The Lily Festival in Bangkok: The interplay of Yuri/Girls Love, book culture, and sapphic literary communities
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Abstract
Since the late 2010s, the female homoerotic romance genre known as Yuri or Girls Love (hereafter GL), which originated in Japan, has been experiencing significant growth in Thailand and the broader Asian region. Despite this expansion, the role of literary festivals in sustaining GL’s cultural and community dimensions remains underexplored. This research examines the Lily Festival in Bangkok, which has run since 2018, as a contested terrain where the economic imperatives of digital platforms and commercial publishers intersect with gender-as-agenda driven by sapphic organizers, writers, and publishers. Drawing on feminist book history and critical event studies, and employing in-depth interviews with festival organizers, publishers, writers, illustrators, GL series production company representatives, and stars, this study traces the festival’s evolution from a subcultural Comic Market-style event into a literary festival. The findings demonstrate that this transformation is not merely commercial but ideological: the festival functions as both a marketplace and a sanctuary, where sapphic literary communities are built and sustained through the very contestation between capitalist platforms and queer publishers. This study contributes to the underrepresented scholarship on gender and contemporary book culture in Southeast Asia, highlighting the Lily Festival as a dynamic site where literary production, queer activism, and the Thai GL ecosystem are intertwined.
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