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Hyperreal homoerotic love in a monarchized military conjuncture: a situated view of the Thai Boys’ Love industry

Research output: Journal PublicationsJournal Article (refereed)peer-review

Abstract

The rise of Boys’ Love (BL) TV series in Thailand over the past decade has sparked critical attention from both academics and journalists alike. Rather than rehashing the trajectory of this development, we analyze Thai popular culture as a contested sexual and political space in which BL performs a paradoxical function within Thailand’s contemporary crisis dominated by a royalist military junta with a penchant for pinkwashing. Through adopting and reappropriating Korean and Japanese BL aesthetics, we argue that BL culture in Thailand recasts such East Asian idolization with its own characteristics, yielding the dual effect of simultaneously bolstering yet challenging Thai discourses on both homosexuality and monarchized military politics.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1039-1043
Number of pages5
JournalFeminist Media Studies
Volume21
Issue number6
Early online date6 Aug 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Keywords

  • Boys’ love
  • conjunctural analysis
  • cultural politics
  • Hallyu
  • queer Asia
  • Thailand

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