The “Y” phenomenon: dystopia, utopia, and heterotopia in Thai boys love media

Abstract

In the past decade, Thai Boys Love (BL) media has gained phenomenal popularity in Asia in the form of film and drama series, garnering considerable interest from scholars of cultural studies, gender studies, and media studies. Using frame analysis, this article traces the evolution of Thai BL themes from cinematic dystopia into small-screen utopia, i.e. from the tragic (dystopia) to the heart-warming (compromised utopia), and to the comic and hyperreal (utopia). We understand post-2014 BL productions as subsisting within a specific frame that breaks with that of pre-2014 Thai homoerotic films before BL series became mainstream. Frames are chronotopic in the Bakhtinian sense; they are timespaces in which spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Applying this to the case at hand, one may observe as follows: temporally, the post-2014 BL frame encompasses adolescence or young adulthood; spatially, it invokes the high school, senior high school, or university as microcosms of an idealized or romanticized pre-society characterized by childlike innocence, parental (usually maternal) approval, and homosocial relations. This article thus proposes a spectrum of affective readings from dystopia to utopia to critically understand the popular reception of Thai BL and explain why some of them are better received than others.