Love Manga Research Articles

A Feminist Psychological Analysis on the Playful Embracement of Boys' Love Manga

A Feminist Psychological Analysis on the Playful Embracement of Boys' Love Manga

Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan ed. by Mark McLelland et al.

Reviewed by: Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan ed. by Mark McLelland et al. Deborah Shamoon (bio) Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan. Edited by Mark McLelland, Kazumi Nagaike, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker. University of Mississippi Press, Jackson, 2015. x, 303 pages. $65.00, cloth; $30.00, paper. In the title of a 2001 online article, Mark McLelland asked, "Why Are Japanese Girls' Comics Full of Boys Bonking?"1 Notwithstanding the playful title, McLelland was one of the first scholars writing in English to take the genre of boys' love (BL) seriously. Fifteen years later, this question is [End Page 462] less surprising as boys' love manga has proliferated in Japan and abroad, and slash (gay-themed fan fiction) has gained prominence in the West. The idea that women might enjoy fantasies of gay male romance and sex has achieved a degree of mainstream recognition, even in the United States. As McLelland argues in that early essay, the more interesting question is not "Why?" but "Why not?" or more specifically, why do we assume that gay images should be the domain of gay men alone? McLelland, joined by Kazumi Nagaike, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker as editors of a new collected volume, offers various and nuanced answers to this question and others: not only "why?" but who is reading, what is at stake for readers, and writers, and how the greater prominence of boys' love has both granted legitimacy and threatened free expression. The volume is arranged more or less chronologically, beginning with a chapter by Barbara Hartley on Takabatake Kashō's illustrations of bishōnen(beautiful boys) in the 1920s and ending with a chapter by Mark McLelland on the future of boys' love in light of government censorship such as the "Non-Existent Youth Bill" and grassroots attempts to remove BL from public libraries. Overall, chapters focus on fans (fujoshi or rotten girls, that is, female fans of boys' love), on professional and amateur writers and artists, and on discourses around fans. While there is some close reading of prominent texts, the emphasis is more on reading practices. The two standout chapters in this volume are translations of essays by Fujimoto Yukari and Ishida Hitoshi, which originally appeared in a special issue of the Japanese literary magazine Yuriika (Eureka) in 2007 on boys' love studies. Fujimoto's essay is an update and reconsideration of an essay she first published in 1991, which is also available in English translation.2 In revisiting her earlier argument that the male characters stand in for female readers, Fujimoto finds that as the genre has matured and diversified, the scope of playing with gender has widened to "experiments in transgressing every possible border of sexual difference" (p. 85). While boys' love manga, with its generic code of masculine seme (top) and feminine uke (bottom) pairings, is superficially heteronormative, Fujimoto argues that couplings contain more nuanced character traits that are not limited to a strict male-female binary, and playing with various pairings allows readers to experience sexual fantasies freed from gender oppression. Ishida likewise takes on the issue of heteronormativity in boys' love, along with the yaoi ronsō (boys' love debate) begun in 1992, which argues that the genre is homophobic and appropriates and/or misrepresents gay culture. The fact that characters often claim they are not gay and disavow gay sex as disgusting (kimochi warui) adds fuel to the debate. Ishida summarizes the response of BL readers and [End Page 463] writers, who tend to assert that the male characters are fantasies, not meant to be understood as real gay men but as points of identification for female readers. However, Ishida argues they are both: "Understanding the intersection of representational appropriation and self-projection will help us see why yaoi/BL endlessly demands the reinsertion of gender power dynamics via the roles of uke and seme to a world where the gender binary is deconstructed through featuring two characters of the same sex" (p. 229). These two chapters help to bring the Japanese language scholarship on boys' love and the debates surrounding it to a wider readership. Chapters by James Welker...

Men on the market: Feminist analysis of age-stratified male–male romance in Boys’ Love manga

Abstract 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.

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

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.

Boys' Love anime and queer desires in convergence culture: transnational fandom, censorship and resistance

Despite its ever-growing international popularity, Japanese anime and the industries that support it are in the middle of a crisis. In an era of media convergence, popularity has not translated into consistent profits as anime producers continue to lose money at home and overseas to rampant file sharing and ubiquitous streaming video sites illegally hosting copyrighted content that can be viewed for free. As a result, convergence is simultaneously fuelling the current anime industry crisis while also opening up new opportunities to make participatory culture work for both fans and producers – especially for niche markets like Boys' Love. This article explores how Boys' Love fans in Japan and other countries often operate in contradictory tension with and against anime industries and socio-cultural values as they access, consume and create around a form of homoerotic media that they do not want to be assimilated into mainstream culture and its norms. As more transnational publishers and distributors are licensing and selling Boys' Love manga and anime, the boundaries between margin and centre have begun to blur, producing intersecting and divergent desires among fans and producers around the commodification and adaptation of queer texts. The first part of this article focuses on how convergence is shaping the dynamic between anime producers and fan consumers, where niche markets have begun to figure into this situation, and what is politically at stake in the consumption and circulation of Boys' Love texts. The second part of the article examines several examples of Boys' Love television anime and Original Video Animation (OVA), with particular attention to Youka Nitta's Embracing Love and Shungiku Nakamura's Junjo Romantica, to assess how deliberate censorship in anime adaptations can sometimes efface important queer meaning in a text while in other instances it can open up new fantasies and ways of reading for viewers that are in keeping with the queerness the author ascribes to the genre.

"Boys' love manga: Essays on the sexual ambiguity and cross-cultural fandom of the genre," edited by Antonia Levi et al.

Book review, Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry, and Dru Pagliassotti, eds. Boys' love manga: Essays on the sexual ambiguity and cross-cultural fandom of the genre. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. Paperback, $39.95 (280p) ISBN 978-0786441952.

Beautiful, Borrowed, and Bent: “Boys’ Love” as Girls’ Love inShôjo Manga

Beautiful, Borrowed, and Bent: “Boys’ Love” as Girls’ Love in<i>Shôjo Manga</i>