Please note that this talk will be given in German.
This event series is a collaboration between the NRW-Forum and the Institute for Modern Japan at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, organised as part of the ASIA POP exhibition.
This talk focuses on the Boys’ Love (BL) media genre from Japan and how, since its beginnings in the early 1970s, it has spread to other countries across the Asian continent in various ways. There, the genre was not only consumed but also adapted and reintroduced in new forms. But do these transformed Boys Love media also find their way back to Japan? If so, in what form and how? And what do Japanese fans think about this? Focusing on BL media from South Korea, China, Taiwan and Thailand, the speaker will present the findings of her research, which she gathered during her stay in Japan from 2022 to 2023.
Tabea Hoffmann is a Master’s student at the Institute for Modern Japan at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. Her research focuses on the Boys’ Love (BL) media genre. On the one hand, she examines representations of gender and queerness within Japanese BL manga and series; on the other, she explores the fan community surrounding this genre in a global context.
