In-Person Panel PS1.5

An Emerging Queer TV in a Transnational Asia

Queering BL Televisuality across Asia: Queer Polylocality across Thailand, South Korea, and Hong Kong 

Alvin K. Wong 

This talk makes a case for the polylocality of queer desire as it manifests in some of the most popular cases of BL television series and reality TV shows across the transregional contexts of Thailand, South Korea, and Hong Kong. In Yingjin Zhang’s original framework of polylocality, the concept refers to “the production of scale and translocality” in cinematic representations of space and scale in globalization (2010: 9). Inspired by this conceptualization, my coinage of ‘queer polylocality’ describes how queer televisual representation, consumption, and reception in globalizing Asia have enabled individual queer TV series and show to cite, recite, and transform queer cultural sources from within its own national border while drawing inspirations from Asian regional and transnational queer influences. Specifically, I will briefly examine three cases of BL TV series and reality dating show, namely the highly erotic Thai BL series KinnPorsche: The Series (2022), the short Korean queer vampire series Kissable Lips (2022), and the Hong Kong gay dating show Boyscation (2022). By exploring the transnational cross-pollination of queerness in BL cultural productions from globalizing Asia, we can appreciate the polylocal queer televisuality that has made its marks globally.

Making A Home (from) Afar Through Gender and Sexuality: The Turn to China and Chinese Diaspora in the Thai Boys’ Love Drama  

Charlie Yi Zhang 

This essay uses two BL dramas, I Told Sunset About You and To Sir, With Love, as examples to explore the recent turn to staging China and the Chinese diaspora in Thai TV culture. My analysis reveals a new trend in Thai BL dramas, where there is a strategic shift towards Sino-Thai communities to increase market shares among Chinese fans. Examining this reveals a dual role of this new trend: first, the linkages developed through the BL-cultivated queerness serve to recreate a sense of ‘China’ as a distant homeland, invoking nostalgic attachment among Chinese diasporic groups that allows Chinese capital to further the party-state’s politico-economic agenda in the region; second, they establish an affective framework for the formation of an imaginary ‘home beckoning from afar’, creating a socio-cultural and linguistic entity that resonates with younger generations of Chinese viewers immersed in the nationalist fervor promoted by the party-state. also provides a platform. By shedding light on the unfolding neocolonial entanglements that transcend established Euro-American parameters and demonstrating how they are informed and facilitated through TV productions, this article expands the fundamental axioms of both television studies and postcolonial studies by attending to the distinct circumstances of Sinophone Southeast Asia.

When Soap Opera Meets Boys’ Love in Thai Television 

Shi-Yan Chao  

Amid the transnational popularity of the male homoerotic BL genre, Thailand has established itself as the powerhouse of BL media across Asia. With GMMTV (including channels One 31 and GMM 25) and LINE TV arguably being the most recognizable feeders in Thai BL series (siri Y), this paper will make a case of Channel 3, the long-standing (est. 1970) and still the second most popular television station (following Channel 7) in Thailand. Known for its high-quality soap opera programming (which targets urban women), Channel 3 has started to engage in BL materials only as a latecomer in around 2020. To address the whys and hows of this, the paper consists of two parts. It will first outline the contours of Thailand’s changing mediascape to contextualize the proliferation of Thai BL series since 2014 and the varied engagement in BL materials among different channels. Secondly, it zooms in on Channel 3, addressing how a limited number of its productions have adapted BL into its primary soap formula, with Shadow of Love (2020), Lovely Writer (2021, with WeTV) and The Miracle of Teddy Bear (2022) as my prime examples.

Born pink? Born queer!: The convergence of global TV formats and K-pop girl group idol cultures in contemporary China 

Jamie J. Zhao 

Local adaptations of ‘global TV formats’ often serve as gendered and gendering venues that can reconfigure heteropatriarchal elements transnationally. This study steps further to consider how China’s appropriation of inter-Asian flows of TV format and music group idol culture, synthesizing with traditional Chinese understandings of gender nonnormativity and homosociality, has enabled a queer-essenced televisual spectacle. I explore one reality TV format that rose in popularity in the late 2010s and was originally from South Korea—music group manufacturing shows. I present a critical analysis of some key sequences from the girl group-manufacturing show Youth with You 2 and the boyband-manufacturing show Youth with You 3, both of which feature the mentor, Lisa, the popular ethnic-Thai female K-pop star from Blackpink. I contextualize the shows in the most recent misogynistic, nationalistic sentiments of the post-COVID-19 Chinese entertainment industry and public space. My examination unravels how global formats and group idol cultures converge to crop and legitimize certain forms of queer visibility and subjectivity in largely heteronormative-structured Asian societies. This convergence enlarges the queer ambience of the TV programs and allow emerging queer images to disrupt official governing and policing of social minorities, though often in extremely ambivalent, fetishistic ways.