I had the immense privilege to be invited to present at an important academic symposium in late November at Meiji University in Tokyo, where some of the most significant scholars of BL had gathered to share their thoughts on recent trends in the genre’s globalisation.

Entitled “LGBTQ Issues and the Globalisation of BL,” the symposium emerged from a JSPS grant-in-aid of research project conducted by Professors Fujimoto Yukari, Ishida Hitoshi, James Welker, and Kazumi Nagaike. The first day specifically focussed on case studies from various fan events and a survey of various consumers and non-consumers of BL to rethink how we can approach the relationships between BL and LGBTQ media. The second day specifically focussed on the rising significance of Thai BL within studies of the genre (I presented here) and how this relates to growing appreciations of BL as queer media.

Within this post, I do not wish to summarise each of the presentations. Rather, I seek to highlight what I believe were the major arguments and theoretical concerns which emerged during the symposium concerning the academic study of BL. I also outline some of my thoughts concerning future directions for research into BL not only in Japan, but around the world. My own personal research interests and agendas will naturally colour this latter discussion!

1. Tensions between “reality” and “fantasy”

Those familiar with studies of the reception of BL – as well as broader debates concerning its representational politics and history – will be well aware of the so-called yaoi ronso or “yaoi dispute” of the 1990s when gay activists in Japan criticized BL for apparently misrepresenting gay male lives and for perpetuating unrealistic stereotypes of same-sex desiring men in Japan. These gay activists specifically called out female fans of the genre for “appropriating the images” of gay men to simplistically fulfil their fantasies. In response, not only did feminist thinkers highlight that these fantasies played a key role in allowing women to explore their sexual desires in a society which often discouraged women to become the subjects of their sexuality, BL creators themselves began developing stories which included more sensitive depictions of queer lives and politics.

At the symposium, speakers exploring the consumer practices of queer men and women in Japan, in Thailand, in the Philippines, in Mexico, and in France highlighted that while there still remains many issues with the representational politics of BL as a genre, the stark differences between gay male and heterosexual female consumers of BL have collapsed. Significantly, a large survey of gay fans of BL conducted by Ishida and Sato revealed that most found the genre resonated with them and their lived experiences. Likewise, both my own work and the work of others revealed how Thai BL resonated with queer men and women across Asia as texts which visibilized their desires within predominantly heteronormative societies.

But perhaps most importantly, many of the scholars (once again, myself included) increasingly questioned the utility of separating the concepts of “fantasy” and “reality” from each other. Indeed, those working on non-Japanese contexts (especially Western ones) highlighted that fantasy represents an active tool which BL fans of diverse backgrounds utilise to intervene in debates over queerness. The idea that BL should not be considered LGBTQ+ media (which is somehow more “real” than BL, whatever that means) has broken down in these contexts, whereas it is currently breaking down in Japan. There was a growing acceptance that to insist on a so-called “gay male reality” was not only totalising, but that doing so also failed to account for the diversity of experiences and, indeed, fantasies these gay men held vis-à-vis their own desires and their patterns of media consumption.

Simply put, at the end of the symposium, one of the greatest outcomes of the academic debates was calling on scholars within the Japanese context to think more broadly and reflexively about what “fantasy” and “reality” could mean and to begin exploring how restrictive understandings of what “reality” looks like could be utilized as a way of policing desire. Both myself and Maekawa Naoya, for instance, highlighted that the gay male activists active in the yaoi ronso of the 1990s often expressed highly misogynistic stances in their calls for “reality” and their criticism of female fans of BL. Significantly, Ishida and Sato likewise found that gay men who read BL developed more expansive and tolerant understandings of “fantasy” than those gay men who did not read BL and continued to express hostility towards it, despite demonstrating statistically significant ignorance about the genre’s norms and the diversification of BL’s contemporary narratives.

To summarise, there is a need to move beyond the limiting binary of “fantasy” and “reality” when discussing BL.

2. A need to focus more on consumer patterns than studies of representation

Related to the above point was a growing awareness that there is a need to actually investigate how and why people consume BL and how they use the genre as a tool to produce specific fantasies. This is in contrast to previous academic debates, including during the yaoi ronso, which focussed more on unpacking the representational politics of the genre.

While I no means wish to suggest that studies of representation are not important (indeed, my own presentation at the symposium focussed on evolving representations of queerness in Thai BL in the context of Thailand’s broader LGBTQ+ media environment), there is a limit to which such approaches can answer some of the fundamental questions of interest to contemporary BL scholarship.

This is where the transnational flow of BL into new, global contexts is becoming key. The major differences in how BL fans and non-fans alike make sense of the genre in Japan, in Thailand, and in the West demonstrate the tired and true insight from cultural studies that an individual brings their own personal experiences and cultural expectations to the table when decoding a media text remains important within BL scholarship. Previous studies of BL’s representational politics have tended to imply a normative BL reader with certain monolithic expectations, but the presenters at the symposium strongly pushed back against such analysis.

Relatedly, work in the Thai context (such as Fujimoto, Ishida, and Nagaike’s interviews with BL series creators or Prasannam’s analysis of BL literature and BL idols’ star personas) revealed that the building of specific representational strategies within BL texts represented active choices/actions on behalf of creators. This was often guided by political concerns, such as including explicit LGBTQ+ politics or developing more inclusive representations of masculinity. As such, there is also a need to more fully unpack how and why the creators of BL develop specific representational politics in their works across the many national/cultural contexts within which the genre circulates.

To summarise, more work on BL’s reception and its relationship to queer meaning-making is needed within BL studies

3. Moving beyond monolithic studies of BL fandom 

At the end of the symposium, each presenter was asked to reflect on what they had learnt concerning the theme of LGBTQ+ media and BL. When asked this question, my response was that while I particularly enjoyed the various presentations and analyses which were presented, there was a tendency for each of the presenters (admittedly, including myself here) to approach fandom and or specific market contexts in monolithic ways, generalising differences without recognising or celebrating the diversity of consumer/producer experiences within each of the contexts we were discussing.

Concretely put, I was interested in moving the discussion beyond a simplistic framing of “Japanese BL fans think this, Thai BL fans think that” or “gay men think this, straight women think that” and to consider how the fantasy work tied to BL was grounded less in what the nationality, gender, or sexuality of a specific fan may be than their own life experiences, personal expectations, and their individual hopes and desires.

I was especially concerned by what I thought was an implicit emerging viewpoint, particularly among the Japanese presenters/participants, that “Western” consumers of BL possessed a somewhat more enlightened or tolerant appreciation of the genre’s queer potentials than Japanese fans. Likewise – and related to the broader concerns over the problematic binarisation of fantasy vs reality discussed above – I called for more work that sought to recognize and celebrate how Japanese consumers from a variety of backgrounds actively construct individual fantasies and aspirations through their personal engagement with the genre (whether it be from Japan or elsewhere).

Relatedly, I made the somewhat provocative suggestion that there was a need to move beyond the framing of “fujoshi” (rotten girls: female fans of BL, largely manga and anime) as the default category for analysis of BL in Japan. This was not based in any kind of dissatisfaction with the term itself, or a belief that those who label themselves fujoshi are somehow problematic. Rather, I suggested that we should instead begin just speaking about “BL fans.” I don’t mean BL fans to emerge as an umbrella category that would produce a new totalising monolith, but instead to position the fujoshi as just one of many kinds of fans possessing their own distinct backgrounds and expectations.

The framing of the symposium, with its explicit focus on globalisation and questions related to LGBTQ+ issues, naturally encouraged presenters to frame their discussions in the monolithic categories of nationality, gender, and sexuality. While I believe comparisons across national/cultural contexts can be useful, we should (as queer scholars) be wary of constructing normativities through our analysis. One potential avenue to ensure the diversity of fan experience is respected within analysis is to embrace the concept of “transcultural fandom” popularised by Bertha Chin and Lori Morimoto – this is something that I am increasingly interested in doing in my own work on BL.

To summarise, more work exploring the diversity of BL fan experience is needed in future scholarship.

I am sure there are many other important debates and ideas which emerged among participants of this symposium and I would welcome attendees who participated to draw upon my own summary as a launching pad for their own thoughts concerning the future of BL studies :)