Creative Misreadings of “Thai BL” by a Filipino Fan Community: Dislocating Knowledge

Production in Transnational Queer Fandoms Through Aspirational Consumption

Author(s): Thomas Baudinette
Source: Mechademia: Second Arc , Fall 2020, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 101-118
Published by: University of Minnesota Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/mech.13.1.0101

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/mech.13.1.0101?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

University of Minnesota Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Mechademia: Second Arc

This content downloaded from

128.36.7.129 on Tue, 03 Nov 2020 03:45:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Creative Misreadings of “Thai BL”
by a Filipino Fan Community
Dislocating Knowledge Production in Transnational
Queer Fandoms Through Aspirational Consumption

THOMAS BAUDINETTE

While browsing the internet one night in late December 2014, I encountered
a Thai television soap opera, or lakhon, named Lovesick: The Series. As a scholar
of Japanese queer popular culture who investigates boys love (hereafter BL),
a genre of homoerotic media produced and consumed primarily by hetero-
sexual women,1 I quickly recognized that Lovesick conformed to the generic
tropes associated with classic Japanese BL texts.2 Unbeknownst to me at the
time, I had serendipitously stumbled upon an emerging genre of popular cul-
ture known in Thailand as “series wai.”3 But in 2015, as I scoured the internet
to learn more about this intriguing series, I came across English-language fan
spaces on Facebook where Lovesick was being discussed as representative of
a phenomenon that fans called “Thai BL.”4 Curious, I began to observe these
English-language fansites for “Thai BL” and determined that the majority of
the people participating in the space were young Filipino men and women and
that most sites were curated and administrated by Filipino men who iden-
tified as gay. In fact, the Philippines has emerged as an important space for
fandom of so-called Thai BL, a point recently recognized by Philippine media.5
As I observed such fan sites over several years, it became increasingly appar-
ent that the Filipino men and women participating in this fandom viewed BL
as fundamentally Thai and that they actively attempted to differentiate it from
what they called “Japanese yaoi.”6 For these fans, BL was positioned as a form
of Thai popular culture and was therefore understood to be categorically not
Japanese.
Previous work exploring the transnational circulation of BL has tended to
advance theory which firmly centers Japan within its analysis, exploring how
“culturally Japanese” products such as BL are adapted or “glocalized” to new
contexts.7 Many of these studies draw upon Koichi Iwabuchi’s seminal explo-
ration of the transnational circulation of Japanese popular culture throughout
East and Southeast Asia in the late 1990s.8 Iwabuchi develops a sophisticated

101

This content downloaded from

128.36.7.129 on Tue, 03 Nov 2020 03:45:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
102 THOMAS BAUDINETTE

framework for understanding how the “cultural odor” of a product—that

is, a product’s recognizability and desirability based in its embeddedness or
centering within a specific cultural context—plays an influential role in its re-
ception. Iwabuchi further contends that the Japanese government has played
an active role in bolstering the Japanese “cultural odor” of certain popular
culture products such as anime and manga by essentializing what he terms
Japan’s “national brand.”9 Throughout his scholarship, Iwabuchi calls upon
scholars to “re-center” Japan within processes of globalization and to draw
upon this re-centering of Japan as a space for critical reflection on the politics
of transnational cultural flow. In so doing, Iwabuchi suggests, scholars can
account for the influence of national producers on the reception of Japanese
cultural products outside Japan.10
Iwabuchi’s theories of transnational flow are useful in understanding
the processes of adaption when a Japanese cultural product such as BL leaves
Japan and enters a new national space. But Iwabuchi’s theories become less
useful for understanding how a glocalized product further transnationalizes
and potentially develops new meanings and associations through this process.
Iwabuchi’s insistence on “centering” analysis on the point of production (i.e.,
Japan) thus fails to account for situations when the so-called cultural odor
of Japan is diminished or even extinguished. Furthermore, Iwabuchi’s em-
phasis on critical reflection based in “centering” analysis on Japan may lead
one to conclude that consumers who fail to recognize the “Japaneseness” of
a cultural product such as BL are somehow “mistaken.” While I am broadly
sympathetic to Iwabuchi’s scholarly project, I am concerned by his criticisms
of fans whose reading practices are positioned as “misunderstanding” Japan’s
role in the production of the texts that they consume. Like Bertha Chin and
Lori Morimoto, I am also troubled by Iwabuchi’s conflation of nation and
culture and his lack of engagement with the intensely affective nature of
fannish consumption.11 Taking inspiration from Eve Sedgwick’s call to read
data through a “reparative” rather than a “paranoid” lens,12 I prefer to explore
such supposed “misunderstandings” as sites for new knowledge production
that can expand rather than limit our critical theorization of popular culture’s
transnationalization.
This article therefore investigates Filipino fans of a popular culture
form, which they call “Thai BL,” to understand how the “dislocation” or “de-
centering” of BL from its origin provides opportunities to further explore and
theorize the global circulation of Japanese popular culture. I follow Stuart
Hall in arguing that consumers possess the agency to reject the messages en-

This content downloaded from

128.36.7.129 on Tue, 03 Nov 2020 03:45:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 CREATIVE MISREADINGS OF “THAI BL” BY A FILIPINO FAN COMMUNITY 103

coded within texts by producers.13 I thus seek to “queer” dominant theories

of the globalization of BL through my reparative readings of this Filipino fan
community. I understand “queering” as a critical hermeneutic that draws
upon queer theory’s “antinormative” destabilization of the presumed nat-
uralness of common-sense, hierarchical knowledge systems.14 Through my
analysis of this Filipino fan community, I thus deconstruct how previous un-
derstandings of the processes underlying the transnationalization of BL have
tended to rely on simplistic binaries that construct certain readings of BL as
“correct” and others as “mistaken.” I develop a theory of what I term “creative
misreading” to conceptualize the queer potential unlocked by the dislocation
of BL from Japan. Creative misreading, I argue, represents a fundamentally
queer method of engaging with texts that dislocates a cultural product from
its purported history and, in so doing, opens new horizons of hopeful knowl-
edge that meaningfully intervene in conditions of heteronormativity and
homophobia.
To do this, I draw upon a digital ethnography of a Facebook fan page for
“Thai BL” of three thousand members that is administrated by six gay Filipino
men and to which I have ascribed the pseudonym Everything’s BL.15 By digital
ethnography, I refer to the emerging practice within the social sciences where
data is collected online and where the field site represents a “virtual” space.16
Like most ethnographic projects, my participant observation of Everything’s
BL was longitudinal, beginning in March 2015 and continuing until July 2017.
I visited the page daily to actively observe and participate in discussions con-
cerning the “Thai BL” series that were screening over the duration of the vir-
tual fieldwork. I was careful, however, to never challenge the views of the
participants I was observing so as not to influence the ideas being discussed.
I instead made various clarification requests that prompted participants to
further justify their viewpoints so that I could make sense of where their
understandings of “Thai BL” derived. I copied relevant discussions into a re-
search journal for later analysis and present excerpts from this journal in
de-identified form below to maintain the anonymity of the fans whose dis-
cussions I analyze.
Following Anna Cristina Pertierra, I recognize that the analytical poten-
tial of digital ethnography is limited if the material conditions which un-
derpin the virtual community under investigation are ignored during the
ethnographic process.17 I therefore traveled to Manila in December 2017, Sep-
tember 2018, and July 2019 in order to familiarize myself with Philippine
society and interact with fans of both “Japanese yaoi” and “Thai BL” to develop

This content downloaded from

128.36.7.129 on Tue, 03 Nov 2020 03:45:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
104 THOMAS BAUDINETTE

an awareness of the emplacement of Everything’s BL within broader trends in

Philippine BL fandom. During my visit to Manila in 2019, I also interviewed
eleven “Thai BL” fans as part of a broader ethnographic project investigating
consumption of Asian queer popular culture among same-sex desiring Fili-
pinos. I draw upon some of these informants’ voices below to provide further
empirical evidence for my theoretical arguments regarding the queer poten-
tials of creative misreading.

“Everything’s BL”: BL Positioned as a

Fundamentally Thai Form of Popular Culture

Like myself, it appeared that the majority of the three thousand members
who participated in discussions on Everything’s BL had discovered “Thai BL”
somewhat serendipitously and had primarily joined the fanpage to learn more
about this new genre of popular culture. In fact, most fans recounted narra-
tives in their posts and discussions about coincidentally encountering “Thai
BL” series on Facebook or YouTube when trying to find “gay” content. Others
were introduced to the group by friends who had, in the words of several
members, “converted” them to “Thai BL.” For many, “Thai BL” seemed to repre-
sent their first contact with affirming homoerotic media produced in Asia and
it became clear that most participants in the fan community were unaware of
Japanese BL. Those few who did, including the administrators, only discussed
Japanese BL in strategic ways, which I elucidate further below.
The fan page was actively moderated by six gay Filipino men and these
administrators acted as “Big Name Fans” who dominated discourse and hence
the group’s overall understanding of “Thai BL.”18 Like the Philippine fan com-
munities for “Japanese yaoi” examined by Tricia Fermin,19 I observed both
young women and self-identified gay or bisexual men active in discussions,
but my impression was that the site was utilized most frequently by gay men.
This was most likely because the administrators of Everything’s BL were gay
men themselves and were intent on creating a “safe space” for same-sex de-
siring Filipino men to explore their desires. Indeed, this mission statement
was prominently displayed in the group’s comprehensive list of rules. The fan
page was technically open to members from outside the Philippines, with the
group’s rules describing Everything’s BL as an “international fanpage for Thai
BL,” but membership data revealed that 83 percent of the users were based
somewhere in the Philippines, usually within the Metro Manila region. It

This content downloaded from

128.36.7.129 on Tue, 03 Nov 2020 03:45:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 CREATIVE MISREADINGS OF “THAI BL” BY A FILIPINO FAN COMMUNITY 105

must be noted that while the group officially had three thousand members by
the time I concluded my digital fieldwork, my observations revealed that only
fifty users were highly active, posting and commenting every day. Of these
fifty highly active users, all but seven were same-sex attracted men, including
the six administrators.
Everything’s BL primarily acted as a space for fans to communicate with
each other concerning their passionate consumption of “Thai BL,” including
reflections on shows currently being broadcast (many fans posted episode
reviews, for example). It became clear to me that the fans on this site lacked
Thai language proficiency and were dependent on unofficial English-language
“fansubs” of Thai BL and Everything’s BL was often used to share resources
concerning where to access “fansubbed” episodes. Toward the end of my ob-
servation period of this fan community, Everything’s BL began to emerge as
a space that promoted “fan meets” with Thai actors in Manila and fans also
utilized the group to share tips about travel to Thailand for the purposes of
visiting shooting locations for prominent “Thai BL” series. Users of Everything’s
BL had a strong affective attachment to Thailand, with many posting about how
their consumption of “Thai BL” had revolutionized their lives and, in the case
of many same-sex desiring men, led them to accept their desires and recognize
the potential for romantic love (rather than indiscriminate sex) between men.
Indeed, this was a common narrative among the eleven fans I interviewed
face-to-face in Manila in 2019, with a young bisexual woman named Zoe20
explaining that watching “Thai BL” even allowed her to recognize that romance
was possible between individuals of the same sex, citing this realization as
foundational to her own “coming out to herself and others” as bisexual.
Everything’s BL was also used to share information about the handsome
Thai actors who perform in such shows. Often, the actors appearing in “Thai
BL” were described as “ideal boyfriends” and it appeared that some fans had
difficulty distinguishing between the actors (who almost all identified as het-
erosexual21) and the same-sex desiring characters that they played. Drawing
on a common trope in global discourse,22 Thailand was often described by
fans as a “gay paradise” that was more tolerant of homosexuality than the
Philippines and that was filled with “handsome gay men” such as the actors
appearing in “Thai BL” series. Thailand’s status as a so-called gay paradise was
one of the many reasons that were given by users of Everything’s BL—as well
as the fans I interviewed in 2019—for the supposed emergence of the genre of
“BL” in Thailand in their discussions. One fan, in a representative statement,
claimed in a post from April 2015 that he believed that “BL is impossible here

This content downloaded from

128.36.7.129 on Tue, 03 Nov 2020 03:45:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
106 THOMAS BAUDINETTE

[the Philippines] but because Thailand is open to gays, of course they made
this kind of series.”
One of the rules which the administrators of the page had implemented
was that “only Thai BL series from the approved list pinned at the top of the
group can be discussed.” During my virtual fieldwork, this list included the
first and second series of Lovesick (2014, 2015), as well as series called Make it
Right (2016), SOTUS (2016) and 2Moons (2017). These four series represented
only a fraction of the “series wai” that had been broadcast in Thailand at this
time, but these four shows were widely available on YouTube and Facebook in
unofficial English-language “fansubbed” versions and were therefore known
to the English-speaking fans on Everything’s BL. The above rule served two
important functions. First, it enforced use of the terminology “Thai BL” among
fans to refer to the “series wai” that they consumed and thus contributed
to the inculcation of the desires for “Thai-ness” detailed above. Second, it
reinforced a belief among the members of Everything’s BL that the shows per-
mitted to be discussed were broadly representative of a Thai popular culture
form and that the representational strategies utilized within these series were
specifically and fundamentally Thai. Indeed, fans developed a collective rep-
ertoire of narrative and character tropes that they believed were representa-
tive of the “Thai BL” genre. One popular example was that drinking nom yen
(Thai-style milk tea dyed pink) was understood to index a character’s sexual
role as a “bottom” and many self-proclaimed “bottoms” among the same-sex
desiring male fans would use the phrase “to drink pink milk” as a playful eu-
phemism for sex within their posts. Because of the existence of this rule and
the six administrators’ strict monitoring of content, members of Everything’s
BL often engaged in intense debates concerning which new Thai series could
be added to the list, deciding whether or not the series was “BL.” That is, this
rule led fans to collaboratively develop a system of knowledge that could be
deployed to evaluate the authenticity of a “Thai BL” series. It was via these
reading practices that the fans who utilize Everything’s BL ultimately dislo-
cated BL from Japan.
As I observed discussions on Everything’s BL concerning what constitutes
a “Thai BL” series over the years, it became increasingly apparent that the six
administrators’ policing of language played a crucial role in how knowledge
was constructed and circulated throughout this fan community. One of the
group rules specifically stated that “as this is an international group, all posts
must be made in English only and posts in other languages will be deleted
without warning.” A consequence of this rule was that when fans attempted

This content downloaded from

128.36.7.129 on Tue, 03 Nov 2020 03:45:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 CREATIVE MISREADINGS OF “THAI BL” BY A FILIPINO FAN COMMUNITY 107

to define “BL,” the administrators enforced the use of Anglophone fan termi-
nology as an extension of the requirement for all users of Everything’s BL to
communicate in English. This meant that the few fans who possessed some
(limited) knowledge of Japanese BL—usually it never went beyond the recog-
nition that it existed as manga comics and I saw no indication that the mem-
bers of Everything’s BL were familiar with Japanese-language terms—were
encouraged by the six administrators to call this genre yaoi.23 The adminis-
trators explicitly differentiated yaoi from BL and hence fans within this com-
munity were educated to think of these two terms as separate and unrelated.
This contrasts with Japan, where BL represents a catch-all label within which
yaoi has been situated by some as the name for parodic, amateur content.24
The following excerpt of a conversation from October 2015 between a male
Filipino fan and an administrator is representative of the dislocation of BL
from Japan in this community’s discourse:

Fan: dont you get the same sweet feeling from the Japanese manga like
the junjo romantic (sic) [Junjō Romanchika, by Nakamura Shungiku]?
When phunnoh [the couple in Lovesick] hold the hands, it remind me
the sweet japanese scene in love!
Admin: hey! but that is a japanese yaoi comics and not a thai BL! they are
different even if both are sweet keke! japanese yaoi is for girls and
thai bl is for gays and thai BL makes real romance between gay men!

The above conversation also points to another important idea that circulated
on Everything’s BL; that “Thai BL” was tied to explicitly “gay” representation
and that “Japanese yaoi” was “for (heterosexual) women” and thus was not
authentically gay. In some ways, the administrators’ policing of this concept
evokes debates in 1990s Japan between gay activists and female BL fans where
BL was criticized as failing to represent the “reality” of gay male experience.25
Analysis of debates between members of Everything’s BL revealed that they
mostly believed that the romantic relationships between the characters in
“Thai BL” were “purer” or “more realistic” than those which were shown in
“Japanese yaoi.” Underlying this discussion was a belief that the actors ap-
pearing within “Thai BL” did not, in the words of one user in a post from
November 2016, “simply look like some girly man like in Japanese manga”
but were “hot and sexy like a real man should be.” Anthropologist Dredge
Byung’chu Kang-Nguyen has noted that contemporary Thai masculinity has
become increasingly dominated by a so-called Korpanese ideal that mixes the

This content downloaded from

128.36.7.129 on Tue, 03 Nov 2020 03:45:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
108 THOMAS BAUDINETTE

supposed “soft” stylistics of Japanese popular culture with the more forceful
masculinity of Korean idol singers (renowned for their muscular bodies and
highly sexualized dancing).26 Similar forms of masculinity have been privi-
leged as desirable among gay Filipinos,27 with gay fans named Ariel, Eugenio,
and Miguel who I met in July 2019, explaining that this masculine bodily aes-
thetic was one of the reasons why they preferred “Thai BL” over the “beautiful
male youths” of “Japanese yaoi.”
Furthermore, unlike the fans interviewed by Fermin who viewed Japan
as a “gender free” society,28 the members of Everything’s BL tended to position
Japan as a homophobic society like the Philippines. As one male fan stated
in a post from January 2016 that discussed homophobia in Asia, “yaoi *IS*
discrimination!! it is like bakla [“faggot”] in PH [the Philippines] with its
girly guys! Only Thai has freedom for real guys! JP and PH are both closed
[sad face emoji].” Likewise, a twenty-four-year-old gay fan named Oli who I
met in Metro Manila and who was attracted to the “manly” men in “Thai BL”
similarly positioned Japan and the Philippines as linked due to their “homo-
phobic” focus on “effeminacy” when representing same-sex desiring men in
their media. For Oli, “Japanese yaoi” could not act as an emancipatory form
of media due to the fact that it focused on “girly men being fucked by other
girly men,” ultimately reinscribing “straight relationships” through its repre-
sentational politics. Oli therefore chose not to consume “Japanese yaoi” even
though he had heterosexual female friends who were fans of it and pressured
him to read it. Thailand, on the other hand, was positioned within Oli’s fan
narrative as a site where “true love” between “manly men” was common, and
he believed “Thai BL” was therefore more popular among gay men in both the
Philippines and Thailand.29 Fans’ investment into Thailand as an inherent
“gay paradise” thus appeared to further authenticate the “reality” of “Thai BL”
as a representation of gay male experience and subsequently dislocate it from
their perceptions of Japan.
Judgments concerning the authenticity of “Thai BL” thus had much to do
with a reading of this media genre as fundamentally different to “Japanese
yaoi.” I would argue that “BL” and “yaoi” were framed in opposition on Every-
thing’s BL, with the administrators’ policing of language and terminology
serving to condition members of the community to view “Japanese yaoi” as
representing everything which “Thai BL” did not. Of course, these fans’ read-
ings of “Thai BL” as dislocated from Japan downplay the historical influence
of Japanese BL on the development of “series wai” that I have explored else-
where.30 What interests me, however, is that the dislocation of BL from Japan

This content downloaded from

128.36.7.129 on Tue, 03 Nov 2020 03:45:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 CREATIVE MISREADINGS OF “THAI BL” BY A FILIPINO FAN COMMUNITY 109

that I encountered on Everything’s BL clearly allowed the genre to perform

important emancipatory work for these fans. For example, one administrator
stated in a post from November 2016 commemorating the second anniversary
of the group, that it was:

thanks to BL, i learned that I was not wrong, i learned that I okay to be
gay and love boys . . . this is so important because at home i can see now
a happy endings for a gay like me. Thai BL set me free and I wanna share
freedom with all gay, all lesbian, all bisex here in our family! Everyone
here together make the loving feeling with our beautiful Thai Boys and
love with freedom now and forever [smiley face emoji] #nomorehate
#loveislove #thaiBL

“Thai BL” thus provided same-sex desiring Filipino male fans such as this
administrator with a tool that could be utilized to make sense of their abject
positioning within a heteronormative and homophobic society. This “aspira-
tional reading” of “Thai BL” was necessary because Japan appeared unable to
serve this specific emancipatory function, as Oli’s case demonstrates. Only
Thailand and their belief in its status as a “gay paradise” could provide these
fans with meaningful fantasies that challenged their lived experiences of ho-
mophobic discrimination in the Philippines. I suggest that the administrators
of Everything’s BL—who appeared somewhat more aware of Japanese BL and
its history than general members—were thus being strategic in their polic-
ing of language. The administrators’ apparent “misreading” of the history
of “Thai BL” and their separation of it from Japan ultimately seemed to be a
deliberate attempt to meet their stated goal of creating a supportive space for
gay Filipino men to explore their desires.

Creative Misreading: Dislocation and the

Queer Potential of Aspirational Consumption

The Filipino fans on Everything’s BL were engaged in a practice I call “creative

misreading.” Creative misreading represents an empowering and aspirational
method of decoding the discourses contained within transnationalized texts
that extends Hall’s insistence on the agency of consumers to “decode” cultural
products in ways that may contradict the messages originally “encoded” by
their producers.31 More so than within Hall’s theory of the political economy

This content downloaded from

128.36.7.129 on Tue, 03 Nov 2020 03:45:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
110 THOMAS BAUDINETTE

of reception, however, I wish to emphasize the productive and queer nature

of creative misreading, which I believe is specifically tied to transnationalized
cultural products within postmodernity. The Filipino fans examined in this
article deconstruct dominant understandings of transnational texts through
a strategic and willful “misreading” of BL’s history and it is the willfulness of
this “misreading” that unlocks the queer potential of “Thai BL.” In making this
argument, I draw upon Sara Ahmed’s notion of the queer potential of “willful
subjects” who refuse to be “smoothed” into heteronormative society and, in
so doing, reveal the disciplinary nature of heteronormativity as a system of
control.32 Creative misreading is avowedly antihierarchical, rejecting read-
ings of transnationalized texts that understand knowledge as flowing “down”
from a source of “national” culture. It is this antihierarchical nature of cre-
ative misreading that “queers” knowledge, destabilizing “common-sense” as-
sumptions. Simply put, “Thai BL” only becomes hopeful and “queer” through
its strategic juxtaposition with a “Japanese yaoi” that has been positioned as
inauthentic and heteronormative via fans’ creative misreadings.
Practices of creative misreading such as those enacted by the Filipino fan
community I discussed above are representative of the “rhizomatic” episte-
mological systems that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari suggest characterize
processes of meaning-making within postmodernity.33 Within their theory
of knowledge production, Deleuze and Guattari reject what they term “arbo-
real” accounts of knowledge which are rooted, unidirectional and centered.34
Instead, Deleuze and Guattari stress that knowledge “assembles” as a rhizome
through which ideas constantly flow, making connections multidirectionally
and antihierarchically.35 These rhizomatic assemblages are not static, but op-
erate as creative “abstract machines” that produce knowledge through the
making of multiple antihierarchical connections.36 Deleuze and Guattari ulti-
mately argue that since knowledge within postmodernity is no longer rooted
in arboreal systems, ideas and concepts (as well as affects and subjectivities)
can be “de-territorialized” through the creative machinery of the assemblage
and subsequently “re-territorialized” within a new assemblage.37 This process
of re-territorialization then produces new knowledge by making new connec-
tions free from the confines of historically deterministic conceptualizations
of epistemology.
The dislocation of BL from Japan to Thailand that I encountered on Every-
thing’s BL is a clear example of this process of de-territorialization and re-
territorialization and I noticed similar narratives when interviewing fans in
Manila. One thirty-year-old fan named Ariel I met in 2019, for example, spoke

This content downloaded from

128.36.7.129 on Tue, 03 Nov 2020 03:45:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 CREATIVE MISREADINGS OF “THAI BL” BY A FILIPINO FAN COMMUNITY 111

candidly about how his consumption of “Thai BL” had shifted his awareness
of his own positioning within Philippine society. He explained that “Thailand
makes these shows because Thailand accepts gay men and here in the Phil-
ippines this shows me something positive, it changes how I see my future.”
When I asked Ariel to elaborate, he further suggested that “Thailand has the
power to show us here that actually we can have love between men, it has
created [my emphasis] a space for Boys Love for Filipinos as well as gay Thai
men . . . nowhere else in Asia is doing this . . . there is no other example.” What
struck me here was how Ariel had taken his fantasies of Thailand and juxta-
posed this with his experiences of homophobia within Manila—something
we had been discussing at length earlier in our conversation—in order to
produce a hopeful narrative through his positioning of BL as a fundamentally
Thai phenomenon that has no comparison throughout Asia. It is important to
note that before making this statement, Ariel had also dismissed “Japanese
yaoi” as “women’s texts,” echoing the discourse appearing on Everything’s
BL. Within Ariel’s discussion excerpted here, the productive nature of re-
territorialization as a queer hermeneutic is evident.38 That is, Ariel creatively
misreads an affirming discourse into “Thai BL” that is emancipatory within
his particular social circumstances, born out of his preconceived fantasies
of Thailand and his own social experiences rather than anything discursively
“encoded” into the text.
As previously mentioned, many who have examined the “glocalization” of
BL draw upon Iwabuchi’s notion of “cultural odor” to make sense of the genre’s
transnationalization. Scholars who follow this theoretical framework—
including Iwabuchi himself—chastise fans who lack knowledge of Japanese
cultural norms as somehow naïve or mistaken,39 rejecting the creative po-
tential of the new knowledge produced as international consumers attempt
to make sense of BL. Such arguments reveal the inherent structuralist biases
of Iwabuchi’s theoretical paradigm, exposing how Iwabuchi and others’ un-
derstandings of the glocalization of cultural products privilege hierarchical
and binary accounts of cultural flow from Japan “down” to another receptive
culture that are static rather than productive. This hierarchical conceptu-
alization of global flow ultimately positions the meanings encoded in a text
by its originator (in this case, Japan) as “correct” and new knowledge pro-
duced by receivers as “mistaken.” But as revealed above, such theorizations
are founded in the “arboreal” systems of knowledge production specifically
criticized by Deleuze and Guattari as misrepresenting the complex, rhizom-
atic nature of postmodern epistemology. The creative misreadings that the

This content downloaded from

128.36.7.129 on Tue, 03 Nov 2020 03:45:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
112 THOMAS BAUDINETTE

users of Everything’s BL enact thus disrupt the logic underlying such think-
ing and therefore collapse the binaries produced through the centering of
Japan within knowledge production. In producing a category such as “Thai BL”
through their creative misreading of “series wai” and “Japanese yaoi,” the Fili-
pino fans on Everything’s BL created new logics that unlocked an emancipatory
potential within “Thai BL” texts which was meaningful within these fans’ spe-
cific emplacement in the Philippines. Simply put, these fans “queer” the hier-
archies which underlie common-sense approaches to the transnationalization
of BL, re-territorializing their consumption to their own specific contexts so
as to produce knowledge that challenges the heteronormative nature of their
everyday lives. In the example above, Ariel certainly drew upon his own expe-
riences of homophobia when producing his reading of “Thai BL.”
Deleuze and Guattari note that processes of territorialization such as I
encountered on Everything’s BL open up new “spaces of enunciation” through
the development of antihierarchical attachments between knowledge and
affect.40 Affect, as Brian Massumi has famously argued, represents an in-
tense, precognitive reaction to an external stimulus that is eventually trans-
lated cognitively into an emotional response such as pleasure that can then
be drawn upon within knowledge production.41 Deleuze and Guattari suggest
that it is within spaces of enunciation that affect produces new knowledge,
with affect unlocking new connections throughout an assemblage that enable
subjects to enunciate new ideas or subject positions.42 On Everything’s BL, the
fans’ creative misreadings of “Thai BL” produce affective fantasies of Thailand
that subsequently create emancipatory knowledge that intervenes in their ex-
periences of homophobia and heteronormativity in the Philippines. Of course,
these fantasies of Thailand as a “gay paradise” are themselves “creative mis-
readings” since Thailand is in fact a highly conservative and heteronormative
society.43 Nevertheless, the fact that it is the fans’ affective entanglements
rather than “cultural odor” and attraction to a specific nation which drives
their consumption is important, since Iwabuchi’s theories of the transnation-
alization of popular culture neglects this aspect of fandom.
Thus, while the fans are attracted to Thailand, it is not a “Thai cultural
odor” that motivates their fandom. It is rather the queer emancipatory knowl-
edge that their creative misreadings unlock that influences their intense en-
gagement with “Thai BL.” One example of this phenomenon can be seen in the
post made by an admin to celebrate the second anniversary of Everything’s BL
excerpted above. Likewise, a gay fan named Miguel that I had met at BLush
Con, a convention for “Japanese yaoi” in Manila, suggested that the “BL shows

This content downloaded from

128.36.7.129 on Tue, 03 Nov 2020 03:45:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 CREATIVE MISREADINGS OF “THAI BL” BY A FILIPINO FAN COMMUNITY 113

of Thailand appear more real than the comics the “het” girls are reading, and
this is why Thai BL is important to us.” Miguel explained that this importance
had little to do with the fact that these shows were “Thai cultural things” but
had instead everything to do with the fact that “they feel more real” since
they contained depictions of what he termed “real gay men.” Miguel’s reli-
ance on feeling here is an example of the affective nature of transcultural
consumption, based less in fact than in affect. In a society such as the Philip-
pines which lacks affirming depictions of same-sex desiring men in its media,
Miguel argued that “Thai BL” has overtaken the “weird girl’s culture of yaoi”
to become an important resource in the fight for representation and equality
because of the fact that it is “live-action” and therefore “feels real.”
Like Chin and Morimoto, my examination of the transnationalization
of BL via this Filipino fan community reveals the centrality of affective con-
sumption to the queer potentialities of BL texts. Chin and Morimoto particu-
larly note that BL’s continued global popularity is strongly based in a shared
culture of affect rather than a purported attraction to the cultural content
encoded within texts by their (Japanese) originators.44 When the Filipino fans
I examined on Everything’s BL creatively misread the relationship between
“Thai BL” and “Japanese yaoi,” they produced fantasies that almost seemed
to “weaponize” the cultural products they consumed as tools to combat their
societal disenfranchisement. In many ways, for the Filipino fan community
I examine in this article, “Thai BL” operates as an example of what I have
termed a “resource of hope” in another study of Chinese gay consumers of
Japanese queer popular culture.45 That is, the creative misreadings enacted
through the policing of language on Everything’s BL strategically and will-
fully deploy aspirational fantasies to concretely combat discrimination by
challenging the dominant epistemological systems that privilege the center,
with “Thai BL” emerging as a “tool” which queer consumers deploy in this
battle against discrimination. Creative misreading is thus a form of aspira-
tional consumption that draws upon fantasy to queer knowledge production
itself and thus “create” discourses of hope that intervene in, and thus disrupt,
heteronormative epistemologies. Creative misreading therefore ultimately
“re-orientates” knowledge toward what José Esteban Muñoz terms a “queer
utopian” ethos that is meaningful for same-sex desiring individuals living
within homophobic social conditions.46 Creative misreading is, I believe, a
sophisticated method of engaging with transnationalized texts and the ten-
dency within previous scholarship to position such practices as mistaken
must be reconsidered and problematized.

This content downloaded from

128.36.7.129 on Tue, 03 Nov 2020 03:45:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
114 THOMAS BAUDINETTE

Conclusion: Whither Creative Misreading?

Within this article, I have drawn upon a longitudinal digital ethnography

of Everything’s BL to reparatively read this Filipino fan community’s under-
standings of BL as a fundamentally Thai form of popular culture. Through
this digital ethnography, I came to understand that this community of fans
strategically rejected common-sense histories of the transnationalization of
Japanese BL and, in so doing, produced new knowledge that was meaningful
to their specific social experiences. Unlike previous scholarship, I chose to
accept the logics produced by these fans as valid and stress that future studies
of the transnationalization of Japanese popular culture must move beyond
a simplistic focus on “centering” analysis on Japan. I reiterate the need for
future theorists to account for the antihierarchical nature of queer theory and
call upon scholars to account for fantasy, aspiration, and affect in their studies
of transnational BL. Rather than “centering” Japan (or any other nation-state)
within our analysis, I call upon scholars to “dislocate” Japan within their theo-
retical frameworks. Doing so will open up new and necessary avenues for the
development of critical theory and will also remain true to the antinormative
promise of queer theoretical work.
Future scholarship will be necessary to tease apart how creative misread-
ing operates around the world to construct knowledge that queers dominant
epistemological systems and social conditions. One area where the theory
of creative misreading may be usefully applied is in the many different ter-
minologies which have developed within fan communities around the globe
to make sense of Japanese queer popular culture. For instance, there has
been a tendency within scholarship to criticize Anglophone fandom for its
use of the term shōnen’ai to refer to homoerotic works that do not contain
sexually explicit content. Theorizing such a practice as an example of cre-
ative misreading that strategically deviates from the norms of Japanese BL
could allow scholars to think through what sorts of aspirational and affective
work shonen’ai does within Anglophone contexts. Another potential example
would be the investigation of Japanese manga produced for and by gay men.
Outside of Japan, these comics are frequently termed bara but in Japan they
are often referred to as gei manga (gay manga). Furthermore, while gei manga
are understood in Japan to promote various different representations of gay
male identity, outside Japan “bara” is uniformly positioned as more authentic
than “yaoi” (that is, BL) due to its supposed focus on “masculine” rather than
“effeminate” depictions of gay men.47 To me, this practice evokes the way that

This content downloaded from

128.36.7.129 on Tue, 03 Nov 2020 03:45:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 CREATIVE MISREADINGS OF “THAI BL” BY A FILIPINO FAN COMMUNITY 115

Filipino fans on Everything’s BL position “Thai BL” as distinct from “Japanese

yaoi,” revealing that conceptualizing such understandings of bara as “cre-
ative misreading” may allow theorists to unlock how the positioning of bara
outside Japan creates queer potentials that are meaningful and emancipatory
within specific cultural contexts. Creative misreading thus represents a new
and innovative queer theoretical framework that extends our knowledge of
the global circulation of Japanese popular culture and its queer potential to
intervene in homophobic and heteronormative social systems.

Thomas Baudinette is Lecturer in Japanese Studies in the Department of In-

ternational Studies, Macquarie University. His current research explores the
global circulation of Japanese queer popular culture. His first book, Regimes
of Desire: Young Gay Men, Media, and Masculinity in Japan, is forthcoming with
the University of Michigan Press.

Acknowledgments
Funding for this research was provided by Macquarie University’s Faculty of
Arts Research Travel Scheme.

Notes
1. Mark McLelland and James Welker, “An Introduction to ‘Boys Love’ in Japan,” in
Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan, ed. Mark
McLelland, Kazumi Nagaike, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2015), 3.
2. Thomas Baudinette, “Lovesick: The Series: Adapting Japanese ‘Boys Love’ to Thai-
land and the Creation of a New Genre of Queer Media,” South East Asia Research
27, no. 2 (2019).
3. Anonymous, “Thai BL Dramas,” MyDramaList, 2018, https://mydramalist.com
/discussions/thai-dramas-lakorns-movies/31270-thai-bl-dramas (accessed
November 14, 2019).
4. Throughout, I place both “Thai BL” and “Japanese yaoi” in quotation marks to
signal the constructed nature of these terms within the community I analyze.
I occasionally use this strategy with other contested conceptual terms when
appropriate for my argument.
5. Madel Asuncion, “In Focus: Thai Series ‘SOTUS’ Stars Singto And Krist On Why
Gender Is Irrelevant In Love,” ABS-CBN Lifestyle, January 22, 2018, https://
lifestyle.abs-cbn.com/articles/6122/chalk/in-focus-thai-series-sotus-stars
-singto-and-krist-on-why-gender-is-irrelevant-in-love/ (accessed March 7,

This content downloaded from

128.36.7.129 on Tue, 03 Nov 2020 03:45:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
116 THOMAS BAUDINETTE

2019); Lendl Fabella, “Thai Stars Bring Kilig to Their Filipino Fans,” The Philip-
pine Star, March 7, 2019, https://www.philstar.com/entertainment/2019/03/07
/1899218/thai-stars-bring-kilig-their-filipino-fans (accessed April 7, 2019).
6. Kristine Michelle L. Santos, “Disrupting Centers of Transcultural Materialities:
The Transnationalization of Japan Cool through Philippine Fan Works,” Mecha-
demia: Second Arc 12, no. 1 (Fall 2019).
7. Baudinette, “Lovesick: The Series”; Dru Pagliassotti, “GloBLisation and Hybri-
disation: Publishers’ Strategies for Bringing Boys’ Love to the Unites States,”
Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, no. 20 (2009), http://
intersections.anu.edu.au/issue20/pagliassotti.htm; Liu Ting, “Conflicting
Discourses on Boys Love and Subcultural Tactics in Mainland China and Hong
Kong,” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, no. 20 (2009),
http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue20/liu.htm.
8. Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transna-
tionalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 27.
9. Koichi Iwabuchi, “Undoing Inter-National Fandom in the Age of Brand Nation-
alism,” Mechademia 5, no. 1 (2010): 92.
10. Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization.
11. Bertha Chin and Lori Morimoto, “Towards a Theory of Transcultural Fandom,”
Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 10, no. 1 (2013): 95.
12. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re
So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You,” in Touching, Feeling:
Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
13. Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers
in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, ed. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
(London: Hutchinson, 1980).
14. Noreen Giffney, “Introduction: The “Q” Word,” in The Ashgate Research Compan-
ion to Queer Theory, ed. Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke (Surrey: Ashgate,
2009).
15. Following advice from my institution’s Human Research Ethics Committee, I do
not provide a URL for the Facebook page and assign it a pseudonym to protect
the anonymity of its users.
16. Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, and T. L. Naylor, Ethnography and
Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2012).
17. Anna Cristina Pertierra, Media Anthropology for the Digital Age (Cambridge:
Polity, 2018), 15.
18. Santos, “Disrupting Centers.”
19. Tricia Abigail Santos Fermin, “Appropriating Yaoi and Boys Love in the Phil-
ippines: Conflict, Resistance and Imagination Through and Beyond Japan,”
Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies 13, no. 3 (2013), http://
japanesestudies.org.uk/ejcjs/vol13/iss3/fermin.html (accessed December 28,
2019).

This content downloaded from

128.36.7.129 on Tue, 03 Nov 2020 03:45:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 CREATIVE MISREADINGS OF “THAI BL” BY A FILIPINO FAN COMMUNITY 117

20. This and other informant names are pseudonyms used to protect my interlocu-
tors’ privacy.
21. Baudinette, “Lovesick: The Series,” 126.
22. Peter A. Jackson, “Queer Bangkok After the Millennium: Beyond Twentieth-
Century Paradigms,” in Queer Bangkok: 21st Century Markets, Media, and Rights,
ed. Peter A. Jackson (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2011), 2.
23. Santos, “Disrupting Centers.” Thai fans, on the other hand, utilize modified
versions of Japanese terminology and thus have higher Japanese BL literacy.
See Baudinette, “Lovesick: The Series.”
24. James Welker, “A Brief History of Shōnen’ai, Yaoi, and Boys Love,” trans. Kat-
suhiko Suganuma, in Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Commu-
nity in Japan, ed. Mark McLelland, Kazumi Nagaike, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and
James Welker (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015), 55.
25. Hitoshi Ishida, “Representational Appropriation and the Autonomy of Desire
in Yaoi/BL,” in Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in
Japan, ed. Mark McLelland, Kazumi Nagaike, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James
Welker (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015).
26. Dredge Byung’chu Kang-Nguyen, “Gei ‘fan’ no ‘fan’: Sōzō to sonzai no hazama
kara tachiagaru tai suru no bōizu rabu” (Fan of gay fan: Realizing boys love in
Thailand betwixt imagination and reality), trans. Satō Mana, in BL ga hiraku
tobira: Hen’yō suru Ajia no sekushuariti (BL opening doors: Sexuality and gender
transfigured in Asia), ed. James Welker (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2019).
27. J. Neil Garcia, Philippine Gay Culture: Binabae to Bakla, Silahis to MSM (Hong
Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 1996).
28. Fermin, “Appropriating Yaoi.”
29. This is not necessarily true in Thailand, where some gay men have criticized
“series wai” as unrealistic, making Oli’s belief another potential creative mis-
reading. See Kang-Nguyen, “Gei ‘fan’ no ‘fan,’” 201.
30. See Baudinette, “Lovesick: The Series.”
31. Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” 136.
32. Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
33. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Schizophrenia and Cap-
italism, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987), 6–7.
34. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 12.
35. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 8.
36. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 7.
37. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 504.
38. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 504.
39. Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 158–98.
40. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 505.
41. Brian Massumi, Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham:
Duke University Press), 15–37.

This content downloaded from

128.36.7.129 on Tue, 03 Nov 2020 03:45:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
118 THOMAS BAUDINETTE

42. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 505.

43. Jackson, “Queer Bangkok After the Millennium,” 2.
44. Chin and Morimoto, “Towards a Theory,” 99.
45. Thomas Baudinette, “Akogare no sekai o yomitoru: Ichiji taizai no chūgokujin gei ni
tai suru ‘kibō no yoridokoro’ toshite no BL” (Aspirational reading: BL as a ‘resource
of hope’ for temporary Chinese gay migrants in Japan), trans. Asako Patricia
Saito, in BL ga hiraku tobira: Hen’yō suru Ajia no sekushuariti (BL opening doors:
Sexuality and gender transfigured in Asia), ed. James Welker (Tokyo: Seidosha,
2019).
46. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New
York: New York University Press, 2009), 1.
47. Thomas Baudinette, “An Evaluation of the Physicality in the Bara Manga of Bádi
Magazine,” in Manga Vision: Cultural and Communicative Perspectives, ed. Sarah
Pasfield-Neofitou and Cathy Sell (Clayton, VIC: Monash University Press, 2016).

This content downloaded from

128.36.7.129 on Tue, 03 Nov 2020 03:45:38 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms