Drawing from the body – the self, the gaze and the other in Boys’ Love manga

Abstract

The body and the gaze are of high importance in all erotic visual media, including Boys’ Love (BL) manga. But in contrast to many other visual media, comics and cartoons do not just show the human body as it appears, but as it is experienced or fantasized. Scott McCloud formulated a basic theory of the gaze in comics when he stated that, while gazing at another person, one sustains a constant awareness of one's own face, but that this mind picture is only a sketchy arrangement. Comics reflect that twofold pattern of the gaze by employing different drawing styles for the interior mind picture of the self and the exterior view of the other. This paper addresses how McCloud's model of the gaze plays out on a strictly visual level when it is applied to erotic situations in different types of comics and manga. Within that context, I ask about the form and location of the gaze in BL manga, an erotic medium that is by definition (mostly) drawn by female artists for a (mostly) female audience, but with an almost exclusively male cast, making it a textbook example of the ‘female gaze’ at male erotic objects.