Sponsors: The Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, and NYSEAN

Description:

Join Dr Thomas Baudinette as he shines the spotlight on the transnational pop culture phenomenon of “Boys Love” (BL) soap operas, and how it has transformed contemporary Thai consumer culture.
This talk draws upon six years of traditional and digital ethnographic research into Thai Boys Love media to trace both BL’s significant impacts on depictions of same-sex desire in Thai media culture and its simultaneous transformation of this culture through the development of new forms of celebrity and fandom.
One of the chief aims of Dr Thomas Baudinette's book 'Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture' (Bloomsbury, forthcoming) is to identify and theorize the changing representational politics of gender and sexuality across Thailand’s popular culture landscape that have occurred as a result of the mainstreaming of Boys Love media. Dr Baudinette built this theorization through a filmic analysis of various seminal Thai BL series – as well as related fan events and practices – that is strongly influenced by the qualitative and explorative methodologies of cultural studies and ethnographic enquiry.
Through his analyses, Dr Baudinette demonstrates that Boys Love media possess important queer potentials which problematise heteronormative assumptions within Thai society concerning the naturalness of heterosexuality and the concomitant privileging of heterosexual romance as representative of both personal and national development.

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