This is a preprint version. The published version is available at https://www.plarideljournal.org/article/the-meaning-making-of-thai-boys-love-cultural- products-from-the-perspectives-of-international-media-a-corpus-driven-approach/ The meaning-making of Thai Boys’ Love cultural products from the perspectives of international media: A corpus-driven approach Boys’ Love (BL) is a genre of cultural products which features erotic and romantic relationships between men. This study seeks to examine the meaning-making of Thai BL products from the perspectives of international media. Methodologically, corpus-driven discourse analysis is adopted. The 57,336-word corpus consists of coverage from 28 media outlets across 10 countries. It is sourced from content published between 2015 and 2021. The investigation is conducted at word (keyword analysis), sentence (N-gram analysis) and paragraph (qualitative analysis) level. Overall, three emerging themes can be captured. First, the strong affection theme regards Thai BL as a lyrical world replete with love and romance, outperforming their Western equivalent because of sensitivity to a romantic ideal known as “love conquers all”. Second, the determinant of audience participation theme considers Thai BL a factor encouraging participation from fandoms. This is exemplified in a cultural phenomenon of fans learning the Thai language in order to comprehend a series without dependence on subtitles. Third, the connection with reality theme treats Thai BL as a reflection of various real-life situations including LBGT issues in Southeast Asia. Such reality is comprised of two domains: what is happening in real life and what is missing in real life. Keywords: Boys’ Love (BL); corpus-driven discourse analysis; cultural products; international media; Thailand; Yaoi Introduction Boys’ Love (BL) is a genre of cultural products which features erotic and romantic relationships between men (Zanghellini, 2009). It takes a wide range of forms including TV series (Wong, 2020), films (Xu & Tan, 2021), fiction (Zhou et al., 2018) and comics (Tanaka & Ishida, 2018). Across cultures, it is also known by other names such as yaoi and shōnen-ai in Japan, danmei in a sinosphere and slash in the West (McHarry, 2011). Although some distinctions between these terms have been made (e.g. Tanaka and Ishida 2018), the current study treats them as under the umbrella of BL (Madill & Zhao, 2021). Originating in Japan in the early 1970s, BL was observed to be internationalised several decades later (McLelland, 2000a). Arguably, a media platform was one of the contributing factors behind such a phenomenon. For instance, in the form of a website, Japanese BL products were translated into a variety of European languages and fan art based on those products was also posted (McLelland, 2000a).