From Boizu Rabu to Thirsty: Mapping Queer Literacies From Boys Love Comics in Japan and the Philippines

• Main Author: Santos, Kristine Michelle L.
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Film and Media Studies; Japanese Studies
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/history-faculty-pubs/245; https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003486954-21/boizu-rabu-thirsty-kristine-michelle-santos?context=ubx&refId=35332f16-ae82-4bd5-85f0-9be614b565a7
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

Beyond the global pandemic, 2020 marked an interesting cultural turn where boys love (BL), a queer media featuring fictional romances between men, became globally popular. Hashtags related to various BL works, from Thailand to Japan, trended on social media platforms, showcasing global interest in this queer genre. The Philippines, in particular, rode the wave of this popularity by producing its own BL television shows and labeling them as Pinoy BL. To audiences who started their engagement with BL in 2020, these Pinoy BL shows marked the start of BL in the Philippines. BL, however, has a long history in the Philippines that highlights transnational and transcultural exchanges since the 1990s. In this chapter, I examine the history and transformations of BL in the Philippines through commercial and self-published comics. Critical to this study is the multimodal and comparative analysis of visual and narrative literacies used between Japanese and Philippine BL comics. The chapter aims to map the transcultural flows of Japanese BL literacies in the Philippines and examine its transformations that elicit localized affective responses. In doing so, this chapter hopes to showcase the growth and diversification of queer expression through the use of BL literacies in Philippine BL comics.