Reaching Out from the Margins:
Queer Community Formation in an Aesthete Magazine for Teenage Girls
James Welker
บทคัดย่อในงานการประชุมวิชาการLocal Japanese Responses to Queer Activism ในการประชุมนานาชาติ เพศวิถี เพศภาวะ และสิทธิในเอเชีย: การประชุมนานาชาติครั้งแรกว่าด้วยเรื่องเควียร์ศึกษา (Sexualities, Genders, and Rights in Asia, 1st International Conference of Asian Queer Studies) จัดโดยโครงการจัดตั้งสำนักงานสิทธิมนุษยชนศึกษาและพัฒนาสังคม มหาวิทยาลัยมหิดล และเครือข่ายเควียร์แห่งภาคพื้นเอเชียแปซิฟิก ระหว่างวันที่ 7-9 กรกฎาคม 2548 ณ โรงแรมแอมบาสเดอร์ กรุงเทพมหานคร
The popularity of the SHONEN AI (boys love) genre of SHOUJO MANGA (girls comics) has drawn significant critical attention. While SHONEN AI has been described as offering a liberatory sphere within which readers are freed to experiment with romance and sexuality, what has little been noted is the genres appeal to young people whose sexual desire and identities transgress heteropatriarchal norms. Given the popularity of this genre, with its focus on beautiful, often androgynous boys in love with each others, it is unsurprising that the end of the 1970s saw the appearance of a few magazines aimed at teenage girls and focused on these BISHONEN (beautiful boys) and their romantic, sometimes sexual relationships with each other. Among the readership of these TANBIHA (cult of aesthetes) magazines were young women and men drawn to depictions of a range of homosexual and transgender desire and identities. The existence of these readers is evidenced by their contributions to the magazines, sometimes as editorial commentary, sometimes as confessional testimony. ARAN (Allan) specifically published a LESBIENNE personals column, which first appeared literally on the margins of the magazines, and which eventually made space for male readers. In allowing readers to make textual if not physical contact with each other, these magazines functioned as sites where queer young people were able to find or create communities of others like themselves. This paper examines reader contributions to these TANBIHA magazines and explores their role in community formation among young people resisting heteronormativity.
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