Japanese boys’ love, Korean idols, and Indonesian fandom: Exploring possibilities to queer gender and sexual normativities

The popularity of Japanese and Korean pop culture have brought new encounters with diverse representations of gender and sexuality for contemporary Indonesian fans. This situation is in stark contrast with current Indonesian public discourses, which are saturated with religious moralism, traditional gender norms, and heteronormativity. The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which Japanese boys’ love and Korean pop music have offered alternative discourses for Indonesian fans in understanding gender and sexuality. Seven self-identified Indonesian female fans co-constructed the data with the researcher in a semi-structured, audio-taped interview. The analysis reveals that these Japanese and Korean pop cultures have evidently opened up an access to alternative practices and discourses on gender and sexuality for Indonesian fans - from crossdressing cosplay (crossplay) to online same-sex sex in Twitter roleplay world. However, hetero-patriarchal discourses are also quick to recuperate their dominance in this situation, such as by confining those subversive practices into the realms of fantasy or entertainment. Nevertheless, the increasingly unstable binary of “real”/”virtual” hints a possibility that complete compartmentalisation might not be possible; queerness may always permeate conservative morality and gender-bending may always disrupt patriarchy