One of the hardest parts about writing my 2008 Participations article on boys’ love manga fans was leaving out all the rich qualitative data that I received in my open-ended questions. Since the article is now long since published, and other scholars are continuing to research BL audiences, I thought it might be useful...
Yesterday, Digital Manga Publishing announced that its publications have been suspended from the Kindle publishing platform for violation of Kindle’s prohibition against “Pornography and hard-core material that depicts graphic sexual acts,” according to DMP, presumably a result of DMP’s yaoi manga. (A warning that this was coming was first released via tweet on Feb....
What is male/male romance, and how is it different from gay romance? That’s a question I’ll be tackling as part of my research agenda for the next year. In the past, I’ve tentatively defined the male/male romance as a narrative that focuses on the romance between two or more men that has been written...
What is yaoi research, anyway? Technically, yaoi research is research about Japanese male/male romantic and/or erotic manga, colloquially known in the West as yaoi or boys’ love, and in Japan as ビーエル (BL). These genres are most commonly written by women for a primarily female audience. However, in this blog we will be extending...
50 Shades of Grey & Fanfic
CNN ran an article Friday placing the popularity of 50 Shades of Grey within an erotic fanfic context (the book grew out of what was originally a Twilight fanfic story). The article mentions the predominance of gay and lesbian fanfic, written, according to Dr. Francesca Coppa of Muhlenberg College, because in fanfic’s early ’60s-’70s...
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