In one of your posts, you had discussed Bad Buddy claiming that the show was making fun of queer people's appropriation of the word wife. Can you explain why you think so?
Dear anon, I have decided to answer this one only and not the other ones. Sorry to have worried you. I have gone through the posts you mentioned and am not offended. I appreciate corrections and critiques. I believe in discourse and that's why I haven't blocked anyone. The delay in answering was for me to be sure about what I wanted to say on top of what I had already said.
For context, anon here discussed my comments about Bad Buddy with @lurkingshan which generated a discussion (linked here and here) that I can't take part in thanks to me being on the block list.
I will first reiterate the points I have raised previously and then discuss something broader that may be slightly off-topic while trying to address the criticism. I deeply appreciate comments and corrections, so please mention me so that I can learn too.
I discussed Aof Noppharnach and Bad Buddy as well as the use of the term เมีย ‘wife’ twice: in Part 1 and Part 3 of my meta series MAME & BL Literacies. The discussion with lurkingshan was without the proper context as most of the responses were going off anon’s ask alone.
The use of that term “wife” (เมีย) by Thai queer men is well documented.
Narupon Duangwises and Peter A. Jackson in their 2021 paper Effeminacy and Masculinity in Thai Gay Culture: Language, Contextuality and the Enactment of Gender Plurality note insertive partner or fai ruk being called “husband” (phua) and receptive partner or fai rap being called a “wife” or mia in Thai gay culture.
In the book Male Homosexuality in 21st-Century Thailand based on the longitudinal ethnographic study of Thai queer men, JWL van Wijngaarden highlights the difference between referring to one’s partner as “wife” (mia) and simply as “boyfriend” (faen) and how much more the former is valued.
The Kothi-Panthi queer culture in India/South Asia also use such forms of endearment. The perception that the term is a pejorative is popular in English-language discourse thanks to ethnocentric perspectives.
Also, the way Aof Noppharnach shamed the use of the term เมีย ‘wife’ in Bad Buddy in spite of its usage by queer people, especially the little people among them, is evidence enough of the contempt and disregard he can bring in through his positionality as an “auteur”, which is very unfortunate.
The issue is not the rejection of the term itself. Any creator can do as they please. But the term in question is one used by the little people (ordinary people who do not have much power) among the queers in Thailand, as is evident from the academic sources mentioned above. This is where Aof as a creator and Bad Buddy as a popular media product stand out as a sour thumb for me.
Here is the scene that is being discussed:
There are plenty of Thai viewers endorsing the scene on YouTube, highlighting the incongruence between the term mia and the LGBTQ+ model of queerness, as in case of the top comment (screenshot and machine translation attached).
The incongruence is not random.
It is in part related to the origins and adoption of different models of queerness and what is considered appropriate in each. Thailand's ‘indigenous’ (for a lack of a better term) conceptions of queerness, that has existed long before the LGBTQ+ model was formed, are now interacting with the latter. Not to mention the performance of genders including masculinities in Thailand and elsewhere.
This is not a phenomenon unique to Thailand in any way. I have highlighted many similar interactions such as those in present-day India (with clear schism between those who subscribe to different models on the lines of class, caste, location, language, migrant status, ethnicity, and religion, opportunities for intermingling, intermixing, and creation of glocal variations) and 20th century Japan (where the glocalized version of LGBTQ+ model replaced pre-existing model after a process that took decades) [more on it here and here]. There is an undeniable hegemony of the model that emerged in the West for reasons well known.
As is the case anywhere, the ones to get marginalized within a marginalized community are those who wield lesser power. These are the queer folk who are not privileged enough to air their grievances through the products of one of the most popular media companies in Thailand. These are queer folk who are passive recipients of not only this type of media but also the culture which produces it.
BL as a genre predates LGBTQ+ model and is in extricable linked to Japanese indigenous conception of male-male sexuality. (I have discussed this in length here and here.)
BL in Thailand is a space where different models of queerness – indigenous models of queerness in Thailand, that which was borrowed from historical Japan via BL, and the LGBTQ+ model that is gaining universality - interact. That is why, from Japan, we simultaneously have a ‘kathoey’ main character in I'm the Most Beautiful Count (which has a historical setting) as well as contemporary-setting characters that may embrace terms from the LGBTQ+ model and also those who embrace, reject, or are neutral about mia (เมีย ) and phua (ผัว). This is where BL literacy or lack thereof might interfere, as is the case with Bad Buddy. That's the point of the meta series and source of discussion in the first place.
It is not a neutral rejection of the term mia that we get in Bad Buddy. It is loaded with explicit mention of triumph as a sentiment (GMMTV used the same in the title of the video and the screenshotted top comment points it out too) attributed to calling someone one’s mia and consequently subjugation implied in Pat’s admission of unease.
As @isaksbestpillow has rightly pointed out and I have discussed earlier (in the context of Malayalam descriptor for androphilic men ‘kundan’ which is the equivalent of the Japanese term wakashu, meaning 'young male’ in its dialect of origin in Kozhikode), not everyone uses the same words in the same way. There is significant spatial, social and temporal variation in the popularity of terms like mia among queer community in Thailand. This I learned from the academic sources mentioned above.
Regarding the very valid issue @happypotato48 raised, I am reminded of what Alan Williams wrote (quoted below) in his 2015 article titled ‘Rethinking Yaoi on the Regional and Global Scale’
As an observation of yaoi's 'post/modern' form, consider how a common utterance in the genre—when a character claims that he is 'not gay, but just in love with a man'—has both homophobic (or modern) temporal undertones but also non-identitarian (postmodern) ones. Consider too how yaoi fans often identify as 'straight/gay/lesbian' and so on, due to the preponderance of such labels in their societies, but also have an attraction to yaoi that crosses identitarian borders. Following Mizoguchi Akiko [another BL scholar] who identifies as both an 'out lesbian' and a 'person of yaoi sexuality,' I too identify as 'gay' out of habit, but the label has a rather dated feel to it when compared to the circulation of desire in yaoi fandoms.
I think that while acknowledging that Kongpop’s declaration (in Sotus 1 episode 10 iirc) sure has heterosexist implications that might be detrimental under the identitarian model that is furthering queer liberation at the moment, there are queer possibilities cutting across sex, sexuality and sexual orientation that are neither new nor obsolete. Also, whether it is embracing of one model over another or going through them as one ages or as the trends change, queer plurality should always be welcome, especially when they are contradictory – our queer dialectical, so to speak.
To conclude, I am grateful to anon for bringing this discussion to my attention and I am sorry for delaying and causing you to worry. Ad hominem (dismissing my argument based on my nationality and sexuality, both of which are beyond the point) attack aside, to borrow @lurkingshan's words, I have not made any ‘claims about how queer people in Thailand may feel about this term or Bad Buddy's intentional rejection of it’. It is precisely because ‘Bad Buddy was in fact made by a queer Thai man… Aof Noppharnach speaking directly to his own community and commenting on the tropes of the genre that he does not find helpful to queer men’ I thought it was worth addressing.
To make things clearer, let me give a completely different example: RRR (2022) [hopefully familiar to my readers] was not problematic for having the themes it had in the movie, instead it was so because of their handling along with the positionality of its creator when compared to the little people who could only consume RRR and its casteist, anti-Adivasi, and communalist effects.
I am always happy to be criticized.
and for maintaining the veneer: All scholarly works that I have referenced
Ah meant scholarly sources, I have read your posts (well written!) but not watched the videos (it is hard for me to focus on sound). :) than
