Back in 2019, I was incredibly fortunate to have travelled to the Philippines thanks to generous funding from my department in order to take up a position as visiting research fellow at Atendeo de Manila University. While resident in Manila, I conducted a large interview-based project exploring how the consumption of Japanese queer popular culture – namely, Boys Love manga, geikomi (also known by some as bara), and Japanese gay porn videos – informed LGBTQ+ Filipinos/as about their gender and sexuality.

I am pleased to announce that some of the first publications arising from this project are now available!

The first, entitled “Investigating the activist potentials of ‘gay manga’ in Japan and the Philippines,” explores how both Japanese and Philippine LGBTQ+ activists and fans alike draw upon BL manga and geikomi as resources to fight for the rights of sexual minorities within conservative, heteronormative societies. This chapter is published within the edited collection Activism and Authoritarian Governance in Asia, edited by my colleagues at Macquarie University Amr Barrow and Sara Fuller. (This book is expensive, but you can find a copy of my chapter here).

The second, entitled “Japanese queer popular culture and the production of sexual knowledge in the Philippines,” more broadly examines how LGBTQ+ subjects in the Philippines draw upon Japanese popular culture to make sense of their sexual and gendered identities, make sense of their positioning within the broader Asia-Pacific, and push back against Western (particularly North American) frameworks for making sense of queer experience. This chapter is published within the edited collection Queer Southeast Asia, edited by Shawna Tang and Hendri Yulius Wijaya. This book is a bit less cost prohibitive, so I would encourage people to purchase a copy (there are other chapters exploring Thailand, the Philippines, etc.)