What’s to Love about Boys Love? An (Un)conventional Approach to the Popular Mass Media Phenomenon

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 11. Fandom & Media Consumption

Abstract

Boys Love (BL) is a transnational phenomenon that has recently gained unprecedented international scholarly attention. Often characterized as “male-male romance made by and for women,” BL originated as a subgenre within the tradition of 1970s Japanese shoujo manga (girls’ comics) culture before developing into a standalone genre in the 1990s. The genre entered Thailand through translated Japanese comics in the 1990s and original Thai BL novels soon proliferated thereafter, but Thailand’s first live-action television adaptation of a BL novel in 2014 marked a new phase of public visibility. Since 2020, these television series have also gained international audiences all over the world, and their commercial success has prompted other Asian countries to produce their own BL television series. While scholarship has addressed the themes of gender and sexuality, glocalization, fandoms, political activism, and queer media, there has been curiously little discussion on what actually makes BL BL. It seems taken for granted that BL is identifiable as such, but given its transnational and multimedia trajectory, how is it that we can still identify it across different locales? Furthermore, as some scholars have argued that the genre is changing, at what point is it no longer BL? I address these questions through a novel approach to studying BL developed from sociological theories of culture. Drawing from Howard Becker’s theory of art worlds, this chapter centers the use of conventions in critical analyses of the genre. I use content analysis to code Thai BL series produced from 2014-2024, sampled from mainstream and independent production companies. By grounding BL in an understanding of its structuring conventions and contexts of production, I aim to offer a more precise definition that can systematically track changes over time and potentially identify cases of genre-blending or even genre-transgression, independent of the gender of the producers and consumers.

Author

• Nida Sanglimsuwan, University of California-Los Angeles