GL Drama Lovers Club

 Ryn:

rabbit god. 

I heard from my ex that there was a lesbian counter part its just not covered well because of........misogyny

 KoreanLatina:

Sadly, dueto  my country's history alot of scripts and artifacts about that were destroyed by the japanese occupation. Most queer-coded artworks were burnt or buried under ruble an bodies...we are missing so much but we know some sapphic art because of poems an journals and things left in nature in secret. 

That breaks my heart

 KoreanLatina:

I heard from my ex that there was a lesbian counter part its just not covered well because of........misogyny

I don't know this one! If you ever hear or remember which it is, please do let me know!

 KoreanLatina:

We have these too.... It's a messy topic, but usually in gay circles men and women, when we date someone who doesn't live our life our isnt gay / queer they are called 기간제 계약직 , like contract worker? term worker? temp? something like that, like you know they will marry heterosexually and that this is temp employment. It is messy lingo, but it is lingo nonetheless. 

Thank you, the messy lingo is also important to know. It says a lot about cultural forces at play.

 MarkWasHere:

In the drama "Blank", Chet (Aneung's father) called Yui (Anueng's friend and briefly girlfriend) a "Tom". Yui, a butch lesbian, corrected Chet saying, "I'm not a Tom, I'm a Queer".

I understood this to mean that Chet thought that Yui was simply a Tomboy, rather than a lesbian, but Yui wanted him to know that she was actually a lesbian. Otherwise why would Yui correct him? But then I'm not sure why Chet was bothered by Yui hanging around his daughter if he only thought Yui was a Tomboy. I suspect there are some cultural nuances I'm completely missing.

No, the word 'tom' in Thai always implies attraction to women, so that wasn't it. I think it's far more likely Yui just didn't identify with the word 'tom', because within some communities that word has very strict requirements (in terms of gender expression, like masculine dress, hair, mannerisms, relatively flat-chested, has to be the one to pursue their partner, financially take care of them, active role in bed, can only be attracted to feminine women etc), while 'queer' is intentionally much more vague and open and fluid. But different people use labels differently, so 'tom' isn't always used in such a strict way.

A tom who is attracted to other toms gets a different 'phet' label: 'tom gay'. I didn't translate that to English, that's what they call it. So that means that a tom-tom relationship is gay, but a tom-dee relationship is not necessarily, though it's not straight either. I have not heard of a word for a tom who is attracted to men. It probably exists though, but it's niche knowledge. I mean, they even have a word for 'woman who is attracted to feminine/gay men': 'cherry'. 

There is also the non-niche word 'bi' (yes that's the Thai word) for anyone who is bi, so if the tom is attracted to both men and women, they could use that.

This is speculation but I actually think that Yui's actor wanted that line in, because they themselves like their 'phet' to be as undefined as possible, as I read in that one interview I linked a couple pages back.

Chet was very aware that Neung and Yui were somewhat romantically involved. I don't remember 100% but I think it may actually have been that same scene where he called his daughter 'phitphet' ผิดเพศ = literally 'wrong gender', for being gay. It was really homophobic.

The main character in the movie 'Yes or No' spends the entire film trying to figure out what exactly it means to be a tom, and whether she is one. And she repeatedly insists that she isn't, but then sometimes says that she is, for different reasons. The subtitles are not sufficient to catch all of this. Really good movie, but watch it when you understand a bunch of spoken Thai.

 KoreanLatina:

That is intresting I start Thai classes next week an I am really want to ask my teacher about wlw terms , I am a Fem Dom and I am trying to find out the thai counter for that.

They also sometimes add 'king' and 'queen' to the end of 'phet' labels. 'King' for people who take an active/dominant role in bed, and 'queen' for people who take a passive/submissive role. 

I don't know what a Thai person would say is the equivalent for fem dom in Thai, or if there even is one, but that may be a good place to start Googling :)

It might be 'les king'.

Let us know what terms your teacher tells you!

 Tina:

Hello! Good news. I was able to get the movie The Lady Assassin (Vietnam) from that one site.

Therefore, if you want to watch this movie with good quality and English subs (I couldn't find it online on streaming), please DM me for the link. 

https://letterboxd.com/film/the-lady-assassin-2013/

It's supposed to be a Vietnamese GL movie, but I'm not sure of its content yet. 

@RealNevermore wanted to watch it so I tried to find it. ^^

Thank you so much dear ^^

This discussion around language and identity is fascinating! I often feel like I need to know Thai to really understand the ways characters use labels and gendered words. I am studying Thai through an app but it is a super hard way to learn, imo. I pick up a lot from all the Thai shows I watch, though.

im curious if anyone knows any words in any Asian language for nonbinary or gender queer. My spouse has started to identify this way rather than as a butch lesbian, and to use “they/them” pronouns. But when we were coming out in the 1990s these terms and labels did not exist. Have other countries started to include terminolgy for this kind of identity or is it still all just “masc” or “feminine.” Maybe using the western word ”queer” or being undefined is an option. I’m just trying to learn how to talk about this both in English and Thai, but I’m interested in other countries as well. I just have yet to watch any GLs that aren’t Thai.

i plan to watch the handmaiden and yes or no. I also have a list of shows with masc/Butch women that I plan to work my way through.

 dora:

im curious if anyone knows any words in any Asian language for nonbinary or gender queer.

In Mandarin it's fei'eryuanxingbie 非二元性別 (fei=not, eryuan=dual/binary, xingbie=gender), and transgender is kuaxingbie 跨性别 (kua = to cross). These are both fairly new terms, influenced by western queer communities.

Spoken Mandarin doesn't have gendered pronouns, but written Mandarin does. The third person pronouns 他 (male) and 她 (female) are both pronounced 'ta'. The reason they made it two gendered characters is because Mandarin only got a standardized script (baihuawen白话文) during the 1917-1922 May Fourth Movement, which wanted China to quickly modernize so that it could stand up to the West, and copied a lot of western things in hopes of 'catching up to the west'. Gendered pronouns were one of the 'modern' things to be copied. They split the third person pronoun into two gendered characters, but not the first person 我 or second person 你 pronouns, because European languages have gendered third person pronouns and genderneutral first and second person pronouns (But Taiwan does sometimes use a feminine version of 'you' 妳, again just pronounced exactly the same as the male version.) 

Copied from the Romance languages (French, Spanish etc), if you refer to a group of women it's 她们, but as soon as even one man is present in the group, you refer to them as 他们. 

Frustratingly, 她 has the 'female' radical 女 (a radical is a part of a Chinese character), while 他 does not have the male radical 男, but the human radical 人. Once again, men are the default, the standard human, and women are the deviation. I hate it.

Before baihuawen was used, writing was generally done in Classical Chinese, which is a different (very old and dead) language, kind of like Latin, but Chinese. This is not the same thing as the difference between simplified and traditional characters. Those are just different scripts, not different languages. Simplified versus traditional characters is more like cursive script versus block letters, except with bigger differences. Baihuawen was still written in traditional characters, and Classical Chinese can be written down in simplified characters. The CCP invented simplified characters in the 1960's, with the goal of making writing easier, so that a larger percentage of the population would be able to read and write. Reading and writing used to only be for elites, which communists were not a fan of, obviously.

In Thai there's an old but still used word for feminine people assigned male at birth, kathoey กะเทย, which can mean anything from feminine man to transfeminine nonbinary to drag queen to transgender woman, though not all feminine men or trans women will identify with it, sometimes rejecting it for opposite reasons. 

The flipside 'tom', is equally vague and dependent on personal opinion. Sometimes masculine women will reject it by saying that they're definitely still women, and sometimes trans men will reject it by saying they're men, not just tomboy women. A general rule of thumb is to not call someone a word like that unless they explicitly identify with it.

'Nonbinary' and 'genderqueer' are western concepts, and Thai appears to have simply copied them as is, just phonologically spelling them in Thai ways: นอนไบนารี and เจนเดอร์เควียร์. The Warp Effect had a sapphic support character identify as nonbinary. This character's actress is half Thai, half Italian, and idk if that's why they identify as nonbinary rather than a tom.

There's a bunch of other terminology like คนข้ามเพศ and บุคคลที่ไม่ระบุเพศ and something about sao phrapet song that I don't exactly remember, but I don't have enough knowledge there to really add anything useful. Here's a thing, also: https://nonbinary.wiki/wiki/Glossary_of_Thai_gender_and_sex_terminology

I think it's best to assume that all of these terms are in rapid flux and different people have different opinions on what they mean and who they include. It's probably exactly as tumultuous as it is in English.

There's generally a lot more well-known language about amab gender diversity than afab, and this seems to hold true across cultures. Amab queerness tends to be hyper visible and reviled, while afab queerness tends to be erased. Like, the whole world and their mother has heard of Indian hijras, but where is the language for transmasculine people? I don't know it.

Oh I also just found a queer glossary for Chinese https://nonbinary.wiki/wiki/Glossary_of_Chinese_gender_and_sex_terminology

As for Thai pronouns, in short I notice masculine female characters (including Molly from the Warp Effect) tend towards using 'rao' as a first person pronoun (gender-neutral), and the feminine 'ka' as a politeness particle, with infrequent usage of 'chan' (a usually-but-not-always feminine-leaning first person pronoun). Very infrequently a masculine woman will use 'krap', the male politeness particle, but then it's generally only once, among many a 'ka'. Not a 'phom' (male first person pronoun) in sight.

This is not at all symmetrical with feminine male characters, who lean far more strongly towards 'chan' and 'ka' rather than 'phom' and 'krup', though they do also still use those, especially in professional settings.

Binary trans characters just talk like their cis counterparts.

There is a metric fuckton more to say here, because Thai has ridiculous numbers of pronouns, but this is really long already. 

In the end I came to the conclusion that as an enby myself, I should still use 'nonbinary' to describe myself, not tom. And I'd use 'rao' and (begrudgingly) 'ka', interspersed with a rare 'krub', though I expect to be 'corrected' for using 'krub'. Sadly you can't just not use either 'ka' or 'krub' at all, because that would be rude. There's the genderneutral 'ha', but that's far more familial, which doesn't sound like it's always appropriate.

Okay I'll allow myself one last Thai gender language tangent before I shut up, in The Earth, Wasu is talking down to Rose right from the get-go by using the feminine politeness particle ka. He is not doing this to express an internal identification with femininity, but to infantilize Rose. Parents often use the politeness particle the child is supposed to use, so a mom would use 'krub' to speak to her son. 'Ka' can be used on two tones, a high one (which Wasu uses, only when speaking to Rose) and a falling one (which Din uses). The high one softly seeks approval, while the falling one is more matter of fact. Din talks to Rose like an equal and Wasu treats her with kid gloves.

Edit: Wait I'm dumb I just realized you were probably looking for third person Thai pronouns to refer to your spouse with. Those are usually not gendered anyways, so you'll be fine. 'Khao' เขา is probably the way to go. 'Man' มัน is a slightly less respectful but still ok. 'Te' เธอ does lean strongly feminine when used in third person (but is genderneutral when used in second person), so avoid using that one for your spouse. If you wanted to curse your spouse out with a pronoun, 'meng' is also genderneutral. And of course if your spouse is slightly older than you you could refer to them with 'phi'พี่. Or just use their name as a pronoun, sometimes in conjunction with 'phi'. If they're slightly younger than you, you could theoretically do the same with 'nong' น้อง, but it can be interpreted as condescending, so maybe don't.

 dora:

I like “queer” because it’s non-specific and encompasses a wide range of identities.

Me too. Same goes for 'nonbinary'. All 'queer' says is 'not allocishet' and all 'nonbinary' says is 'not one of the two binary options' but neither word gives any specifics beyond that. I like that, because usually details are really none of people's business anyways, and because people sometimes get really pedantic and intrusive about who counts as a 'true' xyz, so if you just go 'I'm queer', they have no criteria to judge you on.

 dora:

now I want to watch the warp effect to see the nby character!

I haven't watched it, but AthenaTheStorier gave us timestamps for Molly's scenes (which are few and far between) a while back, and I did watch those. I have the timestamps saved in a file but not on this computer, will find them later. 

 dora:

For now I’m working on Be My Angel though. Cute, fluffy So far.

Yes they're so cute! I'm not 100% sold on the editing or the dialogue though. But I mean I'm not picky when it comes to butchfem shows I guess.

 dora:

Be My Angel does seem silly but Bambam is super adorable so I’ll just watch for them.

honestly real