Fran Martinimpassioned engagement with scenarios of male–male love, sex, and romance on the part of
ostensibly straight women arguably necessitates a revised understanding of sexual straightness:
if the imagination of male same-sex sexual behaviors is a primary nexus of erotic investment for
some such women—as it certainly seems to be—then the category and concept of the “straight
woman” has already been significantly redefined (resonating, in some ways, with my analysis of
the implications of the schoolgirl romance narrative, above).
There is a third way, too, in which the BL phenomenon blurs distinctions between the
queer versus the straight and the subcultural versus the mainstream. In recent years, several
media scholars have observed that BL’s massive popularity with female audiences across East
Asia is having a noticeable effect on the content and marketing of commercial mass media.
Chris Berry, for example, analyzes references both to the family-ethics film genre and to BL
in Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee’s global hit Brokeback Mountain, revealing a certain
Chineseness within this apparently very American gay-themed Western:
Brokeback Mountain does seem to [...] borrow from yaoi and tongrennü [female BL
fan] culture in its efforts to produce a text about a male-to-male sexual and romantic
relationship that will appeal to the most important audience for it: women. In this it
is following a well-established pattern in East and Southeast Asia. As yaoi and tongrennü
culture has proliferated, it has begun to impact upon more mainstream materials, rang-
ing from literature to television and film. The appearance and growth of gay male texts
from East Asia correlates not only to the appearance and growth of gay culture in the
region, but also to yaoi and tongrennü culture.
(Berry 2007, 35–36)Berry’s point, that the wide popularization of BL/yaoi in East Asia from the 1990s onwards
coincides historically with the public emergence of gay cultures in the region, is a telling one.
It suggests that even media products that might at first glance appear straightforwardly “gay”
(or tongzhi) in a minoritarian-subcultural sense—Berry cites, for example, the Taiwanese film For-
mula 17 (dir. Chen Yin-jung, 2004)—may also be appealing to a significant audience of “straight”
women. Hong-Chi Shiau observes that an apparent obsession with gay-themed films on the part
of Taiwanese directors in recent years indeed relates, in part, to their attempts to capture a young
female audience using BL-esque representations (Shiau 2008). Using the case study of the homo-
erotic coming-of-age film Eternal Summer (dir. Leste Chen, Taiwan, 2006), Shiau tracks the direc-
tor’s and producer’s shifting conceptualizations of the film’s target audience. Initially, their concept
was to attract a gay male audience; when this failed, marketing efforts shifted towards targeting
high-school girls, with publicity materials playing up the film’s BL qualities (Shiau 2008). More-
over, writing on BL in mainland China, Erika Junhui Yi observes that although the overall tone
of mass media reporting on BL is one of moral panic and stigmatization, in recent times, more
and more mainstream productions—including 2013’s CCTV Spring Festival Gala, one of China’s
highest rating annual TV events—are lightheartedly encouraging viewers to imagine same-sex
relationships between male stars, in order to cater to fan girls’ interests (Yi 2013).
Such examples amplify a tendency that was already emerging, in nascent form, over a decade
ago. For example, as Romit Dasgupta observes, Yonfan’s film Bishonen (Hong Kong, 1998) can be
interpreted as a “gay” film (it was screened, for example, at various lesbian and gay film festivals)
that also appealed to straight female audiences in East Asia through generic reference to yaoi
narratives and characterization (Dasgupta 2006). Dasgupta’s analysis of that film also underlines
the transnational dimension of its hybrid BL/gay narrative, in that Bishonen is a Hong Kong film
that targets a Sinophone audience by adapting narrative and aesthetic conventions of Japanese