Speaking of westerners censoring Asian queerness, I want to share an excellent thread (which should be turned into a journal article) on how pink imperialism is killing the revolutionary Third Cinema potential of cultural productions like Thai BL.
Forget Covid19, we need to face this ongoing epidemic since 2020 when westerners literally subjected TBL to chemotherapy when it had no sign of cancer. Now these miserablists are the loudest people on the internet, as usual, complaining in European languages that there’s nothing to watch anymore since so much of Asian BL production is identical to the pitiable handful of existing queer media to be found here and there in the west.
Because of the pressure to intensify the globalisation of the same disease western queer media fans are afflicted by - capitalist subordination, most of what’s left of formerly great BL producing countries is white weddings, masc4masc parades and other forms of depoliticised queerness, now that productions are reduced to superficial aesthetics and completely severed from any kind of liberation.
The decolonisation of BL culture in the face of aggressive western parasitism is something I’ve been talking about for years but I’ve been observing long enough to see the opposite happen in real time. As always, a colonial occupation announces itself with cognitively violent Orientalism, misnaming their interventions as improvements, anti-censorship and anti-homophobia and even emancipatory when in fact the reality has been the complete opposite with their interventions/preoccupations having been decidedly homonormative, supremacist and reactionary.
This has razed quality indicators in much of the Asian tv adaptation industry to the ground, if not six feet beneath, in more than two countries so far, amounting to a counterinsurgency that depoliticised Asian BL by rapidly imposing Anglo American lgbt norms in almost every national industry as the new status quo.
Just imagine thinking the west - the empire of resource and people theft, genocide and fatally effective propaganda, has anything productive whatsoever to teach the world about liberation, fighting oppression, or the pursuit of human dignity for all - absolutely risible!
The thread helpfully points out that in order to reclaim its revolutionary Third Cinema identity, Asian BL will need to return to its rootedness in “defying western frameworks of queerness (and certainly of love) by once again mobilising people first in thought” because the clamour to uproot Asian perspectives on queerness that don’t reify the west’s mainstream ideologies means the imposition of their own distorted views of reality ideologically imposed on them by their ruling class since the 1970s political counterrevolution of neoliberalism.
You can read the full thread, on the inherent pitfalls of surrendering Third Cinema to the logics of capital and imperialism, here along with citations.
