Comics as Everyday Theory: The Counterpublic World of Taiwanese Women Fans of Japanese Homoerotic Manga (original) (raw)
Related papers
Girls who love boys' love: Japanese homoerotic manga as trans-national Taiwan culture
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 14649373 2012 689707, 2012
Based on interviews with 30 female readers of BL ('boys' love') manga conducted in Taipei in 2005, this paper analyses the BL scene in Taiwan from the perspective of its social utility as a discursive arena enabling women collectively to think through transforming social ideologies around gender and sexuality. This form of participatory pop culture is most interesting, I argue, not because of any unilateral subversiveness vis-à-vis culturally dominant understandings of (feminine) gender or (homo)sexuality-although it does often contest such dominant understandings. Rather, it is important in providing a space for the collective articulation of young women's in-process thinking on these questions. The paper also engages with the Japaneseness of the genre as consumed in Taiwan in order to consider the imaginative function that its perceived cultural 'otherness' performs.
2017
Since the early 1970s, female readers have enjoyed stories of romance between beautiful adolescent boys in the form of shōnen ai manga. Initially characterised by exotic locations, all-boys schools, and tragic narratives, the genre has since expanded to include a wide range of subjects and themes, and is now referred to boys’ love (hereafter BL) manga. Written largely by women for a presumed female audience, BL manga is a subgenre of shōjo (girls’) manga centred on male-male romance and eroticism. Scholars have argued that, as a romance genre for women featuring male homoeroticism, BL manga provide alternatives to formulaic depictions of heteronormative sexuality prevalent throughout phallogocentric media. While BL manga has become an increasingly global phenomenon and growing field of research over the past two or so decades, BL manga studies has largely focused on why women read BL manga and what the genre means for women and society. By approaching BL manga from an intertextual perspective, this thesis offers an alternative method to understanding how these texts engage with issues of gender and sexuality in Japan. Situated in cultural and gender studies, this thesis utilises research from theorists of BL and shōjo manga, as well as literary studies. Thus, this research meets a need for more textual analysis in the field of BL manga studies. The aim of this research is to investigate the following question: how do girls and women who read and write male homoerotic manga experience pleasure through intertextual transformations? Through a close textual analysis of select shōjo, BL, and BL-informed manga, this thesis traces a genealogy of intertextual practices from Japanese literature through to shōjo manga and BL manga. In addition, many of the texts examined are not classified as “BL manga”, but what this thesis terms “BL-informed” texts, or manga that exhibit similar graphic and/or thematic elements as BL manga while also incorporating intertextual practices. How BL-informed manga transform existing conventions, and the pleasures of readers who move between such texts, are of particular interest to this thesis. As far back as Genji monogatari (ca. 1010), girls and women in Japan have been writing, reading, and re-writing texts and sharing them with one another. For just as long, these same texts have played with notions of gender and sexuality. Continuing the tradition of reading/writing/re-writing in shōjo culture, female writers and readers of BL narratives reimagine existing texts, incorporating criticism of gender and issues of inequality, while simultaneously transforming them into sources of pleasure. Girls’ reading/writing practices have historically been maligned by “mainstream” male-dominated media, but through the eroticisation of existing texts and traditionally homosocial environments, female readers are able to escape from the oppressions of reality. Essential to this query is an examination of how girls and women who read manga narratives featuring male homoeroticism experience pleasure. Not only is the act of reading the texts themselves a source of pleasure, but many BL readers are also writers. Such fans create derivative dōjinshi (amateur publications) that reposition “mainstream” manga, prose fiction, and even live-action film narratives around imagined romantic and sexual scenarios between male characters. Thus, distinctions between genre, creator/fan, and original/derivative text are but some of the boundaries that are transformed through girls' intertextual reading/writing practices. The pleasures of textual transformations are also closely associated with transformations of gendered and sexual identities in BL manga. As such, this research considers how the pleasures experienced by BL-literate readers enhance the constructions and/or deconstructions of gender and explorations of sexuality present in shōjo, BL, and BL-informed texts. In so doing, this thesis argues that intertextuality is a key factor of the pleasures for girls and women who read/write manga narratives of male homoeroticsm.
The Bitches of Boys Love comics: the Pornographic Response of Japan's rotten women
Porn Studies, 2020
Boys Love (BL) manga in Japan have a 50-year history that highlights women’s fantasies of male–male romances that at times feature sexual scenes. In recent years, however, sexual depictions in BL manga have become increasingly vulgar and graphic as fans use the term ero (alluding to its ‘eroticism’) to describe BL works that feature stories with visual and narrative similarities to mainstream pornographic comics called eromanga. The popularization of these ‘ero BL’ titles indicates fans’ growing appreciation and knowledge of mainstream pornography literacies as these are worked on and transformed in this non-heteronormative media. Using approaches in New Literacy Studies, this article examines the works of ero BL artists and the discussions surrounding these titles to understand the development of fans’ affective learning and transformative engagement with pornographic literacies in BL manga that challenge normative notions of pornography in Japan.
Comic Studies special issue edited by Sarah Lightman and Catriona McLeod (Eds.)
Yaoi/BL Fandom Survey (only takes 10 mins to complete): https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey Male–male sexuality is the central trope of Boys’ Love (BL) manga with stories tending to revolve around a central uke-seme (‘bottom’–‘top’) pair. Although focused on men, BL is produced and consumed primarily by women. This article presents, from an anglophone British perspective, analysis of age-stratified male–male romance – paederasty – as portrayed in BL. My corpus consists of 234 commercially-translated original Japanese BL manga stories, created by 100 different mangaka (author-artists), published commercially in English between 2003 and 2012. A total of 68 (30%) of these stories were identified as involving agestratified relationships, eight of which were selected for detailed analysis. Seven were selected for typicality: Waru (2007) by Yukari Hashida deemed the most typical. Fangs (2008) by Hiroki Kusumoto was also included in analysis as the most atypical age-stratified story in order to test the robustness of identified patterns. I argue that that, from an anglophone perspective, the characteristic themes of age-stratified BL map surprising well onto the eroticised intra-familial dynamics of Freud and the intra- and inter-familial economics of Lévi-Strauss. The patterns identified are evidenced and discussed under the following headings: the mother identified son, the doubly divested man, the castrated father, men on the market and the mother with the phallus. These themes help build and substantiate my argument that age-stratified BL might work, within an anglophone context at least, as a feminist critique of patriarchy through the mechanism of phallic divestiture.
The Evolution of Same-Sex Comics across Asia, amidst stifling Patriarchy and Toxic Sexual Normativit
International Journal Of English and Studies (IJOES), 2022
Ever since Japanese manga and anime began portraying characters beyond the stereotypical binary of 'man' and 'woman', more specifically termed as 'yuri' (explicit) or 'shōjo-ai' (girl love) and 'yaoi' (explicit) or 'shōnen-ai' (boy love), the other east-Asian countries in the comic and entertainment industry followed suit as well as Chinese manhua and more recently Korean manhwa flourished in the domain. My research paper takes into account of all the prevailing factors, dominating influence of social custom, normative acceptance of the mass and many more which finally result in the culmination of such non-conforming genre(s). Asians have been perceived as typical of being conventional and sexually orthodox in perception and societal makeup. Despite the backlash and negativity of censorship involved initially in such genre(s), the internet boom and the availability of the same over e-platforms like online websites and the inception of webtoons brought in a wave of mass access and popularity of the same. It is interesting to note that BL (boy love) comics which focus on the same-sex love from a man's perspective, defying the traditional male-gaze for the female only, has had a massive viewership among women despite them being biologically straight. This paper makes an effort in trying to understand what reasons underlie such antithetical reading choices where sexuality might or might not essentially play a major role in such decisions.
Queering the Media Mix: The Female Gaze in Japanese Fan Comics
Transformative Works and Cultures, 2015
The Japanese expression "media mix" refers to multimedia marketing strategies for entertainment franchises. Although such franchises are commonly understood as being controlled by large corporations, the fans of these media properties make significant contributions to the mix, often expanding on the central themes of the source texts and queering them by rendering their subtexts explicit. In dōjinshi, or self-published fan comics, female readers create their own interpretations of stories, characters, and relationships in narratives targeted at a male demographic. In BL (boys' love) fan comics, which are notable for their focus on a romantic and often physical relationship between two male characters, the female gaze has created its own overtly homoerotic readings and interpretations that creatively subvert the phallocentrism implicit in many mainstream narratives. The interactions between texts and their readers found in dōjinshi illustrate how cycles of narrative production and consumption have changed in the face of active fan cultures. Because of the closely interrelated nature of the components of increasingly international media mixes, communities of fans have the potential to make positive and progressive contributions to the media mix ecosystem.
Yaoi/BL Fandom Survey (only takes 10 mins to complete): https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey Yaoi, boys’ love (BL), and danmei are all popular culture designations for male-male romance and erotica largely by and for women. This entry provides a brief outline and history of the development of yaoi and BL in Japan; slash fiction, yaoi and BL in the West; and danmei in China. Fan-base demographics are provided for Japan, China, and the Anglophone West. Research provides evidence that the fan-base is, indeed, predominantly female and, as often assumed, heterosexual but that the engaged Anglophone demographic has a much ‘queerer’ set of gender and sexual identities that appears to be the case in Japan and China. Challenges for yaoi/BL/danmei culture include legal remedies for copyright infringement and increasing attempts to regulate sexually explicit material on the internet. While male-male romance and erotica by and for women may be interpreted as having feminist and progressive potential, this is not necessarily the stated motivation for engagement by fans. Even so, importantly, danmei culture is credited with helping to raise public awareness of same-sex relationships in China.
Considering prior findings that confirm Japanese comics' significance on the gender discourse, as well as the absence of studies on this topic in Vietnam, this research aims to explore the influence of manga on Vietnamese female readers in the way they perceive their gender role through semi-structured interviews with 6 female participants, who are heavy consumers of manga and aged 20. Social Cognitive theory is used as the framework analysis, in which the readers' behaviour is formed by the interaction amongst (1) manga-the environmental factor, (2) readers-the personal determinant and (3) audience's action of learning from manga. The result shows that manga has a variety in gender representation, which gives readers more room for identification and thus, they become emotionally engaged and influenced by the traits/behaviour of the characters. This has come to reinforce the influence of manga in shaping readers' perception/behaviour and further reveals new gap that needs advanced studies in the future.