Remedial Kids: playful academic lectures for the culturally curious

Remedial Kids is a social community for the culturally curious. We host playful academic lectures at cosy bars across Singapore.

Session #8

We Love Boys Love: The Evolution of Thai BL Dramas

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. This talk will take you on a fun journey through the evolution of Thai BL, from stories filled with drama and tragedy to heartwarming and comedic tales that celebrate love.

This talk traces the evolution of Thai BL themes from the tragic (dystopia) to the heartwarming (compromised utopia) to the comic and hyperreal (utopia). Since 2014, the BL landscape encompasses adolescence or young adulthood, invoking school settings as microcosms of an idealized or romanticized pre-society characterized by childlike innocence, parental (usually maternal) approval, and homosocial relations. By using the frames of dystopia and utopia to understand Thai BLs, this talk will unpack why Thai BLs have captured the hearts of so many across the world.

About the speaker: Ying-kit Chan is an assistant professor at the Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore. He served as a research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University, and was a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Thammasat University, and the Center for Chinese Studies, National Central Library, in Taipei. His most recent books include Transnational Southeast Asia: Communities, Contestations, and Cultures and The Cityscapes of Taipei, Hong Kong, and Singapore during the Cold War.

Ticket comes with 1 drink.