Maggi64

Towards a Queer Affective Economy of Boys' Love in Contemporary Chinese Media

Alvin K. Wong
Boys Love
Publication Name: Continuum

This article expands the existing research on the boys’ love (BL) cultural phenomenon by analysing two popular BL films, A Round Trip to Love and Uncontrolled Love, and one TV series, Addicted, all streamed online in 2016. Previous research has explored the various aspects of BL such as cultural globalization from below, the online publishing industry and censorship, and the theme of incest and queer sexuality. This article turns a greater attention to the dialectical relationship between affect, queer desire and neoliberalism by unpacking further the affective work that BL performs in contemporary China. BL is both structurally constrained by the economic infrastructure of heteronormative kinship norms in neoliberal China and residual forms of socialism, as well as offering alternative modality of affective tendency that exceeds these structural impediments. Conceptually, this research explicates three forms of affective work in BL in contemporary China, namely affective imprisonment, queer affective reparation and affective overcoming, in order to illuminate the relationship between affect, queer desire and neoliberalism in contemporary China.

This article proposes to theorize BL as a form of affective economy that emerges from neoliberalism and economic restructuring taking place in postsocialist China. These structural and economic shifts had taken place as early as 1978 when Deng Xiaoping experimented with neoliberalism and privatization through initiatives such as Township and Village Enterprises (TVEs) and ideological liberalization after the end of the Cultural Revolution (Harvey 2005). Marketization and neoliberal globalization were in full swing when Deng embarked on the famous 1992 Southern Tour to the special economic zones (SEZs). Neoliberalism in China thus combines an array of individual and social mechanisms involving privatization, self-enterprising individualism, foreign direct investments, rapid urbanization, unequal rural-to-urban migrations, and a strict household registration system (hukou) under a planned economy. All these factors result in a most capitalist form of postsocialist modernity that some have called ‘socialism from afar’ (Zhang and Ong 2008).

At the same time, BL cinema and media as cultural formations are not simply overdetermined by these larger structural processes; in fact, they offer critiques and alternative imaginary to envision other forms of queer sociality. This queer visuality can potentially overcome (or at least acknowledge) the social violence brought about by globalization, neoliberalism and new forms of social inequality in contemporary China. While existing scholarship on queer Chinese studies has often deployed a framework of queer Marxism that exposes the unequal access to cosmopolitanism and cultural citizenship for queer subjects such as the money boys sex workers(MB in NGO lingo) and elite gay middleclass men (Rofel 2007, 2010; Liu 2015), my research here further expands this line of inquiry by exploring a greater range of gay male subjects beyond the predictable money boys-urban gay men dichotomy.

Grad students are writing dissertations on BL's for PhD's in both Gender Studies and Queer Studies. The topic is included in both fields. I have to laugh when I read some of these papers because they are packed with pretentious, overly erudite rhetoric designed to take a perfectly simple concept and intentionally render it complex. I just got a 50 page paper in my email today, and while I am not going to read all of it, I'll copy paste the 1st page from it so you can see how crazy this stuff is (see below)

Wait, I am not sure I know what you mean when you said, "I need to thank you cause this trend is the most funny, accurate and lovely trend I've ever found here on MDL."

Did you mean to say this "thread" instead of "trend"? If so, then I agree. It truly is a funny thread! Thx for visiting it.

I agree with your list of shows that had dead fish kisses, with the exception of "Cherry Blossoms After Winter." The boys had a nice first kiss the night they drank beer and little Haeboom got drunk and cried. And then there was Haeboom's dream about Taesung coming to his room, kissing him passionately, and then lying him down on the bed to kiss him more. Granted, all the other kisses in the show were closed mouth pecks but at least they got 2 good smooches in there.

Hey, a "BL Professor at the Rainbow Academy" is not as much of a joke as you think, because you truly could study BL's at a university nowadays. Many people are now getting PhD's in the field of Gender Studies and Asian BL's are included in this field. Since I am an English Professor I have free access to these kinds of academic articles and papers, so I signed up to be on the mailing list for the BL category. Every week I get 4-5 new articles and academic research papers on Asian BL's. It's basically people taking a fun topic and making it waaaaay more complicated than it truly is. But hey, that's just what academics always do, LOL.

I did not know Thailand was doing amnesia plots because I avoid Thai BL's in general. In fact, I have only seen 2 Thai BL's this whole year: Kinn/Porsche and Moonlight Chicken. Thailand cranks out over 50 BL's a year, which comes out to about one a week. They feel like they are mass produced on a factory assembly line.

Amnesia! That one used to be common in American soap operas, but "Jack O'Frost" is the 1st time I've ever seen it in a BL. If "Jack O'Frost" gets high ratings then we'll start seeing more amnesia plots just like we suddenly started to see more time travel plots. I can list 5 time travel BL's off the top of my head:

1) Once Again
2) The Director Who Buys Me Dinner
3) First Love Again
4) HIStory 1: Obsessed
5) HIStory 5: Love in the Future

No way! You mean they used it as anal lube?

Yes, the execution was a tad clumsy. But this show is oozing with so much charisma and chemistry that, like you, I forgive the small flaws. I also love the reversal of Eddie's character. And I especially love that when he told Ian he dated someone in college the pronoun he used for his ex was "him" not "her." I despair of all these K-BL's that make a point of proving that the guys had girlfriends in the past, such that they are not really gay, just "gay for you." Well, we know from Ian's high school confession that he was gay from the get-go. And now we know from Eddy's college dating history that he's gay too. I don't always need a declaration of guys being gay in BL's, but it does bug me when a show goes out of its way to prove that the guys had girlfriends in the past.

LOL, wonderful! And your scenario of Eddy carrying Ian to the hospital ties nicely into the high school flashback at the end of Ep 4 where Ian faked being injured by the soccer ball just so Eddy would carry him on his back.

LOL, and when one guy gets bday cake icing on his lips the other guy always wipes it off, then licks his fingers. As for the the time travel trope, ugh, enough! We got 4 time travel BL's this year alone (3 from Korea and 1 from Taiwan).

I especially loved your bit about how it was game over when a K-BL used a Thai-BL trope -- as if there'd be a supernatural, cosmic thunderclap if the 2 worlds of K-BLs and Thai-BLs every collided!

Now that's what I'm talking about! I'm so glad I asked to play this game because your reply cracked me up. Thank you!

I would agree that the soccer ball interception was a cliched BL trope of the sort we see in crappy Thai BL's -- but there's a distinct difference. You see, this scene was thematically connected to a flashback scene of them in high school, on the same soccer field. Ian was in the bleachers staring at Eddy playing soccer when a ball hit Ian's head, and Ian had to decide whether to say he was fine, or pretend he was hurt so that Eddy would carry him on his back to the infirmary. The fact that the 2 soccer ball scenes are thematically connected elevates it from the cliched crap we get in Thai BL's.

Oh shit, because that's exactly the question that Eddy asked on the interview when he said, "What would you do if you got a better offer while still working on our 3 month project?" I guess this was bound to come up again, otherwise the script would never have had Eddie speak that particular dialogue in the first place. That's the thing about these 15 min K-BL's -- every minute is used purposefully and nothing wasted or just used as filler. Well, not in a good K-BL anyway. And this is a very good K-BL.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED ON THAT SOCCER FIELD?

Hey, we were robbed of potential cuteness by not seeing how Ian responded to Eddy's confession on the soccer field at the end of Ep 4! Ep 5 cut right to the office, leaving us to only imagine how that confession scene ended. So let's play a game: tell me how you think that scene ended.

Did Ian say, "I don't believe you," and then run away as usual? Did Eddy chase him across the soccer field and catch him with a lasso? Or did Eddy grab Ian's wrist to latch on a pair of handcuffs and say, "Not so fast baby, cuz this time I got you!" What? What, what, what happened on that soccer field?

Ian got a text from PD Ahn at the end of Ep 6. But who the heck is PD Ahn? Was it the guy with whom he'd interviewed in Ep 1? Or is it somebody completely new whom we don't know about yet?

I guess I don't have a problem with the actors themselves. I just take issue when I hear how an actor's agency cast them in a BL to help jumpstart their career (because BL's are easier to get than mainstream K-dramas), but then don't want their clients to do a male-on-male kiss because it might alienate future fans when they do, eventually, break out into mainstream dramas. In the case of ASTCO, the manhwa has no kissing (there's only a kiss added in a bonus chapter), so the actors have it pretty easy in terms of not risking the alienation of any future mainstream fans.

But who knows if that means that they, personally, chose the project for this reason. I remember wondering if the guys in Where Your Eyes Linger did that lame kiss at the end cuz they had a personal problem with gay kissing, but then I saw each actor later on in BL's where they did a deep, realistic kiss. Meaning, they were fine with gay kissing. I still don't know why that kiss was so lame in WYEL, but I have heard that they had a different agency when it was made . In other words, it was the agency, not the actors, exploiting the BL genre to advance careers while simultaneously being homophobic about gay kissing.

Ok, so he was the CEO of a company and then got famous and appeared on talk shows? Is it the same thing as Donald Trump, who was a businessman and then became a celebrity who appeared on talk shows?

I was confused because when he said he was on "shows" with the actress I thought that he meant dramas, not talk shows.

Well, I'm sure they'd love to score a part in a mainstream K-drama. That's the whole point -- a BL is easier to get than a mainstream drama when you're an up-and-coming actor. They do BL's to gain the exposure that would lead to larger, mainstream roles later on. But it's a tricky dance wherein their agencies want to use a BL for initial exposure, but don't want their clients to do a male-on-male kiss because that might alienate future fans when they eventually do get mainstream roles. See?

The fact that the manhwa ASTCO contains no physical intimacy makes it the perfect project for these 2 idols because they get the exposure from a BL, without risking any alienation of future mainstream fans. This is why certain BL actors have a "no kiss clause" in their contract. For instance, that idol in the BL about the eraser (I can't recall the show's name), and then the taller guy in "Cherry Magic." Now those guys got massive stardom and exposure based on shows about gay love, while being too homophobic to do a gay kiss. That's what I call exploiting the BL genre to advance your career.

*Incidentally, I don't read Japanese so I had to rely on actual Japanese friends who had read the articles about these 2 actors' agencies having a "no kiss clause." Of course, there are plenty of other BL's that avoid kissing, and while I don't know for sure if all of them are due to a "no kiss clause," I tend to think that, yes, it was likely contractual.