Flower Tribes and Female Desire: Complicating Early Female Consumption of Male Homosexuality in Shōjo Manga

Abstract

Shonenai (boys' love) manga is not about homosexuality. Or at least, many critics, scholars, and artists of shojo (girls') manga, of which shoneriai is a subgenre, have long denied a connection between real homosexuality and these narratives, which depict beautiful adolescent males in romantic and/ or sexual relationships with each other.1 Multiple functions have been ascribed to the shoneriai genre, created by and for females, and the bishdnen (beautiful boy) characters who serve as protagonists in these works, yet this denial has remained consistent.2 Many readers, however, have drawn their own conclusions.