be it slacktivism or activism (e.g. Not Me (2022); Cutie Pie (2022)). Ultimately, despite its nuanced twists and turns, BL as an overarching genre does celebrate soft masculinities of the androgynous young men, and showcase a possibility of homosocial-homosexual continuum, where friendship (e.g. I told sunset about you (2020)) or rivalry (e.g. Love in the air (2022)) between men may transition to romance. Arguably, it is for this reason that BL scholars including Baudinette (2019, 2020) and Welker (2022) argue for the inter-implication between BL as a (hyper)commercialized genre and queer politics against homophobia, and its potential as a queer utopia for the gay male communities in homophobic sociocultural landscapes like the Philippines and China. In this sense, it is the exclusion of women in BL that has not been sufficiently explored. As we show below, this insufficiency is manifest in BL scholarship, representations, and industry.

Misogyny in BL scholarship: academic literature on the gender politics of BL media culture

Although existing scholarship on BL has addressed misogyny to some extent, in both Chinese and English-language scholarship, the structural misogyny in BL industry, particularly the problematic representations of women in BL dramas and the industry-led fan practices are largely lacking. Blair (2010), for instance, explores Anglophone fans’ misogynistic responses to women characters in Japanese BL manga, stemming from negative portrayals of women in the texts. In a similar vein, Wang and Ge (2022, 13) explore how the ‘internalized misogyny’ of Chinese fans’ of Xiao Zhan, the male lead of The Untamed (2019), led to their feeling offended by a fanfiction where Xiao is portrayed as a female transgender character, thought of by the fans as ‘feminis[ing]’ their idol. Additionally, Kim (2022) examines why Korean BL fans moved away from consuming the genre due to its marginalization of women and unrealistic depictions of gay sex. Nevertheless, these works focus predominantly on misogynistic fan practices and fans’ interrogation of misogyny in specific cultural contexts. Ning (2014), Wang and Liu (2008) identify the marginal roles of women in danmei fiction in passing. These authors acknowledge that it is reflective of female writers and readers’ internalized misogyny under patriarchy. However, they also argue that it is a representational technique that helps them shy away from identifying with the female characters to engage more with the male bodies, thereby satisfying their sexual desire. Baudinette (2019) discusses in more detail the presence of a BL fangirl in Lovesick: The Series (2014), a Thai BL drama that had laid the foundation for contemporary series wai. For Baudinette (2019, 126), the portrayal of the BL fangirl in Lovesick (2014) as ‘a young girl continues to stare directly into the camera, often with her mouth dropping open’, ‘squealing’ in exaltation at the interactions of the two male protagonists is ‘a pedagogical tool designed to introduce Thai audiences to BL and educate them about the specific reading practices that are central to the fujoshi [Japanese term for female BL fans] sub-culture.’

This analysis of fujoshi characters in Thai series wai incorporates overlapping dimensions that require unpacking. Firstly, as per Prasannam (2019), dramas like Lovesick (2014) are already deeply rooted in Thailand’s literary traditions. In other words, BL drama, in Thailand and otherwise, is a contemporary form of work in the long history of BL’s transnational and transcultural evolution than a brand ‘new genre of queer media’ whose audience, mostly women, need education on the codes of conduct in this media ecology. Secondly, while the figure of the squealing fangirl has been depathologized in foundational fan studies work (e.g. Jenkins 1992), it remains a problematic trope if it is the only representation of female fans without providing any character depth to this dominant portrayal. Thus, the pedagogical purpose of the fujoshi representation necessitates a more complex lens than an easy celebration. Unlike (aca)fan studies’ ownership of the ‘squeeing’ fangirl, this dominant identificatory paradigm is one that is rooted in industry desires to capitalize upon fujoshi affect without addressing the subjectivity of the female characters and consumers (discussed in greater detail in the section of BL industry).

In sum, we argue that problematic representations of women require more nuanced unpacking, particularly how it is ingrained in the broader BL industry. The fact that this complexity remains largely untouched, and indeed, often taken-for-granted indicates the reproduction of gendered hierarchies and signals an underlying misogyny in BL scholarship more generally. In the following sections, we detail the misogyny of BL dramas, and how, amidst these representational politics, Thai BL industry monetize female-oriented fan practices (for a discussion on male fan practices and female fan practices, see Kohnen 2017).

Misogyny in BL media: the representational politics of bl drama

Misogyny in BL drama is showcased through the erasure and reductive portrayal of women. Female characters in BL are either removed altogether, or, if they make it on the screen, limited in their function as no more than ‘currency’ to move the main story forward (Sedgwick 1985, 52). The former is exemplified by the trope of killing women, as in The Untamed (2019), where all female characters were killed off to facilitate the male protagonists’ puzzle solving and development of intimacy. For the latter, the Thai wai series KinnPorsche: the Series (2022) comes to the fore, among several others. KinnPorsche unfolds in the power struggle between the main and secondary families of a mafia group in Thailand. Kinn is the second son, and heir of the mafia head Korn, who is also the patriarch of the main family. Porsche is Kinn’s bodyguard-turned-lover who goes on missions for the crime family with other fellow bodyguards. In real socio-cultural contexts, one would be surprised to see a mafia, including its family businesses and familial heritage system running with few women, even as the mothers, the wives, or the carers – an Other. This is the prevalent norm in the fantastic narratives of KinnPorsche (2022) and other mafia shows such as History3: Trapped (2019), a Taiwanese BL drama.

In KinnPorsche, only three female characters are relevant to the development of the story and take up limited roles. Yok is the owner of the bar Porsche works in prior to his encounter with Kinn. The character stands for the common trope in Thai lakhon, namely ‘kathoey (male-to-female transgender/transsexual)’ (Baudinette 2019, 117). Baudinette (2019, 118) proposes that kathoey often functions as ‘comic relief’ in lakhon to stabilize heteronormativity in Thai society. In past BL media, trans women including kathoey have also often not been represented at all. The cathartic comicality is seen in Yok as she makes her hyperbolic entrance to a party for the mafia bodyguards held in her bar, dressing up in leather jacket and sunglasses to mock a gangster member, and being carried on a trolley with a fan fixed on the side as an air blower flipping up her hair. Nevertheless, Yok is being portrayed more sympathetically in KinnPorsche, as Porsche’s friend/older sister who provides lines of relationship suggestions when the latter turns to her, regardless of her limited screen time (Baudinette 2019, 118).

Meanwhile, Angela is an employee of the family’s security system, allocating weapons to bodyguards and has sacrificed her life in the final skirmish between the main and secondary branches (ep. 14). Finally, Namphueng, Porsche’s mother and the foster sister of Korn, is portrayed as suffering from trauma-induced amnesia upon witnessing the death of her husband a decade ago and has ever since been hidden from the public’s, and even her sons’ eye, by Korn. Throughout the series she appears in flashbacks and makes her appearance in the final episode as having difficulty with speech due to her post-traumatic stress disorder. Namphueng’s silent presence in KinnPorsche serves as a catalyst for the protagonist Porsche to explore his identity and relationship with the mafia family, and the revelation of her existence in the series’ finale as a member of the clan justifies Porsche’s taking over the business of the secondary family in the aftermath of the power struggle. Aside from these women in passing, no other women who have a name has presented across the multiple gatherings, meetings, and other affairs taking place in the mafia family.

Accompanying the general limited representation of women, their appearance in BL dramas is often stereotypical, orienting around tropes of the squeaky, obsessive fangirl, the villain, and the caring mother. My Beautiful Man (MBM hereafter, 2021, 2023), a popular Japanese BL drama contains perhaps the most typical representation of the fangirl trope that resonates with multiple other BL dramas (e.g. Lovesick (2014); 2gether (2020)). The MBM franchise tells a romantic story between Hira and Kiyoi, two high-school classmates. Hira is timid, but devoted fully to Kiyoi, whom he takes as his ‘king’ and the most beautiful man on earth (MBM 2021, ep. 6). Meanwhile, Kiyoi is committed to becoming an actor. Appearing as cold and grumpy, he has a lonely childhood and aspires to Hira’s care and affection. Their fates become increasingly entangled as they struggle to come to terms with who they are and what they want, and finally get together at the end of the first season. Their story continues in the second season as Kiyoi pursues his acting career. In this season, Kiyoi has acquired his own fan base – a group of women holding up posters, screaming, and doing finger hearts, a popular gesture among fans of east Asian idol culture, whenever Kiyoi walks by on-set.

Aside from this all-too-familiar imagination of women as excessively emotional, women in BL shows are also frequently portrayed in extreme, dualistic terms, as either unconditionally evil – bad-mouthing and plotting against the male protagonist(s) – or unconditionally good, as an accepting Madonna. The trope of female villains is most pronounced in To Sir, with Love (To Sir hereafter, 2022), a Thai lakhon featuring a homosexual romance between the male protagonist and a secondary character. To Sir (2022) is set in a Chinese immigrant family in Thailand, against the general background of Japanese invasion in Thailand during the WWII. Thian is the heir of the Song, the leading clan of Five Dragon Guild (FDG), a business empire set up by a group of Chinese businessmen in Thailand. Throughout the show Thian is to come to terms with his identity as a ‘cut-sleeve’, traditional Chinese analogy for gay men, amidst the homophobic familial and societal environment, while saving the family from power struggle among the multiple clans in FDG. Jan is Thian’s aunt and the concubine of his father Mr Song, current head of the Song and FDG. Obsessed with establishing her own son, Yang, Thian’s younger brother as the Song’s legitimate heir, she attempted to poison Thian when he was little and takes pain to uncover Thian’s secret (which turns out to be his gay identity) so as to destroy him. As the story proceeds, Jan’s paranoia becomes more obvious when pitted against Thian’s generosity, who has for multiple times forgiven, even covered up her evil attempts in front of Mr. Song (e.g. ep.3, ep. 7).

This wholehearted evilness in women is, by contrast, accompanied by their unreserved love and affection. Chan (2021) identifies a general hetero-patriarchal narrative structure in Thai BL lakhon, namely the tripartite framework of the approving mothers, the absent fathers, and the good sons. The queer sons are to come out, seeking affirmation of his identity from his mother, who takes up nurturing role as opposed to the patriarch of the family, to be incorporated in, hence maintaining the integrity of the Asian familial system. In this sense, the women in BL dramas are to continue the role of the caring mother that patriarchal system assigns them. Here again To Sir (2022) provides a prime example, where Bua takes up an ambiguous role in the show. Throughout the show, she is the one who exhorts Thian’s parents to accept him as the way he is and let him ‘live the way he wants’ (ep. 16), emphasizing that ‘[being cut-sleeve or not is not] anything that can be forced upon’ (ep. 11). Arguably, Bua is the understanding and caring mother that Thian and Yang do not have. Despite their obvious contrast, both Jan and Bua in To Sir are perceived from the same black-and-white logic, grounded in a male-centric epistemology that gazes women as an Other. Indeed, Jan’s abrupt change in the penultimate episode (ep. 16) from an archenemy of Li, Thian’s mother, to her ally against the traitor in FDG on the excuse that ‘since FDG no longer exists, there is no point in seeing Thian die’ testifies to the absence of a moral middle ground in which female characters could develop their personalities. Such representations point to the lack of adequate female representation within the genre.

It should be acknowledged that in To Sir, the female character, and for that matter a major one, Li, Thian’s mother does exhibit character arc otherwise hard to be seen in the more ‘typical’ series wai. She is central to the functioning of the Song household to the point of saving its family members (including Mr. Song) from Japanese invaders at the expense of her own life. Li’s character is complicated, and morally so, in her multiple attempts, including murder, to protect her son from the potential harm from disclosing his sexual orientation. Yet we emphasize that Li is agentic only to the point of sustaining the patriarchal familial structure in the fictional world of To Sir. She witnesses the proceeding of family businesses, but refrains from decision-making, and her attempts to cover up Thian’s sexuality is a testimony of the legitimacy of homophobia in the family as well as the society. Her presence rather than undermining, testifies to the persisting misogyny of media representations, both in BL and otherwise. More importantly, despite Li’s central position in To Sir, she is much less popular among fans of the show than Thian and his male lover. This can be seen from the release of another BL lakhon (Laws of Attraction, 2023) upon fans’ enthusiasm, shortly after the finale of To Sir featuring the two actors by the very TV station (One 31) (Corner Café 2023), which necessitates a discussion of misogyny in the BL industry.

Fan affects for whose ends?: female fan practices and industry relations

Women’s status as agential consumers of BL texts and celebrities is challenged through their reproduction as goods within these texts and through the industry practices developed around capitalizing upon this consumption. This is primarily evident in the commercialization of shipping fan culture through extensive and monetized fan service. While fan service frequently refers to media creators’ inclusion of ‘erotic content to reward fans and promote sales and/or maintain loyalty’ (Garg 2019, 165) within media texts, it has also become a staple marketing strategy in many East Asian popular culture practices. Significantly, the K-pop industry is well-known for participating in (and perfecting) fan service strategies and has been identified as a major influencing model for the Thai BL industry (Baudinette 2023). However, even in the K-pop industry, shipping, or its encouragement through fan service performed by idols, is not explicitly acknowledged as such, and the largely female fan practice remains controversial. In such a context and given the persisting marginalization of queer representations, practices, and identities across Asia, the fan practice of shipping real people can be read as a transgressive act for fans desiring queer affirmation. However, the Thai BL industry not only normalizes these practices by promoting their onscreen couples offscreen through deliberate fan service and marketing strategies (such as promotional campaigns involving performances of physical intimacy between the male actors), but also commercializes these by enabling fans to buy merchandise associated both with the characters as well as their starring celebrities. For instance, a cursory look through the shopping website of GMMTV Company Limited (a leading Thai entertainment company promoting BL fan culture across Asia; GMMTV hereafter) reveals merchandise featuring both artefacts from popular GMMTV series and their couples, as well as merch pertaining to the ships named after the actors who played these roles. In addition, GMMTV recently held concerts featuring popularly shipped celebrity couples that were a massive success, even when held virtually during the pandemic. By bringing traditionally transgressive modes of fan consumption into the ambit of the market, the Thai BL industry continues to profit off fangirls while offering them little in return in terms of meaningful representation.

To further understand this relationship between BL fans and the industry, it is useful to look at how fans operate in and/or are co-opted in the current economic structure. Much scholarship on media fandom has discussed how it operates within the context of a ‘gift economy,’ involving giving, receiving, and reciprocity (Hellekson 2009). This refers to the creation and consumption of goods in the form of artwork, fanfic, and videos, but also any other engagement that demonstrates fans’ labour, effort, and investment, including assisting in disseminating content, organizing fan events, writing discussion threads, and so on (Turk 2014). However, as De Kosnik (2009) examines in the context of Western fandom, when a subculture becomes mainstream, it becomes open to commercialization. This is particularly relevant in the context of the Thai BL industry that has effectively commercialized the queer subculture. When fans engage in fan practices based on media texts, even when they can involve appreciation or reward in the form of financial support, it is a ‘bottom up’ model rather than the ‘top down’ industrial model. However, the BL industry’s co-option of female fan practices and affect for the purpose of profit generation reproduces normative market relations of what Irigaray described as ‘men as traders’ and ‘women as goods’ (1981). In the section on representation, we noted how women (characters) in BL shows are often reduced to the role of ‘currency’ that facilitate male relationships and character growth. However, through fan practices that centre on how the genre actually works for their pleasures and affects, women are able to use the represented men as currency instead.

The industry’s commercialization of female fan practices then effectively channels fan affect towards a capitalist economy rather than their own affective relations that operate within a gift economy. This is because the fan economy is gendered female and based on symbolic exchanges where fan affect works to build a community and social ties. As Hellekson (2009, 116) writes, ‘[female fans] construct a new, gendered space that relies on the circulation of gifts for its cohesion with no currency and little meaning outside the economy, and that deliberately repudiates a monetary model (because it is gendered male).’ While both economic structures can operate simultaneously, we remain critical of celebrating normalization and mainstreaming of subcultural forms and practices when it comes at the cost of privileging commercial fan practices over creative and communal ones. For these reasons, we remain cautious of the representations of women in BL – particularly the trope of the squealing fangirl – and industrial and scholarly engagement with them. The silence around misogyny in BL scholarship arguably uncritically reiterates the pathologised trope of the crazy fangirl, signalling the enduring presence of misogyny in society. We believe that it is important to normalize such representations to depathologize attitudes towards female sexuality and modes of consumption, as well as to fracture the binary of the ‘good’ (non-shipping, critical) fan versus the ‘bad’ (shipping, irrational) fan. However, at the same time, without acknowledging this as a normal consumptive behaviour or sexual practice, it remains a reductive trope.

There are some significant challenges to these limiting and reductive representations within the industry. One show where this is done to a significant extent with varying results is the Thai BL drama The Shipper (2020). As evident from the title, the series focuses on the story of a fujoshi, who is swapped into the body of a boy she is shipping with another (male) classmate. While the narrative visually retraces the male homoerotic landscape, the internal logic of the protagonist makes the romantic plot a heterosexual one by giving voice to the female subject. The Shipper is arguably more subversive than a typical GMMTV BL because it subverts the set paradigm of a typical BL by focusing on the psyche of the female character and developing the identity of the shipping fujoshi beyond the stereotypical one-dimensional trope while still functioning as a piece of queer media. Indeed, it may be useful here to echo the common usage and understanding of the term ‘queer’ as a way of critiquing heteronormative and dominant structures of being (Zhao 2020). How successfully they manage to do this remains debatable, given its lesser viewership and ratings as compared to GMMTV’s more traditional series²; however, the attempt is one that we would like to see repeated.

Another place where female representations are being challenged and extended in Thai BL is the emerging presence of side GL couples. A prominent example of this is in the GMMTV series, Bad Buddy (2021), where two female characters are defined and developed beyond their relationship to the male protagonists. The character Pa, the sister of the protagonist is officially shipped with Ink, a character who was earlier seen in the role of a potential heterosexual love interest for one of the male protagonists. While the pairing of the two girls works to remove the obstacle of heterosexual romancing, it also shows them actively pursuing their professional and personal interests and providing them romantic fulfilment outside of heterosexual leftovers. While the side couples, particularly female ones, are not marketed the same way as the male ones, we remain wary about whether commercializing all couples and relating fan practices is necessarily a progressive step. In any case, we believe that it is important to expand the conversation on the queer potential of BL by interrogating the varying factors and forces at play in this equation.

Conclusion

Like many other subcultural texts and practices, the earlier stages of BL scholarship (necessarily) focused on its emancipatory and radical potential. In this article, we point to the lack of scholarship on BL addressing crucial dimensions of women’s role and agency in the context of BL textual and industry relations. We approach this politics of BL as fandom killjoys, a critical inquiry born out of a sense of being wronged in our own affective engagements with BL media as Asian female fans. We argue that despite being hailed as a queer genre, BL is often misogynistic in its fictional representations and industry dispositions towards fans. In particular, women are often erased or stereotypically represented in BL media texts as either overly emotional or simply one-dimensional. Moreover, in the context of the Thai BL industry, female fan practices and their affects are channelled towards commercial ends profiting the capitalist industry rather than remaining centred in a fan gift economy aimed towards building a (bottom-up) social community. Given the much-needed discussions around BL occurring at various stages today – industry, fandom, and academic scholarship – that signal its increasing acceptability and entry into the mainstream contemporary media landscape, it is perhaps time to move to the next stage of BL scholarship: one that questions the politics of BL beyond a queer utopia.

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 (2020) has 58,933 and Bad Buddy (2021) 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