On 21st December, I presented – via a recorded lecture – a paper entitled “Reversing Soft Power Flows: The Case of “Boys Love” Dramas in and between Thailand and Japan” at the 8th JSA-ASEAN Conference in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The lecture builds upon preliminary arguments from the final chapter of my book Boys Love Media in Thailand.

I have uploaded the lecture here to anyone who is interested in listening to my arguments concerning the rise of Thai BL fandom in Japan and the “queer” potentials of the Thai Wind (the global spread of Thai popular culture).

Here is the abstract:

Recent years have seen a surge in the transnational popularity of Thai popular culture, grounded in a fandom for “Boys Love” (BL) series featuring men falling in love. One market where Thai BL has received a remarkably positive reception is Japan, the originator of the BL genre. While the relationships between Thai BL and Japanese popular culture’s globalization have received previous scholarly attention, the growing fandom among Japanese consumers for Thai BL series remains under-explored. Indeed, there is a need to understand the emergence of Japan’s “Thai BL boom” since the development of a transnational fandom for Thailand’s popular culture represents an important shift in Asia’s broader media ecologies. This presentation thus aims to situate the analysis of Japanese fandom for Thai BL within the emerging scholarly investigation of the transnational spread of Thai media across Asia known as the “Thai Wind.”

Drawing upon historical and contemporary case studies of BL fandom, I first investigate how Japanese soft power impacted the development of Thai BL media through a case study of the seminal role played by manga comic fandom in Thailand on the historical development of BL series. Reflecting on ethnographic interviews and participant observations of Japanese fans of Thai BL, I then consider how the growing fandom for Thai BL in Japan reverses these soft power flows. In contrast to previous theories of the Thai Wind that center the embeddedness of Thailand’s media within a culture of “inter-Asian referencing,” my discussion of Thai soft power contends that fans’ desires for queer romance are central to the development of the Thai Wind. Ultimately, I develop a queer theory of soft power across East and Southeast Asia, expanding our understandings of Japan-Thailand relations.

And here is the link to the recorded lecture on YouTube!