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McLelland, Mark J. "Why are Japanese Girls’ Comics full of Boys Bonking?." Refractory 10 2006/2007. Accessed 14 Nov. 2014. <http://refractory.unime ... onking1-mark-mclelland/>. Added by: joachim (14/11/2014, 11:09) |
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| Resource type: Web Article Language: en: English Peer reviewed BibTeX citation key: McLelland2006/2007 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details  |
Categories: General Keywords: Gender, Japan, Manga, Pornography Creators: McLelland Collection: Refractory |
Views: 8/543
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| Attachments | URLs http://refractory. ... g1-mark-mclelland/ |
| Abstract |
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‘Boys’ love’ (shōnen’ai) in Japanese does not refer to the love many young Japanese women feel for male teen idols but instead refers to the homoerotic attraction the male heroes in a genre of Japanese women’s manga (comics) feel for each other. Commencing in the early 1970s, women’s manga began to describe love stories between ‘beautiful boys’ culminating in the mid-80s in an amateur genre termed yaoi (an acronym meaning ‘no climax, no point, no meaning’) which, dispensing with the elaborate plots of the earlier comics, focused instead upon sexual interactions between boys and young men. The advent of the Internet has provided a new forum for Japanese women interested in boys’ love fiction to publish their own and read each other’s work and has enabled western women interested in manga and anime to also participate in this subculture – a subculture that overturns western obsessions with traditional heroism. This paper briefly outlines the history of Japanese women’s fascination with male homosexuality and describes the boy love stories in women’s manga and on the Internet. It criticises western academic analyses of the genre which tend to pathologise both the women fans and Japanese society in general. Instead, it is suggested that it is not the widespread representation of homosexuality in Japanese popular culture that should be problematised, but rather the extreme compartmentalisation of homosexuality in western cultures.
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