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Beyond a queer utopia: interrogating misogyny in

transnational boys love media

Divya Garg & Xiaofei Yang

To cite this article: Divya Garg & Xiaofei Yang (14 Feb 2024): Beyond a queer
utopia: interrogating misogyny in transnational boys love media, Continuum, DOI:
10.1080/10304312.2024.2314186

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2024.2314186

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CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2024.2314186

Beyond a queer utopia: interrogating misogyny in

transnational boys love media
Divya Garg and Xiaofei Yang
School of Media and Coommunication, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Boys love (BL) media, a transnational Asian genre centring on male Received 26 April 2023
couples, is gaining global attention and academic discussion. As Accepted 30 January 2024
a queer genre, BL has received much positive attention due to its KEYWORDS
challenging of heteronormativity in a particularly marginalized con­ Boys’ love; transnational;
text. However, scholarship on BL has not sufficiently addressed the Asian media; misogyny;
issue of misogyny that is intrinsic to BL media and industry. Pointing fandom; killjoy; affect
to this persisting gap in scholarship, we interrogate this misogyny
through the lens of representation in BL texts and industry engage­
ment with female fans that complicate the subversive politics asso­
ciated 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, commercia­
lizes 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.

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)

CONTACT Divya Garg divya.garg@rmit.edu.au School of Media and Coommunication, RMIT University, 124 La
Trobe Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3000, Australia
© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any med­
ium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article
has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
2 D. GARG AND X. YANG

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 per­
mitted – 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 engage­
ment 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 underpin­
nings 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 proble­
matics 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 sex­
ualities (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
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 3

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, patri­
archal 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 hetero­
normativity 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 indig­
nation 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 impos­
sible to ‘categorise the communities as discrete and their texts as totally indigenous to
4 D. GARG AND X. YANG

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 oppres­
sion 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 industrializa­
tion 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 scholar­
ship. 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,
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 5

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 prac­
tices 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’ inter­
nalized 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 contem­
porary 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 dimen­
sions 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 domi­
nant 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 scholar­
ship 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).
6 D. GARG AND X. YANG

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,
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 7

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 business­
men 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
8 D. GARG AND X. YANG

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,
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 9

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 commer­
cialization. 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 depatho­
logize 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,
10 D. GARG AND X. YANG

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 (necessa­
rily) 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 particu­
lar, 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
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 11

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.

Notes
1. There are also other problems and visible hierarchies in BL narratives such as their circum­
spect 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://mydram
alist.com/682589-bad-buddy; https://mydramalist.com/49747-the-shipper. See also https://
www.imdb.com/search/title/?companies=co0737196

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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