The informal spread of queer Asian TV in translation

How might you come into contact with queer Asian TV? If you searched using an online search engine, it is likely that you would be directed to YouTube, or other video-sharing sites such as the Chinese-language video platform Bilibili. Here you would find fan-translated and fan-subtitled videos sitting alongside professionally created materials that distribute, sometimes in a shortened or remixed form, queer Asian TV (among many other things).¹ In this essay we examine the ways in which queer Asian TV is distributed, formally and informally, on the video-sharing websites YouTube and Bilibili, in order to better understand the ‘queer Asia’ engendered in this transcultural process. Previous scholarship on queer TV online has focused on Netflix,² but we study video-sharing sites for two main reasons: they do not require a subscription, and therefore can be accessed by everyone; they include fan-subtitled and fan-created videos that demonstrate a grassroots engagement with queer TV. We follow Evren Savcı in arguing for the use of translation as a queer methodology that challenges the Anglocentrism in queer studies and television studies, and allows for the exploration of difference across languages and cultures.³

The placing of videos on sharing sites is not just a straightforward case of media corporations providing access to their products in the form of a taster for the full series, or using the sites for paid distribution. While such uses are common, these sites also host videos produced by other agents, who might be fans or professionals, that excerpt and collect clips from the TV shows.⁴ These videos, as we discuss below, help to create what queer TV scholar Eve Ng calls ‘queer contextuality’ to the shows, highlighting queer elements and extending queer discussion of the original material.⁵ The ways in which the (original) texts are edited, extracted, recombined and otherwise adapted to be sent to other viewers, either through social media or video-sharing sites, are explained through the concept of ‘spreadability’. This refers to the ways in which users redistribute media informally, though we also acknowledge that similar techniques have become part of official promotional strategies following the advent of social media.⁶ In light of this concept, queer Asian TV is always already a noticeable global cultural circuit that has been imbricated in networks of participatory culture and media convergence; it is not confined to watching full episodes on the broadcast medium or official streaming. The fragmentation inherent in ‘spreadability’ differs from previous practices of queer fansubbing and fan distribution, which have typically focused on the translation and circulation of complete films or full episodes of TV shows.⁷

The original formulation of spreadability did not address interlingual translation,⁸ which we argue is central to understanding the global circulation and transnational flows of queer Asian TV. Drawing on André Lefevere’s work, we understand translation to be part of a constellation of rewriting practices that includes remixing, editing and reviewing – indeed, many of the practices discussed in relation to spreadable media – which all rework and recontextualise texts for new audiences.⁹ Despite an acknowledgement of the global nature of television audiences in the field,¹⁰ interlingual translation is seldom a topic of research in queer media studies, and few publications in translation studies address queer TV and its circulation.¹¹ Examination of how televisual texts are cross-geo-linguistically translated offers ways to challenge binary modes of thinking, such as those concerning the local and the global, while at the same time allowing for nuanced understandings of how televisual content is adapted for different audiences. In other words, the context-specific meaning of a text is always complicated by translation and the interpretative possibilities associated with this practice. Texts and ideas travel, and readings are always inflected by local discussion and approaches. Queer Asian TV translated and circulated on today’s global video-streaming sites, then, is both Asian and global, and the ways in which it is translated and socioculturally and linguistically adapted for international audiences tell us about how global networks of queer solidarity can operate, as well as how queer media is subject to international capitalist exploitation as entertainment and commodity. In order to examine these topics more concretely, we now turn to analysing examples from YouTube and Bilibili.

Searching with the English phrase ‘lesbian Asian TV’ on YouTube¹² demonstrates the ways in which queer (specifically lesbian) Asian TV is ‘spread’ and translated by both media companies and fans. Towards the top of the hundreds of results¹³ was a Netflix Philippines promo for the South Korean series Algoissjiman/Nevertheless (2021), focusing on the character Soljiwan, as well as listing videos that covered the top ten Korean lesbian TV dramas or the top five Thai GL (girls’ love) or lesbian dramas.¹⁴ The search results also include short films that have a lesbian theme,¹⁵ and fan-made music videos (FMV) such as an abridged Chinese lesbian love story with songs in Hindi.¹⁶ All of these videos are subtitled in English, offering accessibility to an Anglophone international audience. The combination of Thai, Korean and Chinese also suggests a blending of these cultures under the larger geocultural category ‘Asian’, despite cultural differences, for audiences beyond Asia.

One of our key findings when analysing the results was that the image of Asian lesbians portrayed in the videos found on YouTube tends to lack diversity. We focus here on the video ‘Top 10 South Korean Lesbian Dramas as of 2023’,¹⁷ which had 514,000-plus views and 7000-plus likes at the time of writing, and consists of clips taken from Korean TV and web drama series along with a female-voiced commentary explaining their narratives. It features a predominance of young, able-bodied, cisgendered, feminine-looking lesbians: nine of the ten shows listed here feature young women, while the tenth features well-off, middle-aged characters who register as femme; butch and older lesbians are excluded and there are no lesbian families. This stereotyping of the figure of the Asian lesbian is made more problematic by the fact that such high levels of femininity are typically considered to appeal to a heterosexual male gaze. The clips included from Really Lily (2019) comment on this in a scene where the two female characters are joking with one another about kissing; a male voice is heard, and then two male characters are seen referring to the lesbians behind them. The men represent the voyeuristic, heterosexual male gaze, although in this case the women challenge them and undermine that viewing. While there is some crossover between a heterosexual male gaze and a lesbian gaze, Reina Lewis argues that the latter is connected to ‘subcultural competence’, or the ability to recognise lesbian subcultural practices.¹⁸ Yet these are contextually specific, and so viewers who are not familiar with South Korean female gender and sexual cultures may not recognise elements that are coded as lesbian in a Korean context. The selections from the ten shows typically include kisses, moments of hands meeting or fingers touching faces, or just being together as a couple: these are not the more body- or sex-oriented images seen in films like La vie d’Adèle/Blue is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013), but are more suggestive of intimacy and thus of a gaze that is more lesbian than male. What complicates this for an international, translated understanding is that the selection of TV shows for the video is based on ratings on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, two English-language reviewing sites, which suggests that these shows might be highly rated precisely because they conform to Anglophone stereotypes of Korean lesbians. The imaginary of the Korean, and more widely the Asian, lesbian is therefore partly constituted by its translation and distribution outside of its location of origin. However, there is a risk that this imaginary becomes essentialised through the forms of spreadability we have analysed, reducing the image of the Asian lesbian to a certain type of body that is marketable internationally: the young femme.

Comparative analysis on the Chinese site Bilibili is difficult to undertake, because the English category of ‘lesbian Asian TV’ does not map neatly onto the linguistic preference of the Chinese media landscape. Depending on which Chinese keywords are used, very different outcomes are generated. For example, if phrases such as 亚洲女同电视 (yazhou nütong dianshi) or 亚洲拉拉电视 (yanzhou lala dianshi), both meaning Asian lesbian TV,¹⁹ are used as the key words, most of the results are not lesbian related. Censorship is no doubt responsible for this, as terms like nütong and lala are generally recognised words for lesbians and so more likely to result in videos being removed. The search results are, however, very different if a phrase such as 亚洲姬剧（yazhou jiju), also meaning Asian lesbian TV, is used. Here, 姬 (ji) is a laudatory title for women in classic Chinese. It has now become an internet buzzword in China, referring to queer women because of its gender connotation as well as having the same pronunciation as 基 (ji), another Chinese word meaning gay. 姬剧 (jiju) is thus a shorthand in Chinese for lesbian-themed TV used by Chinese communities of queer women. The results associated with 亚洲姬剧 (yazhou jiju) increase significantly, including videos clearly marked as non-Asian (such as the video clip from the Polish production Kontrola/Control [2018–22], with Polish audio and English and Chinese subtitles)²⁰ and videos without any indication of geographical origin. This difference suggests the phrase 亚洲 (yazhou), meaning Asian, is not a sensitive filter on Bilibili in categorising lesbian-themed TV, and the Asian cultural identity is less noticeable in the Chinese context than the lesbian content. This can be exemplified by the video 换成熟肉了, 三台姬剧预告, 狗血+橘里橘气家庭伦理剧 (Huancheng shuroule, santai jiju yugao, gouxue+julijuqi jiating lunliju), literally ‘Have changed into subtitled version, the forecast from Channel Three, dramatic + lesbian family ethics dramas’.²¹ Here, Chinese phrases such as 姬剧 (jiju) and 橘里橘气 (julijuqi)²² in the video’s title clearly indicate the lesbian elements of the dramas, but only when the video starts does it become clear that it is a Chinese subtitled promotional clip for the Thai show Rākkæw/The Root (2022). The fact that the Thai origin of the drama is not mentioned in the title suggests that this does not matter to its viewers. A lack of attention to, or interest in, place of origin is also evident in the video clips edited and uploaded by fans. Mixing various clips from queer TV, films and media sources from around the world, and replacing the original soundtrack with new music, these fan music videos (FMV) often centre on a specific theme in queer relationships, such as the moment just before a kiss. For example, the video clip [橘里橘气]高颜值姬片混剪 ([Julijuqi] Duobu gaoyanzhi jipian hunjian), which translates as ‘Lesbian: a remix of many films/TV with good looking lesbians’,²³ comprises a mix of scenes taken from, for example, Asian (Seon-am-yeogotamjeongdan/Seonam Girls’ High School Detective Team [2014]), European (Skam España [2018–20]) and Anglophone (Fingersmith [2005]) lesbian TV and films. The music used is the theme song of 第一次遇见花香的那刻 (Diyici yujian huaxiang de nake/Fragrance of the First Flower [2021]), a Taiwanese lesbian TV drama.

As with our previous Korean example, the majority of women portrayed are young, feminine and able-bodied, confirming a certain stereotype of televisual representations in the circulation and translation of queer women. However, these remixes demonstrate more agency in their rewriting than the list videos on YouTube, being tailored for an audience that is unlikely to see explicit queer images in the local mainstream media, correspondingly creating more queer contextuality for the shows by placing them in proximity to, and dialogue with, other queer dramas. The regional specificities of queer Asian TV in China tend to be weakened by online fans and platform users through their remixing of multicultural and multilinguistic contents from a wide range of international media resources, especially as queer-themed local content is more likely to be censored by these platforms, or even reported by heteronormative viewers under the so-called ‘self-censorship’ policy – in reality, this policy is imposed by the Chinese government, requesting Chinese social media and platforms to increase their control over potentially sensitive content, including material that does not fit with the mainstream gender roles and expectations.²⁴

Using a translational approach, it is clear that queer Asian TV is recontextualised and complicated by the forms (remixes, list videos) that distribute it. As Savcı argues, translation draws attention to the ‘disjunctures’ in apparently homogenous ideas as they travel across languages.²⁵ Our examples demonstrate the disjunctures in the term ‘queer Asian TV’: it is not always relevant in a Chinese context and is complicated by the ways in which Chinese fans place media produced in Asia in dialogue with media from elsewhere. Our example of a list of Korean lesbian dramas also highlights how the category is shaped by English-language understandings of those terms, undermining the distinctive qualities of Asian TV as Asian. Queer Asian TV is produced in and through its cross-linguistic and transcultural circulation, which includes it being a commodity that can be reshaped and reworked in a form of spreadability. This is complicated by the fact that such (re-)circulation is inextricably a form of both capitalist exploitation and of grassroots meaning-making and solidarity. The focus on young, feminine and able-bodied lesbians in the videos we analyse here constitutes a reductive approach to Asian queerness that is highlighted through the continuous selection of such images in remixes and other user-generated videos. While this image is of commercial value, it also enables a sense of recognition in some viewers, and the possibility of interpretation and re-use. Queer Asian TV cannot be separated from both possibilities, just as it cannot be separated from the processes of its local and global reception and circulation.

Footnotes