Presenter and Discussant Bios

Thomas BAUDINETTE is a Lecturer in Japanese Studies at Macquarie University, Australia. His research interests include the ethnographic study of the Japanese gay media landscape, queer migration between China and Japan, and the globalization of Japanese popular culture into South East and East Asia. He has published on these topics in the journals Monash University Linguistics Papers (2012), Japan Forum (2016), the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture (2017), Language and Sexuality (2017), and ACME: A Journal of Critical Geographies (2017). He has also contributed a chapter on representations of masculinity in manga produced by gay authors to the edited collection Manga Vision (Monash University Press, 2016, edited by Sarah Pasfield-Neofitou and Cathy Sell) and a chapter on “finding the law” in gay manga to the edited collection Law and Justice in Japanese Popular Culture (Routledge, forthcoming, edited by Ashley Pearson, Thom Giddens and Kieran Tranter).More information on Thomas’s current research projects may be found on his academic blog: http://thomasbaudinette.wordpress.com.

Poowin BUNYAVEJCHEWIN is a researcher at the Institute of East Asian Studies at Thammasat University, Thailand. Before joining the Institute in 2013, he taught ASEAN studies at Walailak University. He holds an MA in International Politics from the University of Hull, U.K., and a B.A. (Hons) in Political Science from Thammasat University. His research interests lie broadly in security studies, international politics and the application of international relations theory. His publications have appeared in academic journals such as the Austrian Journal of South-East Asian Studies (ASEAS) and Pertanika Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities. As a BL aca-fan, Bunyavejchewin is interested in research on BL media in Thailand. He presented his first paper on BL studies, “Reading Boys Love (BL) Manga in Thailand: A Preliminary Study of Thai BL Reader Preferences,” at the 5th Biennial International Conference of the Japanese Studies Association in Southeast Asia in 2016.

Feichi CHIANG is an Officer at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica (Taiwan), and an independent researcher. She completed her PhD in Sociology at the Goldsmiths College, University of London (UK) in 2010. She is the author of “Counterpublic but Obedient: A Case of Taiwan’s BL Fandom,” in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2016). Her research interests include studies in gender and sexuality, the fǔnǚ (female BL reader) community, and popular culture.

Tricia Abigail Santos FERMIN holds a PhD in Sociology from the Graduate School of Human Sciences, Osaka University. Her main research interests include the globalization of Japanese popular culture and fan practices, sexuality and sexual politics in Japan and Southeast Asia, as well as the sociological analyses of story-telling practices. Her dissertation was on the socio-political significance of Yaoi and BL fan appropriations in Southeast Asia, specifically in Manila, Jakarta, and Singapore. Among her publications are “Appropriating Yaoi and Boys Love in the Philippines Conflict, Resistance and Imaginations Through and Beyond Japan,” in Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies 13, no. 3 (2013) and “Male Homoerotic Fiction and Women’s Sexual Subjectivities: Yaoi and BL Fans in Indonesia and the Philippines” in Women and Erotic Fiction: Critical Essays on Genres, Markets and Readers, ed. Kristen Phillips (McFarland, 2015).

Patrick W. GALBRAITH holds a PhD in Information Studies (University of Tokyo) and a PhD in Cultural Anthropology (Duke University). He is the author and editor of many books on Japanese popular culture and media, most recently The Moe Manifesto (Tuttle, 2014), Debating Otaku in Contemporary Japan (Bloomsbury, 2015; with Björn-Ole Kamm and Thiam Huat Kam), and Media Convergence in Japan (Kinema Club, 2016; with Jason G. Karlin).

Gita Pramudita Prameswari is a graduate student in the Department of Global Studies at Sophia University, Japan. She earned her Bachelor of Social Sciences degree at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, where she wrote a graduation thesis about the representation of Islam in boys love manga. Her research interests include religion and the media, gender/sexuality, and audience/fandom studies. She is currently researching the representation of the LGBT community in Indonesia media for her graduation project.

Akiko HORI teaches gender and sexuality theory at Bunkyo University in Saitama, and represents the gender and sexuality section in the Japan Society for Studies in Cartoons and Comics (Nihon Manga Gakkai). She completed her MA at the University of Osaka in 2008. Hori is the author of Yokubō no kōdo: Manga ni miru sekushuariti no danjosa (Codes of desire: Differences between male and female sexuality as seen in manga; Rinsen Shoten, 2009); and numerous articles and book chapters, including, “On the Response (or Lack Thereof) of Japanese Fans to Criticism that Yaoi is Antigay Discrimination,” in Transformative Works and Cultures 12 (2013);and “BL tosho haijo jiken to BL yūgai tosho shitei kara miru sei kihan no hitaishōsei: Josei no kailaku ni chakumoku shite” (Asymmetric sexual norms in removal and designation as harmful of BL books: Thinking from women’s pleasure), in Manga kenkyū 21 (2015).

Holly Lixian HOU is a research associate in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). She gained her PhD degree in Cultural Studies at CUHK in 2016. Her research interests include the development of feminist and queer politics, and new forms of cyber activism in China. Her dissertation, based on ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and textual analysis, explores how lala (lesbian) activists conducted an alternative form of social activism in China and produced new meanings in regard to feminist politics, queer politics and citizenship rights in accordance with the Chinese context. She is also the author of “On Fire in Weibo—Feminist Online Activism in China,” in Economic and Political Weekly 50, No.17 (April 25, 2015), which examines emerging online feminist activism in new forms of performance art in social media in China. 

Katrien JACOBS is Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Program Director of the MA in Visual Culture Studies. She has lectured and published widely about sexuality and gender in and around digital media, contemporary arts and media activism. She moved to Hong Kong in 2005 and devotes most of her research to contemporary Chinese, Japanese, and trans-Asian arts and media platforms. Jacobs has authored three books about Internet culture and sexuality. Her first book, Netporn: DIY Web Culture and Sexual Politics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), received critical claim amongst media scholars as a pioneering study of emerging web cultures that challenge government regulations and the aims of corporate expansionism. Her book People’s Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet (Intellect Books, 2012) investigates mainland China’s immersion in new trends in sexually explicit media. Her most recent book, The Afterglow of Women’s Pornography in Post-Digital China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), focuses on feminist and queer media cultures of sexuality and activism that have defined Chinese gender controversies in the social media age. Her work can be found on http://www.katrienjacobs.com.

KANG Byung’chu Dredge is an assistant professor in anthropology at the University of California San Diego. He received his anthropology PhD (2015) and global health MPH (2016) from Emory University. Broadly, Kang’s research focuses on race, gender, sexuality, class, and transnationalism. His primary interests include the anthropology of love, beauty, sex work, sexual health, structural violence, and Hallyu (Korean Wave) studies. His geographic specialization is Southeast Asia (Thailand), with particular attention to inter-Asia and Asian diaspora connections. His current research explores how popular culture from Korea and Japan are being embodied in everyday Thai gender and sexual practices, including in boys love imagery, personification, and fandom.

Hyojin KIM is an assistant professor at the Institute for Japanese Studies, Seoul National University, Korea. She completed her PhD at Harvard University in 2008. Her research interests include studies in Japanese studies, gender/sexuality and popular culture, especially otaku/fujoshi culture in Japan and Korea. She has published a number of journal articles, book chapters, and translations, including “Crossing Double Borders: Korean Female Amateur Comics Artists in the Globalization of Japanese Dojin Culture,” International Journal of Comic Art (IJOCA) 13, no. 2(fall 2011), “Yoshinaga Fumi’s Ōoku: Historical Imagination and the Potential of Japanese Women’s Manga,” Seoul Journal of Japanese Studies 2, no. 1 (2016), “‘Tasha’ toshite no yaoi: 1990-nendai ni okeru Kankoku dōjin bunka no hen’yo o megutte” (Yaoi as the Other: On the changes in Korean dongin culture in the 1990s), in Nikkan Manga Kenkyu, ed. Jaqueline Berndt, Yamanaka Chie, and Leem Hye Jeong (International Manga Research Center, Kyoto Seika University, 2013), and the Korean translation of BL shinkaron: Bōizurabu ga shakai o ugokasu (BL as a transformative genre: Boys’ love moves the world forward), by Akiko Mizoguchi (Image Frame, forthcoming).

Aerin LAI is a graduate student at the graduate division of Gender and Social Sciences at Ochanomizu University in Tokyo, Japan. She obtained her BA in Sociology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where she graduated with honors in 2013. Her graduation thesis, The Otaku: Negotiation between Fantasy and Reality Beyond the Body, focuses on how Singaporean Otakus made use of available technologies and merchandise to negotiate the demarcation between their immediate social reality and anime narratives. Subsequently, she contributed a chapter, “A Study of the Fudanshi Identity in Singapore” to the Anthropology Through the Experience of the Physical Body (Manohar Publishers, forthcoming). This chapter seeks to understand how fudanshi (male readers of boys love, a genre focusing on male­male romance and/or erotica) make sense of the heterosexuality and masculinity while consuming BL. She completed a three-month internship at the Singapore Heritage Society in 2016, finishing a qualitative study on the Chinese clan associations in the Kreta Ayer area. Her research interests include gender and sexuality, corporeality and fan cultures.

Xi LIN (PhD, LSE), is a Reader in Political Philosophy at the Institute for Advanced Study in Social Sciences, Fudan University. Xi previously taught both undergraduate and postgraduate courses at the London School of Economics (LSE) and School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). He also worked at the Community Care Department in the Sheffield City Council. Xi’s main research interests include moral and political philosophy, especially with regard to theories of justice and the phenomenology of the Lebenswelt (lifeworld).

Mark MCLELLAND is Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Wollongong and a former Toyota Visiting Professor of Japanese at the University of Michigan. He is author or editor of over ten books concerning the history of sexuality in Japan, Japanese popular culture, new media and the Internet, most recently: The End of Cool Japan: Ethical, Legal and Cultural Challenges to Japanese Popular Culture (Routledge 2017) and The Routledge Companion to Global Internet Histories (Routledge 2017; with Gerard Goggin).

Lakshmi MENON is assistant professor in the Department of English, HHMSPB NSS College for Women, Thiruvananthapuram, India. She completed her MPhil dissertation, Girls on Boys on Boys: Subversive Gender Discourse in Boys’ Love Manga, at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in 2012. Her ongoing PhD thesis is a study of Harry Potter slash fanfiction and internet fan communities. Her other research interests include digital humanities, popular culture, young adult fiction and queer literature. She has published and presented a number of papers in the areas of gender relations and fanworks, as well as anime and manga fandom in India.

Akiko MIZOGUCHI received her PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, USA, in 2008. She currently teaches visual studies and gender theory at Hosei, Waseda, Tama Art, and other universities in Tokyo. Her recent book, BL shinkaron: Bōizurabu ga shakai o ugokasu (BL as a transformative genre: Boys’ love moves the world forward; Ota Shuppan, 2015) was published in Chinese in 2016 (Màitián) and will be published in Korean in 2017 (Image Frame). Her new book, containing conversations with BL authors BL shinkaron: Taiwa hen (BL as a transformative genre: Dialogue version) is forthcoming in 2017.In addition to her work on BL, she has written extensively on film, contemporary art, and lesbian activism. Her English-language articles include: “Gender and the Art of Benshi: In Dialogue with Midori Sawato,” Camera Obscura Vol. 26, No. 3 (2011); and “In Flux: Eight Japanese Artists in the Aftermath of 3/11,” WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 39, Nos. 3&4 (2011). In 2013 she contributed an essay on Félix González-Torres to the exhibition catalog Love’s Body: Art in the Age of AIDS. She is an advisor for the Mangasia: Wonderlands of Asian Comics exhibition, which is being organized by Barbican Center, London, and debuts its three-year run in Rome in October 2017.

Naoko MORI is an associate professor in the Faculty of Sociology at the Kansai University, Japan. She completed her PhD in Sociology and Women’s Studies at Ochanomizu University in 2005. She is the author of Onna wa poruno o yomu: Josei no seiyoku to feminizumu (Women read porn: Female sexual desire and feminism; Seikyūsha, 2010). Recently she has been conducting research on the circulation of Japanese manga and BL culture in China. Her chapter “Chūgoku ni okeru bōizurabu” (Boys love in China) is forthcoming in Jendā to sekushuariti de miru higashi Ajia,” ed. Sechiyama Kaku (Keisō Shobō).

Kazumi NAGAIKE is a professor at the Center for International Education and Research at Oita University, Japan. She completed her PhD at the University of British Columbia (Canada) in 2005. Her research interests include studies in comparative literature, gender/sexuality, and popular culture. She is the author of Fantasies of Cross-dressing: Japanese Women Write Male-Male Erotica (Brill 2012) and co-editor of the collections Boys’ Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan (University Press of Mississippi 2015; with Mark McLelland, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker), Shōjo Across Media: Exploring Popular Sites of “Girl” Discourse in Japan (Palgrave, forthcoming; with Jaqueline Berndt and Fusami Ōgi), and Women’s Manga in Asia and Beyond: Uniting Different Cultures and Identities (Palgrave, forthcoming; with Fusami Ōgi, Rebecca Suter, and John Lent). She has also co-edited “Boys’ Love Manga (yaoi),” special section in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 4, no. 1 (June 2013), with Dru Pagliassotti and Mark McHarry, and “Transnational Boys’ Love Fan Studies,” special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures 12 (March 2013), with Katsuhiko Suganuma. Nagaike has also published a wide range of journal articles, book chapters, and translations in relation to her ongoing analysis of gender/sexuality in Japanese literature and popular culture.

Kristine Michelle SANTOS is a postgraduate student in the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her PhD thesis explores the history of fujoshi literacies that arose from female fan culture surrounding some manga serialized in Shūkan shōnen janpu (Weekly boys’ jump). Through textual analysis of young women’s fan dōjinshi of various Shōnen Jump titles and fan magazines such as Pafu (Puff) over the last four decades, her thesis highlights the transformative impact of fujoshi literacies on fan culture and shōnen media. She has published articles on Philippine comic culture such as “Is there a Space for Cool Manga in Indonesia and the Philippines? Postcolonial Discourses on Transcultural Manga,” in The End of Cool Japan (Routledge 2016; with Febriani Sihombing) and “Pinoy Manga in Philippine Komiks,” in Global Manga: “Japanese” Comics Without Japan (Bloomsbury 2015; with Karl Cheng Chua). Her research interests include history, gender, cultural studies, popular and fan culture. She hopes to further explore women’s fan cultures in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. 

Kania Arini SUKOTJO is a graduate student in the Comparative Asia Studies Programme at National University of Singapore. Her research interests revolve around fujoshi culture and fandom studies in Japan and Indonesia. She is currently conducting ethnographical fieldwork studies at Tokyo and Jakarta comic-related events. Her PhD thesis will focus on Tokyo and Jakarta comic events’ participatory culture to analyze how fan activities shape comic events and fans view on yaoi content.

Peiti WANG is an adjunct assistant professor at the Center for General Education, at National Chiao Tung University and National Central University, Taiwan. At both universities, she teaches anime/manga-related courses, including “Otakuology,” “The World History of Animation and Comics,” and “Anime/Manga Culture and Gender.” Wang completed her PhD at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center in 2010, with a dissertation entitled Affective Otaku Labor: the Circulation and Modulation of Affect in the Anime Industry. Her research interests include media and cultural studies, feminist theories and gender studies, and globalization. She is the chief editor of the books Dòng màn shè huì xué: Bié shuō de hǎo xiàng hái yǒu jiù (Sociology of anime /manga: Stop talking like we can fix this; Kiwi, 2015) and Dòng Màn Shè Huì Xué: Běn Běn De Dàn Sheng (The sociology of anime/manga: The birth of dōjinshi; Kiwi, 2016).

Wei WEI is Associate Professor of Sociology at the School of Social Development at East China Normal University, China. He earned his PhD at Loyola University Chicago in 2006. His research interests include gender and sexuality, urban studies, and social movements, with a focus on the LGBT communities in contemporary China. He is the author Kudu zhongguo shehui: Chengshi kongjian, liuxing wenhua he shehui zhengche (Queering Chinese society: Urban space, popular culture, and social policy; Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2015) and Gongkai: Dangdai chengdu tongzhi kongjian de xingcheng he bianqian (Going public: The production and transformation of queer spaces in contemporary Chengdu, China; Shanghai sanlian shudian, 2012). Wei has also published widely in both English and Chinese peer-reviewed journals, including Culture, Health & Sexuality, Journal of Homosexuality, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and Chinese Journal of Sociology. 

James WELKER is an associate professor in the Department of Cross-Cultural Studies at Kanagawa University. His research examines gender and sexuality in postwar and contemporary Japan. He is the author of Transfigurations: Feminists, Lesbians, and Shōjo Manga Fans in Late Twentieth-Century Japan (Hawai‘i, forthcoming), and co-editor of Rethinking Japanese Feminisms (Hawai‘i, forthcoming; with Julia C. Bullock and Ayako Kano), Queer Voices from Japan (Lexington, 2007; with Mark McLelland and Katsuhiko Suganuma), and “Of Queer Import: Sexualities, Genders and Rights in Asia,” with Lucetta Kam (Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, no 14, 2006).

Yanrui XU is an associate professor in the School of Media and Design at Ningbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University, P. R. China. She is the author of Zhongguo dangdai nüxing zhuyi wenxue piping ershinian (Contemporary feminist literary criticism in China 1980s–2000s; Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2008), Meijie yu xingbie: Nüxing meili, nanzi qigai ji meijie xingbie biaoda (Media and gender: Femininity, masculinity, and the formulation of gender in media; Zhejiang daxue chubanshe, 2014), and the co-author of Dangdai zhongguo de wenhua piping (Cultural criticism in contemporary China; Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2006; with TAO Dongfeng). She has published research in Chinese on women’s literature and queer culture. Xu is also a BL novelist and her stories have appeared in Chinese BL magazines and literature websites such as Jinjiang, Lucifer Club, and My Fresh Net.

Ling YANG is Assistant Professor of Chinese at Xiamen University, P. R. China. She is the author of Zhuanxing shidai de yule kuanghuan: Chaonü fensi yu dazhong wenhua xiaofei (Entertaining the transitional era: Super girl fandom and the consumption of popular culture; Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2012) and the co-editor of Fensi wenhua duben (Fan cultures: A reader; 2009; with TAO Dongfeng), Dazhong wenhua lilun xinbian (A new introduction to theories of popular culture; Beijing shifan daxue chubanshe, 2011; with ZHAO Yong), Mingren wenhua duben (Celebrity studies: A reader; Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2013; with TAO Dongfeng), and Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (Hong Kong University Press, 2017; with Maud Lavin and Jing Jamie Zhao). Yang has published extensively on fan culture, Internet culture, young adult fiction, and cultural industries, including six English articles and four Chinese articles on Chinese danmei (BL)fiction and fan community, most of which co-authored with Yanrui Xu. She is also the chief translator of Stardom: Industry of Desire (Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2017).