YAOI Fans As Queer Women in Japan

YAOI Fans As Queer Women in Japan

Akiko Mizoguchi

บทคัดย่อในงานการประชุมวิชาการQueering of Our Own: Queer Practices of Japanese Women ในการประชุมนานาชาติ เพศวิถี เพศภาวะ และสิทธิในเอเชีย: การประชุมนานาชาติครั้งแรกว่าด้วยเรื่องเควียร์ศึกษา (Sexualities, Genders, and Rights inAsia, 1st International Conference of Asian Queer Studies) จัดโดยโครงการจัดตั้งสำนักงานสิทธิมนุษยชนศึกษาและพัฒนาสังคม มหาวิทยาลัยมหิดล และเครือข่ายเควียร์แห่งภาคพื้นเอเชียแปซิฟิก ระหว่างวันที่ 7-9 กรกฎาคม 2548 ณ โรงแรมแอมบาสเดอร์ กรุงเทพมหานคร

Starting in the early 1960s, YAOI fictions, male homosexual comics and illustrated novels created by women for women in Japan, cater to at least half a million women today. Through many stronger works of the 1960s and 1970s have proven to be crossover hits with readers of both genders, more recent YAOI comics and illustrated novels which feature explicit depiction of male homosexual acts have excluded straight male. Today over 95% readers and 100% writers and artists are women for YAOI genre as a whole, and as such, YAOI provides a female gendered and fully sexualized discursive space. What female YAOI fans communicated in this space through the representations of male homosexual romance narratives are their sexual desires and fantasies. Regardless of their sexual identities such as straight, lesbian, bisexual and others, these women operate in the YAOI space together. For example, a married woman who reads YAOI fictions and shares her fantasies with other YAOI fans on a daily basis, and claims that such acts feel more sexual than her actual sex acts is not at all rare. Instead of calling these women straight women who like YAOI fictions, or women who belong to lesbian continuum with lesbian fans of YAOI fictions, this paper proposes to call them queer. By examining womens words from magazines, face-to-face interviews and email correspondences, this paper explores this queerness that exceeds conventional categories of sexual orientations in the hope of expanding the discussions of womens queer sexualities in contemporary Japan.

Reaching Out from the Margins

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.

Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan

 

Title: Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan: Cultural, Myths and Social Realities
Author: Mark J. McLelland
Publisher: OX: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004
ISBN: 0-7007-1425-1

Contents

1. Introduction

- Whose homosexuality?

- The lexicon of same-sex love

- Japanese term describing same-sex attraction

- Research approach

- Chapter outline

2. Homosexuality in Japanese History

- Introduction

- Tokugawa homosexualities

- The Meiji discourse of sexual deviance

- Post-war understandings of homosexuality

- Japan’s ‘gay boom’

- Homosexuality before the law

- Conclusion

3. Just Like a Girl: Images of Homosexual Men as Feminine

- Introduction

- Homosexuality and cross-dressing in Japanese entertainment World

- Representations of homosexual men as transgendered in popular print media

- The treatment of homosexual men who ‘pass’

- Conclusion

4. The Love between ‘Beautiful Boys’ in Women’s Comics

- Introduction

- The treatment of women’s sexuality in media discourse

- Representations of women in men’s comics

- The ‘love between boys’ in women’s comics

- Women’s comics as a site of gender resistance

- Gay men’s reponses to women’s comics

- Conclusion

5. Gay men as Women’s Best Friends and Ideal Marriage Partners

- Introduction

- The contested meaning of marriage in modern Japan

- Gay men as women’s ideal partner in Okoge and Twinkle

- Real and counterfeit marriage

- Why are women who marry gay men ‘trendy’?

- Are gay men really women’s best friends?

- Gay men’s changing response to marriage

- Conclusion

6. Images of homosexuality in the Gay Media

- Introduction

- Stero-‘typing’ in the gay community

- Japanese gay magazines

- Fantasy figures in gay magazines

- Function of gay magazines

- Fantasy figures in gay pornographic video

- Sons, brothers, fathers and lovers: amae in Japanese personal ads

- Gay internet resources

- Conclusion

7. Interview with Japanese Gay men

- Introduction

- Profile of interviewees

8. Japanese Gay Men’s Self-Understanding

- Introduction

- Gay identity

- Coming Out

- Gay community

- Sex and relationships

- Marriage and family

- Living stituation

- New technologies

- Japan vs ‘the west’

- Conclusion

9. Is there a Japanese Gay Identity?

- Introduction

- The sexual identity model

- The sexual rights model

- Conclusion

หมายเหตุ:

- จำได้ว่าเล่มนี้สั่งคิโนะไปประมาณ2เดือน เพราะเป็นช่วงที่สำนักพิมพ์Curzon กำลังเปลี่ยนมาเป็น RoutledgeCurzon

- ได้ลายเซ็นอาจารย์มาจากการประชุมนานาชาติ 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