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Charlie Yi Zhang, Making a home (from) afar through gender and sexuality: the turn to China and Chinese diaspora in the Thai ‘Boys’ Love’ drama, Screen, Volume 66, Issue 1, Spring 2025, Pages 100–107, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjaf009
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As Thai actor Earth Pirapat Watthanasetsiri, dressed in an elegant black suit, strides gracefully into the camera’s view, he begins to serenade us with the Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng’s classic song, ‘The Moon Represents My Heart’ (月亮代表我的心), fine-tuning his gesture and gaze to match the tender melody. The scene then transitions to Moonlight Chicken,1 a Thai ‘Boys’ Love’ drama (hereafter BL). Here he stands before a traditional Chinese-style restaurant, seemingly engaged in a contemplative exploration of the establishment’s historical significance and narrative context, as he portrays the restaurant’s owner in the show. His fellow crew members join in, resurrecting Teng’s beloved song in Mandarin, albeit with a hint of awkwardness, and reviving the mise-en-scene of the TV show’s homoromantic story.
Part of the original soundtrack of the popular drama, the scenario above offers an intriguing prism through which we can study an emerging domain within the transnational television industry. This industry has traditionally been dominated by Euro-American stakeholders, but the growing interactions among those countries that have been marginalised in the global mediascape, specifically China, Taiwan and Thailand, have started to shift the landscape. The instances of intertextual entanglement and transcultural exchange among these peripheral ‘underdogs’ work to disrupt the hegemonic patterns within entrenched televisual discourses and to ignite novel linguistic-cultural possibilities. A critical analysis of the emerging scenarios of queer Asian TV productions therefore helps to broaden and even subvert the prevailing Anglophone lexicons that dominate scholarly understandings of television and related industries. By redirecting our attention towards the Sinosphere, a realm enriched with layers of colonial and imperial sedimentation, these televisual moments also afford us an opportunity to unsettle ‘the historico-geographically determined conceptual matrix that tacitly ties postcolonial studies to certain experiences of Western colonialism and their enduring legacies in Asia and Africa’.2
