James Welker, Queer transfigurations: Boys love media in Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2022, paperback, $28.00 (312p) ISBN 978-0-8248-9284-5; hardcover, $68.00, ISBN 978-0-8248-8899-2.
[1] Queer Transfigurations brings together a wide range of scholarship that examines the localized development and social implications of boys' love (BL) media across Asia. BL—a genre of shōjo manga that originated in Japan in the late 1980s—has gained cultural significance as a homoerotic popular culture primarily created by and for cisgender young women across Asia. By juxtaposing diverse essays with various disciplinary approaches, James Welker identifies a transnational cultural movement that is not constrained by unidirectional postcolonial frameworks. As Welker argues, BL media exemplifies how culture moves across national borders in multidirectional ways, sometimes influencing its original sources. Such is the case of the recent popularity of Thai BL dramas among Japanese BL fans, despite the Japanese manga origins of these shows. Welker also identifies BL media as intimately connected with social change and movements happening in Asia around issues of gender and sexuality, as well as democracy and state censorship. BL, as Welker and this anthology suggest, is intrinsically political, as it creates space for and encourages imaginaries beyond existing heteronormative orders. This book brings forth two main takeaways for fan studies scholars interested in the transnational flow of popular culture in Asia. First is the extensiveness of BL and BL media in both its translocal developments and the discursive spaces it has created for a transnational counterpublic. Second, this book identifies the emerging landscape of a queer popular culture that intimately connects to BL media developed in Asia in recent decades. Borrowing the broad definition of queerness used by Welker and others (Lavin et al. 2017), the studies in this book suggest that queer gender and sexuality imaginaries that distinguish themselves from heteronormative orders are making their way into mainstream entertainment, popular media, and sociopolitical dynamics with localized negotiations and compromise. With its extensive reach into the regional developments of a connected transnational phenomenon in Asia, this anthology points out a new direction for fan studies on BL. Overcoming the difficulties of connecting a wide range of topics, this book provides an extensive overview of some of the most recent phenomena and scholarly engagement with BL media and popular culture in broader Asian regions.
[2] Compared to other anthologies focusing on BL, such as Boys Love Manga and Beyond, also coedited by Welker (McLelland et al. 2015), Queer Transfigurations moves beyond Japan as the epicenter of this homoerotic popular culture. While many studies on BL media focus on single or related regional cases, such as Boys Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols (2017) on Sinophone BL media, Queer Transfigurations turns to BL's transnational developments in broader Asian areas. This compilation of essays identifies BL media from different parts of Asia as interconnected and overcomes the impulse to compare the West versus the East and slash versus BL. Rather, the studies in this book dive deep into BL's implications as a queer popular culture with multiple hotspots, revealing the robust localization of transnational trends across Asia. This book is organized based on the cases' geographical connections, covering a broad range of topics on BL media from its glocalization in Asia, its sociopolitical implications in local societies, and the discursive spaces generated by BL that produce queer reimaginaries of gender and sexuality norms. Below is a summary of the essays in this anthology based on topic relevance.
[3] Several chapters examine glocalized developments of BL across Asia. Yanrui Xu and Ling Yang identify danmei as a local homoerotic genre informed by BL (Japan) and slash (Anglophone) in China in "Between BL and Slash: Danmei Fiction, Transcultural Mediation, and Changing Gender Norms in Contemporary China." Poowin Bunyavejchewin examines the "Thailandization" of BL manga and its popularity back in Japan in her essay "The Queer if Limited Effects of Boys Love Manga Fandom in Thailand." Kristine Michelle Santos identifies the emergence of unique transnational BL literacies through dōjinshi (self-produced fanzines) that disrupt assumptions of BL's homogeneity in "Glocalization of Boys Love Dōjinshi in the Philippines, Malaysia, and Australia." Additionally, Asako P. Saito discusses the trans–East Asian BL fandoms of the Japanese video game Dynasty Warriors based on literary successions of the classical fourteenth-century Chinese text Romance of the Three Kingdoms in "From Legends to Games to Homoerotic Fiction: Dynasty Warriors BL Texts from China." These chapters show that BL media exists as a fluid popular culture with transnational origins and manifestations, which is reinterpreted, appropriated, and spread back and forth by cultural agents across national boundaries.
[4] Another group of works here engages with the broader impact and entanglements of BL fandom on sociopolitical movements in multiple sites in Asia. In "Rethinking the Meaning of Boys Love in an Era of Feminism: Online Discourse on 'Leaving BL' in Late 2010s Korea," Hyojin Kim discusses the commercialization of BL in South Korea and radical popular feminist activists' controversial rejection of BL in South Korea. Peiti Wang examines how BL helps young people negotiate same-sex marriage legalization in Taiwan in "Repression or Revolution?: On the Taiwanese BL Fan Community's Reaction to the Same-Sex Marriage Legalization Movement." In "'Send Them to Mars!' Boys Love Erotica and Civil Rights in Hong Kong," the BL fandom is turned into a political tool for younger generations to engage and make sense of democratic activism and political leadership in Hong Kong, according to Katrien Jacobs and Han Hau Lai. BL media, in this case, has become an accessible lens for people to engage with social-political issues on local stages.
[5] The next group of studies in this book engages with the discursive spaces BL media has created for queering imaginaries, whether going beyond or directly contesting heteronormativity. The BL fandom allows its primary participants, cisgender straight women, to reconsider gender and sexuality norms despite conservative social environments, according to Lakshmi Menon in "Desi Desu: Sex, Sexuality, and BL Consumption in Urban India." Tricia Abigail Santos Fermin discusses how BL provides new models of intimacy for Filipino fans in "BL Coupling in a Different Light: Filipino Fans Envisioning an Alternative Model of Intimacy." Kazumi Nagaike argues that BL also allows cisgender, heterosexual men who consume BL to experiment with a process of self-feminization to subvert hegemonic masculinity in "On the Psychology, Physicality, and Communication Strategies of Male Fans of BL in East Asia: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Men's Desires to 'Become' Fudanshi." Similarly, Xi Lin suggests that the BL fandoms provide outlets for queer voices and expression in China for LGBTQ communities in "Breaking the Structural Silence: The Sociological Function of Danmei Novels in Contemporary China." Thomas Baudinette argues that BL provides the discursive tools for Chinese gay men to negotiate Chinese heteronormativity and fight discrimination in Japan in "BL as a 'Resource of Hope' Among Chinese Gay Men in Japan." Wei Wei's chapter titled "Straight Men, Gay Buddies: The Chinese BL Boom and Its Impact on Male Homosociality" argues that BL makes space for reconstructing heteromasculinity by popularizing bromance as a meme in China. Finally, Kang-Nguyễn Byung'chu Dredge suggests in "Faen of Gay Faen: Realizing Boys Love in Thailand Betwixt Imagination and Existence" that BL fandom moves beyond the realm of fantasy and has begun to encompass gay couples in real life in Thailand, functioning as a discursive space for queer expressions. BL, in these ways, has expanded the discursive spaces for queering constructions of gender and sexuality norms on the local and transnational stage.
[6] The last group of works discusses the implications of state censorship and national identity on the BL fandom. With the presence of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric in Indonesia, Kania Arini Sukotjo provides a detailed account of how BL fans creatively hide away from public scrutiny in the safe spaces provided by comic-cons in her essay "Hidden in Plain Sight: Boys Love Content at Indonesia's 'Comic Frontier.'" Aerin Lai examines, in her essay "Docile BL Bodies: Boys Love Under State and Societal Censorship in Singapore," the way BL writers negotiate state censorship by both testing the boundaries of censorship and internalizing social-political norms through self-censorship in Singapore. Gita Pramudita Prameswari discusses how BL fans negotiate with their national consciousness, religious belief, and LGBTQ politics in "Dissonant Passions: Indonesian Boys Love Fans' Identity Negotiation and Perspectives on LGBT Issues." These essays touch on the flexibility of BL and BL fans in negotiating with heteronormative and conservative states.
[7] Despite its rich content, this book could have engaged with the connected themes between these studies more in depth. Organizing chapters based on regional interests, though it provides an overview on the specificities of local configurations, makes it hard for readers to identify the underlying social-cultural conditions that have shaped changes in BL media across Asia, such as the context of influential internet-mediated feminist movements in East Asia, younger generations' use of popular culture in political activism, growing state censorship and content moderation on social media, and how national identities are informed and complicated by nonheteronormative imaginaries. While this list does not exhaust the inquiries BL media studies could go into, they are already somewhat reflected in the studies of this book.
[8] In sum, Queer Configurations provides an extensive collection of recent interdisciplinary engagement with the transnational developments of BL fandom and BL media in Asia. In this anthology, scholars approach BL as a translocal cultural phenomenon, examining the discursive spaces it creates for queering narratives, and investigate how BL complicates local gender and sexuality norms and politics, as well as the way it functions at the forefront of negotiating national identity and democracy through queer lenses. Bringing these works into conversation, this book presents a helpful overview of a thriving transnational queer popular culture in the form of homoerotic fantasies in Asia.