As a fieldworker, I have usually found myself well accepted as a participant in various contexts, in which I became deeply submerged and consequently my personal experiences also became part of the research data. Being an anthropologist, I regard these discussions as highly valuable data, as, unlike data acquired from interviews and written sources, these data are acquired without any manipulation by the researcher or an author and they offer insights into how actual people relate to the topic. My research has hardly ever focused on manga as such but as an anthropologist conducting fieldwork on issues of sexuality, gender and later also employment, spanning the years from 1991 until 2003 and being based in Osaka, Kyoto and Tokyo, the topic regularly came up in discussions and activities I engaged in with informants. This paper intends to make a beginning in filling these gaps by concentrating on the following questions: What is the meaning of the changes in BLB shōjo manga towards more realistic and contemporary Japanese situations and how do they relate to gay manga and gay pornography in connection with the yaoi dispute?
Although the actual meaning of yaoi is limited to manga in which the depiction of sex is pivotal, in this discussion, as well as in many other contexts, the term is used to include all BLB manga. So far in English scholarship, the yaoi ronsō, a discussion concentrating on the politics of depictions of men having sex with men in shōjo manga, is, apart from some remarks in my earlier work, to my knowledge never mentioned. manga made by gay men for gay men, and pornography. The genre is commonly treated in isolation from other phenomena, such as gay manga, i.e. Answers to questions such as who reads the genre and why have been sought in women's resistance to patriarchy, ignoring the fact that there are also many gay male readers. The same point is made about Japanese films and television shows depicting homosexuality, which, like the manga, are mostly aimed at a female audience. McLelland takes the discussion further to include newer manga situated in the present but insists that the depictions are equally not representative of actual gay existence, as they are over-romantic. However, little attention has been paid to developments in the 1980s, let alone the 1990s, resulting in an outdated depiction of the genre, with, for instance, a stress on the foreignness or otherworldliness of the situations described.
Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Contextĭiscussing Depictions of Male Homosexuality in Japanese Girls' Comics, Gay Comics and Gay PornographyĪ number of papers in English have discussed the genre of shōjo manga known as BLB (boy loves boy) manga in which gay male characters figure prominently and which were first published in the 1970s.
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