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Over the past several years, the Thai popular culture landscape has radically transformed due to the emergence of Boys Love (BL) soap operas which celebrate the love between handsome young men. Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture is the first book length study of this increasingly significant transnational pop culture phenomenon. Drawing upon six years of ethnographic research, the book reveals BL's impacts on depictions of same-sex desire in Thai media culture and the resultant mainstreaming of queer romance through new forms of celebrity and participatory fandom. The author explores how the rise of BL has transformed contemporary ...
Explores the limitations of sexual expression in Tokyo's "safe" nightlife district and in Japanese media
This interdisciplinary book offers a new analysis of the concepts, spaces, and practices of activism that emerge under diverse authoritarian modes of governance in Asia. Demonstrating the limitations of existing conceptual approaches in accounting for activism in Asia, the book also offers new understandings of authoritarian governance practices and how these shape state-civil society relations. In conjunction with its tripartite theoretical framework, the book presents regional knowledge from an array of countries in Asia, with empirically rich contributions from both scholars and activists. Through in-depth case studies, the book offers new scholarly insights that highlight the ways in which activism emerges and is contested across Asia. As such, it will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian politics, law, and sociology.
The home has been on the forefront of rapid economic, political, social, and technological transformations for many individuals and families across the world. As a country reliant on the exportation of human labor to sustain its national economy, the Philippines exemplifies a valuable case study of the impacts of a globalized and networked society on the everyday dynamics of a transnational family arrangement. Despite ranking among the heaviest Internet users in the world, Filipino citizens are often left with no choice but to navigate digital and transnational environments orchestrated by the uneven distribution of both national and international resources and opportunities. (Im)mobile Home...
What does it mean to be queer in a Confucian society in which kinship roles, ties, and ideologies are of such great importance? This book makes sense of queer cultures in China—a country with one of the largest queer populations in the world—and offers an alternative to Euro-American blueprints of queer individual identity. This book contends that kinship relations must be understood as central to any expression of queer selfhood and culture in contemporary cultural production in China. Using a critical approach—“queering Chinese kinship”—Lin Song scrutinizes the relationship between queerness and family relations, and questions Eurocentric queer culture’s frequent assumption o...
The boys love (BL) genre was created for girls and women by young female manga (comic) artists in early 1970s Japan to challenge oppressive gender and sexual norms. Over the years, BL has seen almost irrepressible growth in popularity and since the 2000s has become a global media phenomenon, weaving its way into anime, prose fiction, live-action dramas, video games, audio dramas, and fan works. BL’s male–male romantic and sexual relationships have found a particularly receptive home in other parts of Asia, where strong local fan communities and locally produced BL works have garnered a following throughout the region, taking on new meanings and engendering widespread cultural effects. Qu...
Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls' Comics Artists and Fans examines three dynamic and overlapping communities of women and adolescent girls who challenged Japanese gender and sexual norms in the 1970s and 1980s. These spheres encompassed activists in the ūman ribu (women’s liberation) movement, members of the rezubian (lesbian) community, and artists and readers of queer shōjo manga (girls’ comics). Individually and collectively, they found the normative understanding of the category “women” untenable and worked to redefine and expand its meaning by transfiguring ideas, images, and practices selectively appropriated from the “West...
How did Korea with a relatively small-scale music industry come to create a vibrant pop culture scene that would enthrall not only young Asian fans but also global audiences from diverse racial and generational backgrounds? From idol training to fan engagement, from studio recording to mastering choreographic sequences, what are the steps that go into the actual production and promotion of K-pop? And how can we account for K-pop's global presence within the rapidly changing media environment and consumerist culture in the new millennium? As an informed guide for finding answers to these questions, The Cambridge Companion to K-Pop probes the complexities of K-pop as both a music industry and a transnational cultural scene. It investigates the meteoric ascent of K-pop against the backdrop of increasing global connectivity wherein a distinctive model of production and consumption is closely associated with creativity and futurity.
Tang and Wijaya present a range of new and established scholarly voices, including local activists directly involved in developments in Southeast Asia. This groundbreaking collection presents the current state of play and longstanding LGBTQ+ debates in this often-overlooked region of Asia. The diversity of both the subject and the region is reflected in the broad scope of topics addressed, from the impact of Japanese queer popular culture on queer Filipinos, to the politics of public toilets in Singapore, and the impact of digital governance on queer communities across ASEAN. Taken in combination, these investigations not only highlight the operations of queer politics in Southeast Asia, but also present a concrete basis to reflect on queer knowledge production in the region. A vital resource for students and scholars of gender and sexuality in Southeast Asia, or any Queer or LGBTQ+ studies looking beyond the West.
Japan has often been portrayed as a mysterious, sexless, troubled land. Birth rates and marriage rates have been decreasing for decades, and national surveys show that Japanese people are simply having less sex overall. But Japan is not so different from anywhere else—it’s simply on the leading edge of worldwide demographic shifts. Because of rigid norms around gender, marriage, childbearing, and work, and relatively strict immigration policies, Japan is also experiencing these shifts more acutely. In The Relationship People, Erika R. Alpert starts by exploring some of the factors that have contributed to later and less marriage and childbearing in Japan and elsewhere. Alpert then goes o...