Bliss Cua Lim is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic and Temporal Critique (Duke U Press, 2009 / Ateneo de Manila U Press, 2011) and a member of the Editorial Collective of Camera Obscura and the Advisory Board of Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication. Her next book, The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema (forthcoming from Duke U Press), analyzes the crisis-ridden history of film archiving in the Philippines. Her numerous articles have appeared in journals such as Discourse, Kritika Kultura, Art Journal, and Spectator, and her poetry has appeared in Nang Magazine.
Complicating Japan’s presumed cultural ownership of anime is its historical reliance on outsourced animation labor across Asia. Inter-Asian histories of subcontracted animation labor, alongside the transcultural production, circulation, and fan uptake of anime, donghua, manga, manhwa, and komiks demand a balanced analysis that recognizes cultural, historical and geopolitical specificity but also refutes claims to national ownership and cultural exclusivity. Scholarly consensus identifies Japan, South Korea, and China as central nodes in the intermedial regionalization of inter-Asian popular culture, while the United States is understood as the core of global English-language fan practices. Against this backdrop, I explore a two-fold approach to intermedial regionalization in a minor mode. First, Trese (2021), anchors my analysis of transnational animation in the Philippines, a minor node in comparison to East Asian or American hegemons. Second, I foreground a heterogenous continuum of Filipino/a/x artists and fans surrounding girls love (GL, yuri, baihe, lesbian komix), a queer transcultural genre of female homoerotic fiction. Enjoying less marketability and academic recognition than boys love (BL, yaoi, shounen’ai, danmei), girls love is a minor transcultural mode. Beyond representational content, its authors and fan communities are queer in the sense of confounding fixed identitarian coordinates of gender, sexuality, class, nationality, age, race, ethnicity, and religion. Hailed as the first Filipino animated series on Netflix, the detective-horror series Trese (2021), is an adaptation of a cult Filipino graphic novel with an androgynous heroine. Although publicity hyped its Filipino and Filipino American cast, writers, and producers (i.e., above-the-line “creatives”), most of its animation workers were not based in the Philippines. With a production company headquartered in Indonesia and Singapore and animation studios based in Los Angeles and Seoul, Trese reverses the Philippines’ history of below-the-line animation labor for Japanese and American animation companies. At the same time, Trese exemplifies Netflix’s attempt to become a global TV giant through international expansion and glocalization. Pivoting away from the formal economy of animation labor and media giants, this talk also looks at subcultural creators and informal economies of fan labor. I consider Ligaw-Tingin (2018), a Philippine anthology of queer women komix artists, alongside online fan communities like Yuri/GL PH on Facebook and Filipino translations of Japanese shōjo manga on bootleg aggregator sites. Recalling the penumbral quality of devalued outsourced labor in the global offshore economy, creator economies and fan labor are often overlooked despite their crucial role in ensuring the circulation of queer media (via promotion of foreign and local artists and titles, fan conventions, fan talk, and unlicensed uploads and scanlations). If language differences are a barrier to media globalization and regionalization in key geocultural markets, then localized transcultural flows depend on the multilingual competencies and intercultural knowledge of both fans and authors.