New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024. US$115.00, cloth; US$83.00 ebook. ISBN 9781350330641.
Queer Asian studies, broadly defined, developed since the early 2000s as the interdisciplinary exploration of how categories, expressions, and representations of gender and sexual diversity cross, blur, and transcend national borders. Thomas Baudinette’s Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture makes valuable contributions to this and related fields by producing new theories about the transformative possibilities of the Thai media phenomenon known globally as “Boys Love,” hereon abbreviated to “BL.”
Emerging in the late-2010s and gaining wide mainstream popularity among primarily young, middle-class audiences in Thailand and beyond, Thai BL refers to a distinct form of television series centring stories about “the blossoming love between handsome young men” (1). BL is known as “Series Y” (wai) in Thailand, the “Y” being a reference to Japanese Yaoi, the genre of originally women-authored romantic fiction from which contemporary Thai BL is derived.
Based on extensive traditional and digital ethnographic research, Boys Love Media in Thailand identifies and theorizes BL’s “significant impacts on depictions of same-sex desire in Thai popular culture and its simultaneous transformation of this culture through the development of new forms of celebrity and fandom” (3). At the centre of Baudinette’s theorization is the provocative thesis that “BL media possess important queer potentials” for challenging assumptions concerning the primacy of heterosexuality and “the concomitant privileging of heterosexual romance” within Thai and inter-Asian mediascapes (4).
Following an introductory overview of the contemporary Thai media context and the global rise of Japanese BL, Boys Love Media in Thailand contains six analytical chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 offer close analyses of several BL series that the author identifies as significant for the recent history and development of Thai BL and its adaptation from Japanese media forms. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the role of celebrity and fan cultures in propelling Thai BL into mainstream popular culture. Baudinette introduces concepts such as the “BL Machine” and the “queer idol celebrity” to describe systems of production and consumption that create new kinds of virtual and in-person intimacy between fans, fictional BL characters, and the actors themselves. Chapter 5 analyzes the transnational reverberations of the “Thai BL boom” among audiences in China and the Philippines, and chapter 6 establishes Thai BL as an important site for expanding scholarly understandings of inter-Asian queer popular culture.
Collectively, these chapters develop three key interventions. First, Baudinette positions the popularization of Thai BL in the 2010s as a moment of transition in Thai popular media away from a heteronormative status quo and towards stories centring same-sex desire. Second, this popularization is explained as the effect of a “transnationalizing” process in which Southeast Asia no longer looks to the West as a leading influence regarding queer culture but instead finds meaningful cultural exchanges in East Asia, particularly Japan and Korea. Third, the increasing commercial power of Thai BL suggests that the centre of Asian queer cultural production has shifted over the last decade from Japan to Thailand. These interventions coalesce around the larger argument that BL media “possess important queer potentials” (4) in how the genre’s unprecedented mainstreaming of same-sex desire between men and the “particular affective fantasies” that such depictions allow for among fans “intervene into situations of homophobia which exist across the Asia Pacific region” (7).
Baudinette’s analytical approach to Thai BL is “broadly reparative, focused less on the problematics arising from Thai BL than on its revolutionary potentials to destabilize heteronormativity” across East and Southeast Asia (17). While chapters 2 and 3 discuss such issues as “queerbaiting” and the tropes of sexual and domestic violence within BL media, the book is motivated by a strong commitment to “reparative analytical practices” that can reveal “how queerness as a radical process of deconstructing normative understandings of the world provides support to queer subjects” (105).
While focusing primarily on the queer potentials of Thai BL leaves limited space for analyzing how hierarchical regimes of class, beauty, and capital mediate the production and consumption of the genre, Baudinette’s reparative reading raises productive lines of inquiry for future queer Asian studies work. For example, Can queer desire be imagined and lived as both mainstream and revolutionary? What kinds of queerness are mainstream media industries capable of incorporating and what queer forms do these economies of production and consumption ignore? How might scholars of queer Asia develop further methodological tools for identifying and contextualizing queer potentials within mainstream popular cultures?
Further, while the book emphasizes the influential roles that female audiences play in shaping the genre and its fan and celebrity cultures, the reparative reading of BL’s queer potential does not include a corresponding vision for heterosexual Thai and Asian women. If Thai BL’s queer potentials challenge the social primacy of heterosexuality, can BL also hold feminist potentials as erotic formulations that critique Thailand’s heteropatriarchal status quo? The fact that these questions arise from Baudinette’s work is a testament to how the book forges critical new pathways for the study of Thai BL and transnational queer Asian media studies.
Boys Love Media in Thailand makes compelling claims about the transnational queer potentials of Thai BL and its attendant fan cultures. Attuned to the entangled inter-Asian cultural and commercial history of this distinct media form, Baudinette combines fine-grained analysis and provocative argumentation with a deep sense of care for the subject. The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of queer Asia and BL fans alike.
Emi Donald
Cornell University, Ithaca