2 - “Retweet for a collab”: Celebrity Capital and the Rise of Inter-Asian Queer Pornography

The end of the COVID-19 pandemic fueled an intensified movement of people across Asia, reshaping the contours of Asian amateur queer pornography that has recently become widely available on digital media platforms like Twitter and OnlyFans (Jacobs et al. 2020; Cao 2021; Ding and Song 2023). This paper investigates the emergence of “inter-Asian queer pornography”, wherein queer, Asia-based pornographers travel across the continent to metropolitan “gay capitals” such as Bangkok, Taipei, and Tokyo to collaborate on creating queer pornographic media. As a new modality of queer porn production, inter-Asian queer pornography involves increased collaboration among queer Asian “microcelebrities” (Senft 2008) of different national origins and racial and ethnic backgrounds, lubricated by increased mobility. Drawing on visual and textual analysis of these microcelebrities’ social media content, we unpack this phenomenon through the critical lens of “celebrity capital” (Driessens 2013), which is grounded on repeated media appearances, and translates into social and economic capital. We ask: How do digital platforms motivate new mobilities in Asian queer pornography production? How do these inter-Asian connections reshape transnational Asian queer subjectivities? And what hierarchies, exclusions, and problems may such a new mode of porn production produce? We show that, while inter-Asian queer pornography opens exciting venues for inter-referencing, queer visibility, and community-building, it simultaneously creates new forms of homonormativity in relation to hegemonic bodily norms and spatial and linguistic hierarchies.

Co-Author 1
Lin Song, Jinan University