I never wrote one of these for 2019 as I was busy revising my first book (Regimes of Desire: Young Gay Men, Media and Masculinity in Japan, out soon with University of Michigan Press) and fighting to have my contract renewed. But now that both of these tasks have been completed, it’s time to reflect on what I hope to achieve in 2020!

My job title at Macquarie has changed as of 2020, and I am now Lecturer in International Studies rather than Japanese Studies. While my teaching will mostly remain Japan-focused,  my research will broaden to explore cross-cultural flows in the Asia-Pacific. This means my research will now formally turn away from Japan to focus on South Korea, Southeast Asia and Australia. As such, my research goals for 2020 are:

-Work towards the completion of my 2nd book manuscript, tentatively entitled Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans and Asian Queer Popular Culture (including fieldwork in the Philippines in January, Thailand in April and possibly July, and Japan in July)

-Write up a number of collaborative pieces on K-pop fandom with colleagues in media studies, ethnomusicology and cultural anthropology and continue my public-facing work in this space through media engagement

-Secure a grant from the Academy of Korean Studies to begin a research project in 2021 exploring Australian fan’s consumption of K-pop and its impacts on their understandings of gender and sexuality, with a specific focus on queer consumers

-Write a DECRA application to conduct a project exploring the consumption of Asian queer popular culture in the Philippines to develop new theories of queer knowledge production within the Asia-Pacific region

-Collaborate with colleagues at Macquarie University on an edited collection emerging out of our conference on Modes of Activism across the Asia-Pacific, writing about the activist potentials of the work of Tagame Gengoroh in Japan and the Philippines

-Finalise the special issue of Porn Studies on East Asian pornographies along with my collaborators on this project

It’s an ambitious list of things to do, so wish me luck mi gente~!