Reviews of the decade’s major novels collectively tended to disparage the contributions of women who wrote fiction about gay men, for instance, while attempting to create and regulate the boundaries of an elite, literary, male fraternity of gay authors and critics authorized to undertake such writing and to represent gay people within mainstream culture.

(Distelberg, 2010, p. 394)

But reviewers faulted some books for countering “the old stereotypes” so insistently that gay men were now misrepresented as homogenously masculine, middle class, and white. They applied this analysis with the most vigor to the representations offered by positive novels with female authors: Warren’s books and Hobson’s Consenting Adult, which describes a mother’s slow coming to grips with her son’s homosexuality. The Front Runner‘s “heroic masculine characters” — a trio of track stars and their butch ex-marine coach — “are not the faggots that most of us know,” Allen Young wrote. Likewise, the protagonist in Consenting Adult (also a star athlete, as well as a medical student ultimately in a long-term relationship), like the main characters in similar novels, was in Thom Willenbecher’s estimation “not … the stereotypical fag.” Novels with female authors — Warren’s in particular — also received an especially intensive gender analysis not typically applied in other cases.  [...] Although reviewers’ critique of Warren and their observations about the narrowness of her and Hobson’s perspectives had some merit, and although the particular prominence and success of these authors’ novels made them especially ripe targets, these criticisms allowed many reviewers not only to discredit the positive subgenre and the gay men it portrayed as too conventional but also to dismiss the contributions of these female authors.

(Distelberg, 2010, pp. 404-405)

Have perceptions changed among gay reviewers of female-authored m/m fiction?

Reference:

Distelberg, Brian J. (2010). Mainstream fiction, gay reviewers, and gay male cultural politics in the 1970s. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 16(3), 389-427. doi: 10.1215/10642684-2009-036

Why Straight Women Love Gay Romance

First, it’s worth noting that Knight doesn’t differentiate between gay romance and m/m romance. I and a number of other yaoi/BL researchers have attempted to draw a distinction between the two. We use boys’ love and/or m/m romance as broad categories encompassing a variety of narratives featuring a romantic and/or erotic relationship between two or more male characters that are created, usually, by heterosexual women with the intention of appealing to a primarily heterosexual female audience. By contrast, gay romance would be assumed to be written primarily by gay men with the intention of appealing to a primarily gay male audience. The sexual orientation of the m/m creator and/or reader is subject to discussion, of course; for example, my research on BL fandom suggests that the sexual identification of BL readers isn’t nearly as clear-cut in English-speaking countries as it seems to be in Japan. Nevertheless, most research on slash and yaoi has indicated that the majority of its authors and readers are heterosexually oriented women, and Knight also notes in this book, “It’s a fact that the majority of authors in the gay male romance category are women, mostly straight” (Chap. 3 para 2).

Like Knight, Josh Lanyon, in his Man, Oh Man: Writing M/M Fiction for Kinks & Cash (2008), also preferred not to make a clear distinction based on implied authorship and readership. On the other hand, both Knight and Lanyon are men who self-identify as m/m or gay romance writers, so it’s likely that they are viewing the m/m genre from that particular standpoint and that women might have a different perspective on it. The researcher might ask, have women carved out a particular subgenre of their own as the predominant creators and consumers of boys’ love/yaoi manga, slash, and original m/m romantic fiction, or not?  That is, are women doing anything new with the m/m romantic subgenres that they either started or dominate, or are the differences between (gay-male-authored) gay romance and (straight-female-authored) m/m romance more of a historical artifact than a quantitatively useful distinction?

In Chapter 8 of Knight’s book, a few of the women address the question of whether there’s any difference between gay erotica and gay romance, which is not quite the same as the question asked above. The consensus seemed to be that gay romance offers more complex and emotionally nuanced plots in which sex scenes, when present, serve the story, while gay erotica focuses on sex, with little to no framing plot required. However, there was no clear differentiation in this discussion between who writes one or the other, which sets it apart from the conversations revolving around boys’ love manga, which is said to be mostly created by women for women, and bara manga, which is said to be mostly created by gay men for gay men. Does this reflect cultural differences in how the various genres arose and have been received? Or perhaps a technical difference between the media (graphic-based manga vs. text-based novels)? Has the discussion of m/m romance simply not evolved to that point yet? Or was it simply not clearly addressed in this particular set of interviews, even though the discussion may be going on in other places?

Most of the interviewees in Knight’s book report that they first ran across m/m romantic fiction as original fiction rather than as slash or yaoi. That surprised me. The book doesn’t specifically provide the women’s ages — though most give hints — which leads me to wonder whether there may be a demographic difference involved. Maybe older readers are more likely to have run across slash and yaoi first — because that’s what was most common ten years or so ago — and younger readers are more likely to have run across original m/m novels first, because of the recent expansion of original m/m fiction publishing?  Or perhaps it’s that the fandoms are distinct — slash readers and yaoi readers and m/m romance novel readers are separate groups without much spillover. My assumption is that slash and yaoi, both of which appeared in the ’60s (though yaoi’s U.S. boom started in the mid-’90s) helped open the door to the mainstreaming of m/m romance novels, which seem to have started booming around the mid-2000s. However, that’s just an assumption; more research is required.

On the other hand, almost all of the women mention first or currently reading or publishing m/m fiction in the form of ebooks, which supports my belief that digital publishing has been another significant factor in the m/m romance boom — digital publishing makes the genre less expensive (and thus risky) to publish, easier to market and sell, and — of course — less obvious to consume. Since it’s become common practice to offer free samples of digital publications, curious but hesitant readers also have a better chance of being exposed to the genre, which may also be contributing to its growth.

So … back to the title question. Why do straight women love gay romance? No clear answer comes through. Although the question is addressed throughout the interviews in the book, the most direct answers are embedded in the ten interviews that make up Chapter 2. They do not differ greatly from the answers I got when I asked a similar question in my 2008 survey of yaoi manga readers — you can find those responses in a pdf under BL Survey: Qualitative Data. Some of Knight’s interviewees said they liked m/m romance because it avoids gender stereotypes they perceive in m/f romance, especially the damsel in distress. Some said they liked it because it’s arousing. Some said they liked it because gay romance is still transgressive and thus offers more plot complexity than m/f romance. Elisa’s answer struck me as the most introspective of the lot, offering the possibility (suggested by Laura Kinsale in the edited volume Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of Romance) that if the female reader identifies with the male hero, then in m/m romance “the female reader can pick both heroes without having to choose and she is not annoyed by the weak heroine” (Knight, 2012, Chapter 2 para 27). I’ve read similar arguments about BL manga. Not surprisingly, none of the women’s replies address the kind of deep psychoanalytic theorizing formulated in some books and articles about BL such as Kazumi Nagaike’s Fantasies of Cross-dressing: Japanese Women Write Male-Male Erotica (2012).  (That may be one reason why I found it so fascinating that Anna Freud was apparently psychoanalyzing her own childhood homoerotic m/m daydreams, as discussed in my previous post.) As always, comparing the responses of those involved in an activity and those studying the activity raises questions about personal experience versus scholarly interpretation — although, to be honest, I’ve found that many of the scholars who study BL and m/m fiction are also fans of the genre.

The other chapters in Knight’s book addresses how women write about gay romance and what they’ve learned about men in doing so, the cultural differences in attitudes toward gays that the women have encountered in their lives, how they started writing gay romances, how they “came out” as gay romance authors, what their experiences were when sharing their love of m/m romance with others, and why more women aren’t reading gay romance. The answers to the latter question seemed to boil down to (1) a lack of exposure (it’s still not a mainstream genre), (2) apprehension (fears of porn/of being found reading gay romance), and, more speculatively, (3) a spiral of silence (perhaps more women read it than are willing to admit to it in public). Other chapters in the book ask whether m/m romance has improved its authors’ and readers’ sex lives and whether it has the potential to advance GLBT acceptance in individuals or overall. This is why I described the book as “sprawling” in my opening paragraph — there’s a lot of material in here, and it’s not clearly organized or focused, but it’s all intensely personal and presented in what seems to be the women’s own voices with minimal editing.

In sum, Why Straight Women Love Gay Romance is a casual, not an academic, read. The information it contains has not been rigorously categorized and labeled; no qualitative data analysis has been carried out, and demographic data on the interviewees is too vague to allow the reader to draw any clear conclusions. To that extent, scholars hoping to tackle this book as a form of quickly accessible data may be frustrated. However, the book’s essentially journalistic nature shouldn’t deter scholars researching m/m romance from giving it a look. Anyone interested in hearing women involved in the m/m romance publishing industry talk at length about their own experiences, challenges, and hopes for the genre and for gay acceptance in general will find this an intriguing read and, possibly, an inspirational jumping-off point for further investigations.

References:

Kinsale, Laura. (1992). “The Androgynous Reader: Point of View in the Romance,” in Krentz, Jayne Ann (Ed.), Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of Romance. University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 31-44.

Knight, Geoffrey. (2012). Why Straight Women Love Gay Romance. MLR Press, LLC. [Kindle Version]. Retrieved from Amazon.Com.

Lanyon, Josh. (2008). Man, Oh Man: Writing M/M Fiction for Kinks & Cash. MLR Press.

Nagaike, Kazumi. (2012). Fantasies of Cross-dressing: Japanese Women Write Male/Male Erotica. Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV.

Nagaike uses the Freuds’ description of girls’ beating fantasies as a launching point for her psychoanalytically based examination of several Japanese women’s interest in and fantasies about male homosexuality. Her book is interesting on a number of levels, but for now I want to set it aside for some future post and instead address Anna Freud’s essay. Since I haven’t seen it discussed in other analyses of boys’ love fiction, I think it would be useful to present it here, if nothing else as a description of one turn-of-the-century girl’s construction of  male/male homoerotic hurt/comfort, and torture, proto-slash.

In “Beating Fantasies and Daydreams,” Anna Freud discusses a young girl’s “continued stories,” a series of daydreams linked by the same characters and settings, which she categorizes as either “nice stories,” which could be talked about, or shameful beating fantasies associated with masturbatory activity, which were not so easily discussed. The essay specifically analyzes one “nice story” that was inspired by/based on the girl’s encounter with a short story set in the Middle Ages. I used the term proto-slash, above, because the characters that the girl daydreams, and later writes, about are based on an external work, though obviously not one with the depth of canonical source material and established fandom from which contemporary slash is drawn.

The source material’s plot, as presented by the girl, was “A medieval knight has been engaged in a long feud with a number of nobles who are in league against him. In the course of a battle a fifteen-year-old noble youth (i.e., the age of the daydreamer) is captured by the knight’s henchmen. He is taken to the knight’s castle where he is held prisoner for a longtime. Finally, he is released” (A. Freud, 1922). The girl proceeded to use this story, as any good slash-fic writer might, as the framework for numerous fully elaborated stories about the noble youth and the knight, many of which replicate the classic hurt/comfort pattern in female-authored m/m fiction:

A great introductory scene describes their first meeting during which the knight threatens to put the prisoner on the rack to force him to betray his secrets. The youth’s conviction of his helplessness is thereby confirmed and his dread of the knight awakened. These two elements are the basis of all subsequent situations. For example, the knight in fact threatens the youth and makes ready to torture him, but at the last moment the knight desists. He nearly kills the youth through the long imprisonment, but just before it is too late the knight has him nursed back to health. As soon as the prisoner has recovered the knight threatens him again, but faced by the youth’s fortitude the knight spares him again. And every time the knight is just about to inflict great harm, he grants the youth one favor after another. (A. Freud, 1922)

Although the individual narrative pieces within the continuing story were manifold and differing, the  scenes told within the overarching narrative followed a clear pattern, which Anna Freud describes as

antagonism between a strong and a weak person; a misdeed — mostly unintentional — on the part of the weak one which puts him at the other’s mercy; the latter’s menacing attitude which justifies the gravest apprehensions; a slowly mounting anxiety, often depicted by exquisitely appropriate means, until the tension becomes almost unendurable; and finally, as the pleasurable climax, the solution of the conflict, the pardoning of the sinner, reconciliation, and, for a moment, complete harmony between the former antagonists. (1922)

Anna Freud notes that this pattern is almost identical to the girl’s beating fantasies, with the difference being “in their solution, which in the fantasy is brought about by beating, and in the daydream by forgiveness and reconciliation.” She proceeds to discuss the parallels between the two sets of daydreams and discusses their functions (representations of sensual love vs. tender friendship), noting “The sublimation of sensual love into tender friendship is of course greatly facilitated by the fact that already in the early stages of the beating fantasy the girl abandoned the difference of the sexes and is invariably represented as a boy.”

It’s worth noting, as does Rachel B. Blass in her 1993 article about this essay, that for Anna Freud, “What aroused guilt and required repression was the act of masturbation. Everything that contributed toward the curbing of that behavior, including the girl’s identification with the male figure, was considered progressive” (pp. 79-80).  Many BL fans, however, are willing to admit that they are drawn to the material for its erotic content. In my survey of English-language BL readers, “I think it’s sexy to see same-sex couples making love” was the most favorite choice of 14 possibilities, getting 318 votes of 478 respondents, and the appreciation was reiterated in qualitative comments. However, I’ve yet to read or give a survey that directly asks female fans whether they masturbate to m/m fiction. Maybe somebody needs to do that?

Finally, and of some interest to those of us who create and/or consume m/m fiction, she discusses the way the creator’s pleasure changes in the transformation of a daydream into a written work, which entails a shift from the consideration of personal pleasure to the pleasure of an audience. She also notes that “the written story (as the inclusion of the torture scene demonstrates) can discard the restrictions imposed on the daydream in which the realization of situations stemming from the beating fantasy had been proscribed” — that is, what was once guilt-inducing (the beating fantasy) can now be safely presented to others in the more objective format of a written text. I’d love to hear some m/m or BL writers’ views on this assertion.

As an aside, it seems to be generally believed that the girl described in this paper was Anna Freud herself.

I would love to hear other BL scholars’, writers’, artists’ and consumers’ thoughts about Anna Freud’s essay and the history of women fantasizing about m/m homoerotic relationships.

References:

Freud, Anna. “Beating Fantasies and Daydreams.” (Originally presented in May 1922). Accessed from http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/afreudb.html, 2/1/2013.

Freud, Sigmund. “A Child is Being Beaten.” (Originally published in 1919).

Nagaike, Kazumi. (2012). Fantasies of Cross-dressing: Japanese Women Write Male/Male Erotica. Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV.

In the face of the genre and its fandom as it manifests today, Satō’s concerns can seem dated.  Outside Japan, the genre is enjoyed and produced by a notable percentage of gay males and lesbians (see Pagliassotti 2008).  Many if not most yaoi fans are supportive of gay politics.  Akiko Mizoguchi writes about how, even in Japan where the fandom remains almost entirely female, the subcultural space was never a heteronormative social vacuum.  It functions as a “feminist and lesbian” space due to the fans’ freed desires (2008, 384).  The extent to which the genre has developed accompanying feminist and antihomophobic politics over the years has been due to the power of the storytelling as opposed to overt political maneuvering.  As an example of yaoi “activism,” Mizoguchi writes about recent yaoi texts that are “a few steps ahead of reality in contemporary Japanese society, in the direction of equal rights for homosexual individuals” (2010, 161).

The last few decades have seen a gradual normalization of homosexuality in the industrialized world. Today, yaoi and gay subcultures influence each other, both in real life and in yaoi texts. The concern now is less that yaoi fans might be homophobic or exploitative, but more, as Neal Akatsuka writes, that they might “easily consume [yaoi’s] queerness without being antihomophobic” (2010, 172).  This concern is rooted in the fact that sexuality is not just an inherently transformative cultural practice, but is also, as Rosemary Hennessy writes, “a regulatory apparatus that…works in concert with other social totalities — capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism” (1994, 70).

To some extent, modern-day patriarchal capitalism has assimilated homosexuality into its logic. When the subversive is sanctioned, it loses its transformative power.  What does the normalization of homosexuality mean for the continued production and consumption of yaoi?  Is it enough for the genre to titillate, to ebb and flow with the market?  Or does the heart of yaoi beat to subversion?  If the latter, what new tropes might emerge to keep yaoi transformative without being overtly political?

Citations:

Akatsuka, Neal. (2010). “Uttering the Absurd, Revaluing the Abject: Femininity and the Disavowal of Homosexuality in Transnational Boys’ Love Manga.” In Levi, Antonia; McHarry, Mark; and Pagliassotti, Dru (Eds.) Boys’ Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre (pp. 159-176). Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc.

Hennessy, Rosemary (1994). “Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture,” Cultural Critique 29 (Winter 94-95), 31-76.

Lunsing, Wim (January 2006). Yaoi Ronsō: Discussing depictions of male homosexuality in Japanese girl’s comics, gay comics and gay pornography. Intersections: Gender, history and culture in the Asian context. 12.

Mizoguchi, Akiko (2008). Reading and Living Yaoi: Male-Male Fantasy Narratives as Women’s Sexual Subculture in Japan. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Rochester.

——. (2010). “Theorizing comics/manga genre as a productive forum: yaoi and beyond”. In Berndt, Jaqueline. Comics Worlds and the World of Comics: Towards Scholarship on a Global Scale (pp. 145–170). Kyoto, Japan: International Manga Research Center, Kyoto Seika University.

Pagliassotti, Dru. (2008). Reading Boys’ Love in the West. Participations 5(2).

16. Any other reasons why you like boy’s love manga? If not, please go ahead to the next page.   WhyILikeBL

43. Is there anything else you want to say about boy’s love manga, its fans, or why you like it? OtherBLComments

I hope that you’ll find the comments interesting! Please note that although I did not change any spelling or punctuation in the comments, I did in a few places eliminate information that could have identified the commenter, and those edits are noted with [BRACKETS AND ALL CAPS].

References:

Dru Pagliassotti, Reading Boys’ Love in the West. Participations, 5(2). November 2008.

I suppose another question worth asking is whether erotica authors need mainstream publishing anymore; erotica seems to be doing just fine digitally. Even 50 Shades started out as a print and digital publication from a small publisher — with its biggest sales in that safely discreet digital format. Of course, there’s no doubt that its being picked up by a mainstream publisher has contributed greatly to the marketing buzz around it, and what author doesn’t want that?

Still … 50 Shades is about a heterosexual couple. Would the story, could the story, have possibly become so popular, and get picked up by a mainstream publisher, if it had been about a same-sex couple? For example, there’s an incredible amount of gay and m/m fiction, whether fan- or nonderivative, out there in digital format. Why is so little of it available in print? And, of the few works that are available in print, why are they so difficult to find in any mainstream bookstore? These are rhetorical questions, of course; the answers are easy enough to surmise. But another question I find particularly interesting is why have boys’ love manga been one of the notable exceptions to the rule? True, it’s been getting harder to find BL since Borders collapsed, but for years they were one form of m/m erotica that could actually be bought in a bookstore … and they were illustrated.  Was it their foreignness? Were they flying under the radar? I can make guesses, but it’d be fun to interview some of the publishers, marketers, and bookstore owners to find out their thoughts on the matter.

In the meantime, I’m not going to hold my breath that 50 Shades will be opening up the mainstream market to an onslaught of erotica … at least not the m/m erotic romances that are the current focus of my interest as a reader and scholar.

Reference:

Goldberg, Stephanie. ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Shines Light on Erotic Fanfiction. CNN (April 6, 2012). Accessed 4/7/12 http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/05/showbiz/movies/fifty-shades-of-grey-fan-fiction/index.html.

Presumably DMP is referring to the recent flurry of interest in Fifty Shades of Gray, currently in the #2 spot on Amazon.Com’s top 100 best selling list. Last Saturday Fifty Shades of Gray was featured in a New York Times article, “Discreetly Digital, Erotic Novel Sets American Women Abuzz.” The book, about a wealthy man and a college girl who enter into a dominant/submissive relationship has, according to the article, introduced “women who usually read run-of-the-mill literary or commercial fiction to graphic, heavy-breathing erotica.”

Of course, DMP is exaggerating by suggesting that Amazon is particularly targeting male homosexual romance, since Kindle offerings are rife with male/male romances that feature, yes, a number of graphic sexual acts.  Given this, one has to wonder if Amazon’s concern is with the graphic sexual content itself, or with the fact that DMP’s content is illustrated — although The Joy of Gay Sex is available on Kindle, complete with graphic illustrations easily previewed via the “Click to Look Inside” tab — or, perhaps, with the fact that yaoi manga is a “comic book,” given the lingering Western stereotype that comics are still, essentially, kids’ stuff.

Or could it be that Amazon’s Kindle store getting ready to kill all of its erotic titles? That seems highly unlikely — erotica is a lucrative e-publishing niche, after all, and a quick search today on “erotica” under the Kindle Books category pulls up 46,638 results (see image at bottom of post).

While all of this is going on, DMP itself has recently been subject to criticism among some yaoi fans after a March 10 post from yaoi scanlation group Dangerous Pleasure that criticized DMP’s Digital Manga Guild for “aggressive and accusing” posts about its scanlations. The Digital Manga Guild, on the other hand, defends its right to send out “cease and desist” notices to scanlators and has been handling the debate with Dangerous Pleasure and other groups in its forum on the DMP website.

Setting aside the unlikely-to-be-resolved-anytime-soon tension between manga licensors and scanlators, the question of yaoi’s future on the Kindle is something worth watching.  Will this suspension be applied to Kindle works by Yaoi Press and SuBLime, a partnership between Libre Publishing Co., Ltd., VIZ Media LLC, and Animate U.S.A.? Will the suspension spread to erotic novels and sex advice books?

Or will Amazon eventually accept that digital publishing is conceptually no different from paper publishing, and allow the same kinds of content in its digital-copy store as it does in its paper-copy store?

(Update: DMP was reinstated as of 3/16/12)

References:

Bosman, Julie. “Discreetly Digital, Erotic Novel Sets American Women Abuzz.” New York Times, March 10, 2012. Accessed March 10, 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/10/business/media/an-erotic-novel-50-shades-of-grey-goes-viral-with-women.html.

Digital Manga Blog. “Important Announcement: DMP’s Kindle Publishing Suspended.” Accessed March 16, 2012. http://www.digitalmanga.com/blog/2356/important-announcement-dmps-kindle-publishing-suspended.

Digital Manga Forums, Digital Manga Guild, The Guild Guide. “Dealing with Scanlations of Your Titles.”  http://www.digitalmanga.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=2193%3E.

Scyren. “2012-3-9 Announcement.” Dangerous Pleasure Scanlation Group. Accessed March 10, 2012. http://www.digitalmanga.com/blog/2356/important-announcement-dmps-kindle-publishing-suspended.

Arriving at Edo by boat on the Sumida River, on his way to the kabuki, the scapegrace narrator of Asai Ryōi’s Tōkaidō meishoki (Famous Places along the Tōkaidō; 1661), laments that too many men “have had their souls stolen…by beautiful boys” at the theaters (Elisonas 1994:253-4). Ryōi’s riverine imagery describes the culture of the ukiyo (floating world): confluent yet aimless, channeled yet overflowing barriers, its content a continual mix, constrained only by larger forces such as the flow of time. Illustration and text were often interdependent, and genres intermingled:

Professional rakugo storytelling provided gesaku [playful parodic] fiction with puns and wordplay [and character sketches], ukiyo-e…provided illustrations, and the jōruri puppet theatre and the kabuki male actor theatre, plots and language. (Cross 2004:1)

Consumers and producers intermingled too. They collaborated, sometimes closely, on haikai, books, publications, calligraphy, and artwork, meeting at parties as well as at the theaters, and in restaurants, shops, and brothels.

Fig. 1. Fujikawa Tamenobu. Hirasata. c. 1918.
The good-natured but bumbling friends of Tōkaidōchū hizakurige, Kita (left) and Yaji, wreak havoc on their pilgrimage to the Ise shrine. They have hired bearers to carry them across the Banjugawa. Yaji tries to impress them with his local knowledge. Rather than doing so from memory, as would a tsu, he relies on a guidebook. They had been lovers until Kita reached adulthood.

Bodily coercion

Beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century, as the uikyo produced an outpouring of cultural products, Europe and North America developed new ideas, strategies and technologies to restrict the ability of people and their activities to freely float across boundaries.

Michel Foucault theorized that these changes stemmed in part from the industrializing economy and the Enlightenment’s emphasis on a social contract wherein rights and obligations replaced feudal duties. Liberatory in some aspects, the new systems were repressive in others. Surveillance became emphasized. States needed to know not just where people were and what they did but what they thought. In his 1975 book Surveiller et punir (Discipline and Punish), Foucault elaborated six major rules on which Enlightenment states based what he called a semiotechnic of their power to punish.* All of these involve newly fixed, permanent, relations among crime and punishment. Their effect was to restrict autonomy, discretion and other qualities that depend on movement. The results included,

a tighter grid around the population, better adjusted techniques of identification, capture, information…. an effort to adjust power mechanisms that frame the existence of individuals [with] denser controls…. (93)

He provides accounts of these new rules playing out against real people. One is of a thirteen-year-old boy, Béasse, hauled before a Paris tribunal in the summer of 1840. He was, wrote Foucault, “without home or family” (339-40). To the court, that meant that he was without a place not just to live but as a citizen. Béasse resisted the attempt to normalize his life. To the chief judge’s “You must sleep at home”, the lad responded ironically—insolently, given the power difference between him and the judges—”Do I have a home?”. The questioning continued:

“You are living in perpetual vagabondage.”

“I work to earn my way.”

“What is your state?”, meaning Béasse’s place in society. One can imagine the boy’s pondering that question for a moment, stateless as he was.

“My state…. It’s been a while already since I’ve had a room. I have my day and night states.” He then described what he did each day and night. (340)

Although there was no allegation of criminality or evidence that Béasse could not support himself on his own, however hardscrabble his life may have been, and he testified that he earned a living during his day and night states by distributing flyers, opening doors to theaters, and selling ticket vouchers, he was condemned to two years imprisonment where he would be monitored and taught correct behavior. From multiple states he was reduced to one: criminal.

In Foucault’s conception of the court’s hearing,

All the illegalities that the court saw as offenses, the accused reformulated as the affirmation of a living force: the lack of habitat as vagabondage, the absence of a master as autonomy, lack of work as freedom, the absence of a schedule as a plentitude of days and nights. (340)

A living force, one that could move where it wanted, that had not (yet) been fixed. It threatened this society. “Order is brought into existence from disorder” observed Anthony Uhlmann, and Béasse “appears as an example of disorder, and disorder, its very existence within the society of discipline, of surveillance, presents that society with apprehension in the face of the possibility of its own death” (1999:88).

The semiotechnic of punishment helped bring into being “a new political anatomy” (Foucault 1975, 122), one whose power centered and expressed itself on the body: “The new art of punishment shows well the changing of the punitive semiotechnic by a new politics of the body” (ibid.). The criminal body became “the anchorage point for power manifestation” (67). In this process Foucault identified a new type of knowledge he called power/knowledge (pouvoir-savoir):

It is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that would produce a body of knowledge, useful or refractory to power, but power/knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it and thus constitute it, that determines the possible forms and domains of knowledge. (36)

Power/knowledge developed from a way of enabling not just the control of threatening social elements but of enhancing on and via the body the utility of those subjected (Rouse 1994:97). Power/knowledge permitted more effective control by a refinement of bodily coercion that may be as totalizing as it is subtle:

It was a question not of treating the body en masse [but] of exercising upon it a subtle coercion, of assuring a hold upon it at the level of the mechanism itself—movements, gestures, attitudes, rapidity: infinitesimal power on the active body. (Foucault 1975:161)

Foucault developed the idea of the imbrication of body and power, writing in The History of Sexuality and elsewhere that power relations demand examination and seek causation via sexuality (1978, 59). He conjured an image of power fucking the body: “power relations can materially penetrate the body in depth” (1980, 186), “wrapp[ing] the sexual body in its embrace” (1978, 44), “an entire glittering sexual array” to produce truth at “a nearly fabulous price” (1978, 72). One of the consequences is the separation of truth and sex, no longer linked by transmission from one body to another as they were, he said, in Ancient Greece (1978, 61) and were, I think, linked in the Edo period via erotic desire such as iki (an aesthetic; sexual passion) and kōshoku (loving love), described below.

Onnagata and bodily desire

Edo-period Japan controlled its population by prescribing obligations among classes even as it restricted interactions between them, prohibiting almost all external travel, restricting internal travel, promulgating sumptuary laws, holding hostage the families of daimyō (domain lords) to ensure their fealty, regulating the “pleasure” quarters and kabuki, censoring books and art and ferreting out those who violated the polity.

The ukiyo arose independent of the shōgunate. Ukiyo expression was surveilled and censored, but the ukiyo as such may not have been thought of as a demimonde worthy of intervention absent illegality. This would be unlike the physical spaces in Europe and America then where males cruised for sex with one another, which, when identified, became loci of surveillance and arrest.

The ukiyo saw not just the creation of cultural products but of an ethos that valued qualities such as iki, kōshoku and kokkei (humor). This was an ethos not simply more liberal than those of Western cultures at that time but a different way of thinking about things. Takayuki Yokota-Murakami noted that the sexual and aesthetic qualities of iki could be “interrelated without any differentiation”:

That iki involves “two” significative axes, one on the sexual plane, the other on the aesthetic plane is, probably, a vision transparent only for the observer whose language segregates the sexual and the aesthetic on different planes…. (Yokota-Murakami 1999:53)

Iki is considered a combination of the two dimensions, the sexual and the beautiful, only because these two are basic categories of Western criticism. (54)

One of the most valued goals in the ukiyo was to be tsu (a connoisseur), someone who could afford asobi (play) and who took a witty and highly informed attitude toward it via kokkei. But always at a distance. The narrator of Hiraga Gennai’s novel Fūryū Shidōken den (The Story of Gallant Shidōken; 1763) remonstrates with its hapless protagonist, the fifteen-year-old Asanoshin, who had not learned the ways of the world even after having undertaken a world tour that goes spectacularly wrong:

[O]nce you had learned about human passions throughout the world you were to detach yourself from society through the medium of humor [kokkei]…. But instead you became so distracted by worldly attachments and were so carried away by your own emotions that time and again you have found yourself in difficulties…. This loss of judgement is not limited to the irrationality accompanying a person’s craze for courtesans. There is harm in forming too great an attachment to anything. (Jones 1968:236-237)

Gennai’s own kokkei literary style follows his advice, distancing himself as author while creating a texture that adds humor to the narrative via puns, wordplay, irony, and allusions to contemporary and classical works and events. Phonetically, “Asanoshin” means “new dawn” (asa no shin) but the word invokes other meanings, notably the auspicious state event called mitsu no asa (threefold dawn, i.e. New Year’s Day) and Gennai’s guide to male prostitution, Mitsu no asa (1768). Adriana Delprat observes that it refers to his own samurai rank of no shin, which was the lowest of five ranks given to the lower samurai echelons (1985:124). Kokkei style is at the heart of gesaku and other ukiyo works.

Kabuki was at the center of ukiyo space. It is often said to have started in the performances of Okuni on the dry Kamo riverbed in Kyoto. Izumo no Okuni (active 1603-?), a temple dancer, created a review, that, according to Katherine Mezur in a fascinating book about onnagata (female gender role specialists), Beautiful Boys/Outlaw Bodies,

combined revamped folk dances with religious chants, ritual, and prayer gestures from a Buddhist incantation and dance. She crowned this with an irreverent mixture of gender and class acts of costuming, accessories, and movement. (Mezur 2005:54)

From its outset, Okuni’s performances transgressed gender. She created dramatic skits that became early staples of kabuki. In some of these, such as a skit about prostitute buying, she played the character of a male customer with a male actor as a female prostitute (ibid.). Okuni also performed a dance named after the ninth-century courtier Ariwara no Narihira, who was

a famous legendary lover and poet of great beauty, frequently referred to for his mixture of feminine and masculine attributes. Okuni performed her version of Narihira somewhere between male and female, even confounding her audience as to whether she was a man or woman…. (55)

Wakashū (youth; boy) had long been objects of desire. Mezur writes that wakashū kabuki had become well established in Kyoto and Edo by 1617 (64). Restrictions on women performers were enacted in 1608 and 1615, but it wasn’t until 1629, with bans segregating male and female performers, abolishing public performance by women, and restricting and licensing female prostitution (61-2) that all-male kabuki came into being.

Women continued to attend kabuki, and some pursued erotic relationships with actors. Ordered on a pilgrimage in 1714, Lady Ejima, one of the highest officials of the women’s quarters in the shogun’s castle, ditched a meeting with an abbot, heading instead to the Yamamura-za to meet her lover, kabuki star Ikushima Shingorō (1671-1743). News leaked about their party in the theater (Shively 1995:348). Punishments for those involved ranged from banishment to death (ibid. 349). Lady Ejima, her family and entourage were banished to Shinshu (Bach 1995:276); Ikushima and the theater’s manager were banished to the island of Miyake-jima. The Yamamura-za, one of Edo’s four great theaters, was demolished (Shively 1955:349). Timon Screech speculates that a scroll painting c. 1725 by the female artist Yamazaki Joryū (active 1716-35) of a boy kabuki actor could have been commissioned by a woman. He asks if this may be “an example of an all-female production of a sexualized image of a man” (1999:151).

Certain traits of wakashū kabuki actors, such as hair with forelocks or bangs (maegami) and later bōshi (caps) (Mezur 2005:66), and whitened faces with red lips (72), were eroticized in performance. These and other wakashū actor traits including “movement, postures, vocal acts, costumes, wigs [and] makeup” (76) evoked iroke (erotic allure):

It is important to emphasize that the wakashu art was first and foremost a danced seduction. Gestures, postures, costuming, vocal articulation, props: everything was an “erotic” act. (147)

Some of these iroke elements may have originated apart from kabuki “in the wakashu system of erotic codes with its own boy/man erotic points and gender ambiguity” (ibid.) and were subsequently carried over into early kabuki performances of wakashū and onnagata. The distinctive and essential feature of their performance, Mezur says, was “communication of iroke” (35). Central to her thesis of onnagata roles “never [being] performed in imitation of real women” (4) but rather being “a constructed female-likeness” (2) is that onnagata iroke is based on an adolescent male body:

Wakashu onnagata stylized and reconstructed the bishōnen ideal appearance…to achieve the look: the long, slim line and willow-like softness of the ideal wakashu body in every gesture and posture.

Subsequent onnagata gradually stylized these boy erotic codes into onnagata gender acts…. [T]hey also assimilated the wakashu trait of gender ambiguity. Moreover, it seems probable that the early onnagata so thoroughly incorporated the wakashu erotic acts into their onnagata art that onnagata standards of beauty were infused with wakashu sensuality. (72)

Mezur argues that for spectators, then and now, “the presence of male sexual organs underneath the kimono is a requirement for kabuki onnagata performance, because the spectator must be able to imagine a male body beneath the feminine costuming” (25, italics in original).

Onnagata, as other kabuki actors, use kata (stylized forms) in their performance. Kata inhere to performance as a way of, in part, communicating iroke. Onnagata kata have been retained and elaborated throughout kabuki history.

The body in ukiyo was consciously performative and the ukiyo was about worldly things. This worried scholars whose study was the spiritual. Harry Harootunian writes that some kokugakusha (in part, nativist scholars) during Edo argued for a “rescue” of the body from the pleasures of gesaku (1988: 407). They attempted to counteract “the bodily excesses of urban culture” (408) which “privileged the ceaseless activity of body over mind” (38).

Resistance to being fixed

According to Joseph Rouse’s view of Foucault’s thinking, “[p]ower is not possessed by a dominant agent, nor located in that agent’s relations to those dominated, but is instead distributed throughout complex social networks” (1994:106). He quotes Foucault that “‘power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away’” (105). Rather, in Foucault’s words, it is “‘something that circulates’” and is “‘produced from one moment to the next’” (107). Rouse observes that “[p]ower can thus never be simply present [but rather is reproduced] over time as a sustained power relationship” (ibid., italics in original). These relations can, as Foucault said, “‘support…one another, thus forming a chain or a system’” (107). Rouse invokes Thomas Wartenberg’s idea that power relationships encompass social agents in a diffuse field wherein these agents align themselves into coordinated practices of domination (105), coordinations which may happen independent of agents’ intentions (106).

Power is complicit and by preference hidden. A power relationship, wrote Foucault, is indirect: it “does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead it acts upon their actions….acting upon…subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action” (1982:789). One of its geniuses is that people act on its behalf against their own interests, a more efficient method of control of subjects than the naked deployment of force. Foucault makes this point more than once in Surveiller et punir, here quoting from a 1767 book by influential penal reform advocate Joseph-Michel-Antoine Servan:

‘A stupid despot can constrain slaves with iron chains, but a true politician binds them even more tightly with the chain of their own ideas…’ (1975:122)

In Europe power militated against people’s ability to be aware of, hence resist, its often subtle, infinitesimal, totalizing hold on the body’s movements, gestures, attitudes. In Edo Japan people in the ukiyo with the resources and inclination to do so consciously developed and cultivated bodily gestures and movement, attitudes, conduct and dress in pursuit of goals, often erotic, of self. Gennai’s narrator tries to teach Asanoshin what kokkei is and why it need be pursued if one is to become tsu. Onnagata kata were a way of an actor’s asserting erotic power via his body. Iki and kōshoku were major themes of floating world works. Erotic desire underlies many of best-selling author Ihara Saikaku’s novels and is overt in the titles of three: Kōshoku ichidai otoko (The Man Who Loved Love; 1682), Kōshoku gonin onna (Five Women Who Loved Love; 1686) and Kōshoku ichidai onna (Life of an Amorous Woman; 1686).

This cultivation was highly valued. It was sought after, studied, worked at, and performed whether as a gesakusha (gesaku writer / artist), an onnagata, a client socializing with actors in a kabuki teahouse or visiting a licensed female prostitution district such as the Yoshiwara or the far more numerous unlicensed brothels, male and female. Its failure is depicted in a woodblock print by Fujikawa Tamenobu where Jippensha Ikku’s character Yaji, though very likeable, fails as utterly as Asanoshin to be tsu. (Fig. 2) So highly valued was this cultivation that it may have helped forestall the ability of expressions of power reflecting other power relationships to take hold on the body.

Fig. 2. Detail of Yaji using his guidebook.

Onnagata kata and the many other elements of erotic style helped form an ethos unique to ukiyo. This ethos comprehended a nexus between the all-male kabuki and nanshoku (male-male love), the latter going back to the beginnings of Japanese literature and popular in the ukiyo (less so toward the mid-nineteenth century [Pflugfelder 1999:95-6]). In Foucauldian terms, these elements were agents in power fields aligned in sustained coordinations over time and space to link kabuki and nanshoku. These coordinations and this linkage helped the ukiyo to counter agents of power incursions, whether by the disciplines of the shōgunate, the writings of the kokugakusha, the values of the Western Enlightenment (erotic uikyo-e on reaching London was burned), or by entropy.

The object of “fixer” in the epigraph above is “la population flotante” (floating population). Foucult was referring to groups of people, some criminal, roaming the countryside, their existence threatening newly formed lines of property and propriety. In Edo-period Japan it was ideas, cultural products that were able to roam across genres and classes. It took a revolution sparked by an armed intervention by the United States seeking fuel for its industrial revolution and nascent gilded age to end the ukiyo. Until then, the ukiyo’s ethos, its mixing of genres, the determination and creativity of its participants and the very many products that they produced, helped it to persist, to continually evolve, to move, to sidestep control, that is, to float, and thus to prevent it from being fixed by those outside its ambit.

____________________

*To summarize Foucault’s rules of the Enlightenment states’ semiotechnic of power-punishment: Penalties must be fixed; the proximity between the penalty and the crime must be fixed; punishment must be fixed around only one idea, that of maximum effect; the pain of punishment must be fixed in the convicted person’s mind in order to prevent recidivism; there must be certainty (fixity) among judges and the public as to what is and is not a crime so to encourage law-abiding conduct as well as to prevent impunity. (Foucault 1975, 112-18)

Works cited

Bach, Faith. “Breaking the Kabuki Actors’ Barriers: 1868-1900″, Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 12, no. 2 (Autumn, 1995):264-79.

Cross, Barbara. “Representing Performance in Japanese Fiction: Shikitei Sanba (1776-1822)”, SOAS Literary Review, 2004(Autumn).

Delprat, Adriana. Forms of Dissent in the Gesaku Literature of Hiraga Gennai (1728-1780). Ph.D. thesis, Princeton U, 1985.

Elisonas, Jurgis. “Notorious Places: A Brief Excursion into the Narrative Topography of Early Edo” in James L. McClain, John M. Merriman and Ugawa Kaoru, eds., 253-91. Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era. Ithaca, New York: Cornell U P, 1994.

Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. My translation. (Translated by Alan Sheridan as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon: 1977.)

——. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

——. “The History of Sexuality”, interview with Lucette Finas (trans. Leo Marshall) in Colin Gordon, ed., 183-93. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon, 1980.

——. “The Subject and Power”, Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 4 (Summer, 1982):777-95.

Fujikawa Tamenobu. (藤川 為信). Hirasata. Woodblock print, c. 1918.

Harootunian, Harry. Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.

Jones, Stanleigh Hopkins, Jr. Scholar, Scientist, Popular Author: Hiraga Gennai, 1728-1780. Ph.D. thesis, Columbia U, 1968.

Kornicki, Peter F. “The Survival of Tokugawa Fiction in the Meiji Period”, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 41, no. 2 (Dec., 1981):461-82.

Mezur, Katherine. Beautiful Boys / Outlaw Bodies: Devising Kabuki Female-Likeness. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Pflugfelder, Gregory. Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950. Berkeley, CA: U of Calif. P, 1999.

Rouse, Joseph. “Power/Knowledge” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting, 92-114. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U P, 1994.

Screech, Timon. Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700-1820. Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P, 1999.

Shively, Donald. “Bakufu versus Kabuki”, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 18, no. 3/4 (Dec., 1955):326-56.

Thorn, Matt. “The Moto Hagio Interview”, The Comics Journal 269 (July/August), 2005. <http://matt-thorn.com/shoujo_manga/hagio_interview.php> Accessed 7 Feb. 2012.

Uhlmann, Anthony. Beckett and Poststructuralism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U P, 1999.

Yokota-Murakami, Takayuki. Don Juan East/West: on the Problematics of Comparative Literature. Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 1998.

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 by women, usually in the expectation that its primary audience will be other women. By contrast, gay romance would be a narrative that focuses on the romance between two or more men that has been written by men, usually in the expectation that its primary audience will be gay men.

These definitions suggest two to four possible points of differentiation: the author’s gender and, perhaps, sexual orientation, and the target audience’s gender and, perhaps, sexual orientation, if one assumes hetero/homo binarism.

Of course in reality we know that things aren’t that simple. Men write and read male/male romance, women write and read gay romance, and sexual orientation doesn’t fit neatly into straight/gay categories. The m/m timeline I’m developing on this site includes lesbian and gay male writers, as well.  Moreover, it’s quite likely that as the male/male romance niche grows increasingly mainstream — as I think it will — more overlap in authorship and readership will occur.

A third possible means of differentiating the genres might be to examine literary style. Are there any differences in the dominant themes or characterizations in male/male and gay romance? An analysis of cover art might also be interesting, to see whether any differences might be noticed across the two genres.

Finally, a fourth possible means of differentiating the genres might be to examine the works’ marketing strategies. Are there any differences in the way male/male and gay romances are marketed? Shelved? Or are those issues moot in a genre largely populated by ebooks?

As I’ve considered my definition of m/m romance, I’ve looked for associated research. Unfortunately, scholarly work on the subject is still sparse — almost all of it pertains to slash and boys’ love, rather than original m/m popular romantic novels. On the bright side, however, m/m romance writer Josh Lanyon offers plenty of anecdotal and personal information about the m/m genre in Man, Oh Man! Writing M/M Fiction for Kinks & Cash.

Lanyon’s book is both a primer on “how to write a novel” and a focused look at the male/male industry. Lanyon, whose works currently make up a significant portion of my Kindle collection, writes,

The essential difference between M/M fiction and all other gay genre fiction is that regardless of the genre — mystery, military, paranormal, historical — the romantic relationship between the two male protagonists is going to be of paramount importance. All M/M fiction is romantic fiction (2008:6)

And, he adds about romance in particular:

The stand-out thing about M/M versus gay romantic fiction is that there’s a distinct sensibility to M/M fiction. In effect, it’s gay men in love and making love versus gay men fucking. It’s about sensual and evocative details. It’s about the choice of language. It’s about emotions rather than mechanics. (2008:8)

Lanyon also rounds up a number of definitions from other writers and publishers. One publisher noted that m/m romance is often written by women and “most of our audience is straight females but we have a solid contingent of gay readers as well” (Harte in Lanyon, 2008:12).  Another added, “[r]eaders who are reading M/M fiction aren’t reading gay fiction. It’s two different types of books” (Scognamiglio in Lanyon, 2008:12). Yet others commented that they make no differentiation between m/m and gay fiction.

Of course, it’s possible that general recognition that m/m and gay audiences are somewhat different has grown since 2008. For example, a 2009 article by Gendy Alimurung in the LA Weekly noted that “most readers of gay-romance novels are — like most readers of straight-romance novels — women who devour 300-page stories of men falling in an out of love with each other, all the while having abundant, glorious and oh-so-graphic sex.” Similarly, a 2010 discussion of the genre by Devon Thomas in Library Journal defined m/m as “gay romantic fiction mostly written and read by straight women. Featuring traditional romance conventions, including mistaken identities, star-crossed lovers, and happy endings, these stories show both physical and emotional intimacy between men.”

Lanyon thinks women found m/m fiction first due to their exposure to slash — and, I’d add, boys’ love — but that more gay men are now discovering and reading it.  Gay men may be more likely to pick up a m/m romance because, despite any differences that may exist in style and target audience, these romances are being shelved and marketed by third-party distributors as gay romance. A 2009 Baltimore City Paper article by Heather Harris noted that both Borders and Barnes & Noble quickly moved Alex Beecroft’s False Colors from the romance section to the GLBT section of their stores, and Amazon dropped it, along with a number of gay titles, during the April ‘09 “Amazonfail” incident.  It seems unlikely that this shelving preference has changed, although there’s probably a research project there waiting to be undertaken.

The m/m romance genre has continued to grow and gain recognition. In December 2010, Thomas’ Library Journal article called m/m romance “one of the hottest growing segments of the romance genre,” and just a few months later, in February 2011, Elio Iannacci reported in The Globe and Mail that “Amazon’s Kindle has had such success with the genre that the e-book site has tripled its ‘m/m’ stock since January, 2010.”

The genre isn’t without its controversies, however. In February 2012, an Oklahoma chapter of Romance Writers of America raised a flurry of discussion among m/m romance writers when it refused to accept m/m submissions for its “More Than Magic” contest. The contest was later closed with an apology note stating, “We recognize the decision to disallow same-sex entries is highly charged. [...] We do not condone discrimination against individuals of any sort.” The queer community also holds some skepticism toward a genre written largely by self-identified straight women. Victoria Brownworth, in Lambda Literary, writes critically that m/m romance is “about reinterpreting gay male relationships for heterosexuals in a fashion that is fetishistically sexual and which thus can be accepted–because it is ultimately negative [...] When we give straight writers the power to say we got our own relationships wrong and they know better, we are embracing our own oppression. That’s at the core of M/M writing–not the queer gaze but a distorted gaze.”

Yet Lanyon believes m/m fiction has an advantage over gay fiction because, he writes, “while many women readers are likely to be disappointed by the lack of emotional intensity in much of gay genre fiction, there’s a great deal to appeal to gay male readers in M/M fiction” (p. 13).  Similarly, a 2009 article in Lavender Magazine suggests that m/m romance may be popular because “M/M relationships do not have the same gender stereotypes as straight relationships. There can be much more to these characters, and they don’t need to fit into typical female and male roles. The story really can go anywhere, with no social or expected boundaries—enticing to both the writer and the reader.”

All of this brings us back to the question I asked at the beginning of this article. Is there a difference between m/m romance and gay romance? If so, what difference does that difference make? A 2010 article by Lizzy Shramko in Lambda Literary put the issue well: “How does a genre of fiction that is exclusively centered around homosexual love, and largely written by and for explicitly straight writers and readers challenge the typical notion of what LGBT fiction is? Perhaps more significantly, how does it problematize the mutual exclusivity of homosexuality and heterosexuality?”

Those are the kinds of questions I hope to tackle, and that I hope other scholars may be tackling along with me, over the next year or two. I welcome your comments, responses, and suggestions.

Works Cited

Alimurung, Gendy. “Man on Man: The New Gay Romance … Written By and For Straight Women,” LA Weekly (Dec. 16, 2009). <http://www.laweekly.com/2009-12-17/art-books/man-on-man-the-new-gay-romance/>. Accessed Feb. 19, 2012.

Brownworth, Victoria. “The Fetishizing of Queer Sexuality. A Response,” Lambda Literary (Aug. 19, 2010). <http://www.lambdaliterary.org/features/oped/08/19/the-fetishizing-of-queer-sexuality-a-response/>. Accessed Feb. 20, 2012.

Harris, Heather. “Zipper Rippers: Women Write Gay Male Romance Novels for Women,” Baltimore City Paper (June 17, 2009). <http://www2.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=18234>. Accessed Feb. 19, 2012.

Iannacci, Elio. “What Women Want: Gay Male Romance Novels,” The Globe and Mail (Feb. 11, 2011). < https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/relationships/valentines-day/what-women-want-gay-male-romance-novels/article1902774/>. Accessed Feb. 19, 2012.

Lanyon, Josh. Man, Oh Man! Writing M/M Fiction for Kinks & Cash. Albion, New York: MLR Press, 2008.

Lavender Magazine. “Male/Male Romance Novels Flourish Trangressions and False Colors are Recent Examples.” (Aug. 13, 2009). <http://www.lavendermagazine.com/uncategorized/malemale-romance-novels-flourish-transgressions-and-false-colors-are-recent-examples>. Accessed Feb. 19, 2012.

Romance Writers Ink. “RWI Magic Contests.”  <https://rwimagiccontests.wordpress.com/>. Accessed Feb. 19, 2012.
See also Dear Author’s report on the contest: <http://dearauthor.com/features/industry-news/monday-news-and-deals-2>. Accessed Feb. 19, 2012).

Shramko, Lizzy. “Can M/M Romance Challenge the Definition of LGBT Lit?” Lambda Literary (Aug. 18, 2010) <http://www.lambdaliterary.org/features/oped/08/18/mm-romance-queer/>. Accessed Feb. 19, 2012.

Thomas, Devon. “Bodice Rippers Without the Bodice: Ten Male-on-Male Romances for a Core Collection,” Library Journal (Dec. 16, 2010). <http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/newslettersnewsletterbucketbooksmack/888366-439/bodice_rippers_without_the_bodice.html.csp>. Accessed Feb. 19, 2012.

See also:

Wilson, Cintra. “W4M4M?” Out (Aug. 17, 2010). <http://www.out.com/entertainment/2010/08/17/w4m4m?page=0,0>. Accessed Feb. 19, 2012.

By the second half of the seventeenth century, Japanese popular culture was beginning to assert owners, creators, and genres centered around the idea of ukiyo (floating world). Its first peak came in the Genroku era (1688-1704) with the production of works, today considered cultural treasures, by masters such as Ihara Saikaku (1643-93), Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725), Matsuo Bashō (1644-94), and Hishikawa Moronobu (c.1618-94).

All four dealt with bishōnen themes, as did much of the ukiyo. Two works, one a haikai, the other a painting, counterpoised bishōnen and women in a remarkably compact way. The haikai is by Bashō; the painting by Moronobu. (Fig. 1)

Fig. 1 Hishikawa Moronobu, "Scenes in a Theatre Tea-house"

Bashō’s verse reads: Ume yanagi sazo wakashu kana onna kana, or, “plum willow indeed wakashu is it? woman is it?”. (Basho Haiku U: HS-152) Moronobu showed the inside of a kabuki theater teahouse, whose furnishings include a pair of paintings of what look to be a plum and a willow.

Before and during the Edo period, plum and willow referents abounded in art and literature. They could refer to seasons and to other things but they very often referred to males and women. Timon Screech wrote that a traveler by water to the Yoshiwara courtesan district “boarded his boat…at the Willow Bridge near the center of Edo and ended it at the Looking-back (Mikaeri) Willow at the Yoshiwara entrance.” So too at Shimabara in Kyoto, where “a large old willow graced the entrance and linked the site to the feminine” (Screech 1999:134) Of an Edo-period screen of the Uji Bridge (first erected in 646), “[w]eeping willows were metaphors for the tangle of tragic loves”. (Screech 2000:247)

Plums could be a symbol of male sexuality, sometimes but not always of young males, as they were in shunga (erotic art). (Screech 1999:148-9) Yushima hill’s Shintō shrine in Edo was known then and today for its plum trees. It was once the site of boy brothels, some of whose prostitutes had hung offertory flags at the shrine advertising themselves. (Screech 2002:233) The star onnagata (a male acting a female role in kabuki) Muzuki Tatsunosuke I (1673-1745) was compared to “a plum blossom in the snow” (Mezur 2005:87) for his male sensual appeal. Donald Jenkins glosses the kyōka (“mad” poem) at the top of an early nineteenth-century hanging scroll showing a wakashu walking with a young boy carrying flowering plum branches: “The flowers of the Yoshiwara / Are not the only ones worth loving; / The blossoms of the young plum [i.e., the young man] / Are attractive too.” (1988:255) A Moronobu parody of the style of an official government painter, Kanō Tan’yū (1602-74), depicts Ki no Tsurayuki (who supervised compilation of the Kokinshū) comparing the beauty of a young man to the plum blossoms in front of which the two are sitting. (Mostow 1996:111)

According to Paul Schalow, a wakashu in Saikaku’s day could range from eleven or twelve to eighteen or nineteen years of age, distinguishable by his forelocks. (1990:28-9) The city of Edo had ample opportunity for males to cruise one another. Notable were the theater districts of Sakai-chō and Kobiki-chō. Fukiya-chō gained a reputation for its brothels, which Saikaku noted: “In the morning, at the theatre / We’ll go crazy over boys. / Even the Winds of sex go / Exactly as you want them — / The Fukiya district.” (Screech 1999:172)

There were four major kabuki theaters in Edo at the time of Moronobu’s painting. “Crowding in against them from either side were rows of lantern-festooned teahouses” (Jenkins 1993:19) at which wealthier fans (male or female) could pick up tickets, change from street clothes to more elaborate dress, and, in between acts and after the performance, hold parties for actors (male-only by shogunate diktat) in relative privacy, away from the main hall.

A plum-and-willow teahouse?

Moronobu’s teahouse was furnished with scroll paintings, lacquered furniture, and a door decorated with a country scene. It offered music, food, drink, massages and a screened-off area with an ample bed. His handscroll tells a story, too, though one that’s not known to us given that it was cut from a longer scroll. Officials gifted expensive pieces of art as assertions of status and would sometimes cut out parts from a handscroll or painted screen, practices imitated by commoners.

E-maki (pictorial handscrolls) could be objects of great value, especially from a master. Moronobu may be better known today for woodblock prints, which could be printed in large number and were cheap enough to be disposed of after an owner had tired of them. Not so paintings, even for artists who worked in the zoku (vulgar) demimonde of kabuki, depending on their reputation and talent. In about 1810, Santō Kyōden (1716-1816) wrote to a friend that his Moronobu scroll was “worth a lot”. (Screech 2007:38)

Moronobu’s teahouse painting shows groupings of people. Most are wakashu or their clients; some are onnagata. In the center right, a blind masseur massages the shoulders of a client who is attended by an actor serving a drink; another plays the shamisen. The masseur is leaning forward and listening, the server may be looking to his right, the shamisen player is looking over them while the client ignores the focus of their interest. In the foreground, an actor on the left is pointing back to bed area, whispering in a customer’s ear. The man is looking that way; the other actor in this group is observing the first two. In the upper left an actor entertains a man on a bed furnished with quilts and a net. The youth appears annoyed at the goings-on.

Our eyes follow these groupings to the fusuma (sliding screen), where a plainly-dressed man, possibly a doctor but clearly an interloper among these expensively-dressed people, is speaking to a youth while clutching his wrist. They are the center of attention. Is he importuning the actor? Trying to get him to go somewhere else? Giving him bad news about someone he knows? The actor looks like he’s resisting; he has his other hand to his mouth and his body half-hidden behind the screen. To their right is the owner or manager, possibly concerned at his guests’ displeasure at their costly fun being interrupted. Some e-maki have text but there is none in this surviving part of the scroll. We don’t know whether this tea house is fictional, in what city it may have been, who the people shown were, what the performances that day were, and how the tête-à-tête at the fusuma ends.

A pair of paintings at the back of the e-maki (in the alcove near the top, right of center) caught my eye: they appear to be a willow branch and a plum. (Fig. 2) Had Moronobu heard or read Bashō’s haikai? As far as I can tell, no one in the West has yet speculated as to a connection between ume-yanagi in these two works.

Fig. 2 Detail of "Scenes in a Theatre Tea-house"

Their adult lives were nearly contemporaneous. Moronobu moved to Edo in about 1657. By the time of the painting in 1685 Bashō was recognized as a haikai master, having judged contests. His work may have been more accessible than the painting given the large number of book stores and book lenders in Edo then. Richard Rubinger cites a claim of more than 200 publishers in seventeenth century Edo. (2007:83) A book could be borrowed for five days for no more then, by the end of the Edo period, half the cost of a bowl of noodle soup. (Hirano 2007:120) Beginning by the mid-eighteenth century, the Edo bookseller-publisher Suwaraya Ichibei “provided his store…as a space for the most innovative cultural articulators to commingle, chat, play, and work together.” (Hirano 2007: 118) Individuals organized salons for poetry and other artistic pursuits in hired rooms as well as in private homes, “egalitarian spaces where class, by convention, did not matter.” (Gerstle 2011:142)

Moronobu would have had opportunity to have known about Bashō’s work and possibly to have met him. But given the popularity of ume and yanagi in culture, Moronobu could have come up with the pairing on his own. And plum referents were often to its flowers, not the fruit itself.

Everywhere invoked, nowhere present

According to Katherine Mezur, from kabuki’s beginnings (about eighty-two years before the teahouse painting) throughout the Edo period, onnagata were not performing imitations of real-life women. Of a Saikaku story about Matsushima Han’ya, who was a real onnagata, Earl Jackson observed that “[w]omen are everywhere invoked, yet nowhere present.” (1989:466) Mezur argues that onnagata constructed a female-likeness based, in part, on an adolescent boy’s body: “bishōnen no bi (beauty of male youth)—the aesthetics of the beautiful boy—shaped onnagata gender acts and role types.” (2005:2)

The eroticism of male adolescence underlay their performance. Onnagata style was formed from wakashu kabuki (c. 1600-1652), in which boys on stage would entice audience members to hire them. Kabuki had changed by the time of Moronobu to where the onnagata he shows in his tea-house painting would have acted in plotted works, creating their own kata (stylized forms) or following those of onnagata stars. Mezur reasons that this process of evolution and onnagata performativity disrupted “the hegemony of binary and oppositional gender roles…. [O]nnagata performance cannot be identified with any one gender. Instead, onnagata perform multiple, ambiguous, and transformative genders.” (2005:15)

Bashō’s haikai could be read today as reductive, affirming to the reader or listener a nominally binary choice. Yet even here, as he moves from referents to the real, from the classical to the profane, from the rich cultural image of ume to an individual wakashu, Bashō introduces a grain of doubt. He privileges ume, starting his poem with it, but immediately after “wakashu”, as well as after “onna”, he has “kana”, for which I used “is it?” but could also be “I wonder; should I?; I hope that”. So the nominal choice and action toward it could be uncertain or deferred. Possibly it could be no choice at all.

By juxtaposing ume yanagi, Bashō sets them as coterminous, that is, as sharing a border. Borders are dangerous, not just to the people who try to cross them, but to meaning. To paraphrase Gloria Anzaldúa, they are where one thing “grates against [another] and bleeds.” (1987:25) Among and within nation-states they can be chaotic and violent as people contest them, as they did the shogunate’s barriers along its highways, sometimes trying to sneak past them without authorization (Nenzi 2006:107), for which the penalty could be death. (Screech 2000:257)

From a metaphysical standpoint, borders are self-destabilizing. Max Statkiewicz writes that borders threaten “to spill over and confuse” genres and categories: “A margin is by definition, paradoxically, indefinite. It marks and blurs the difference between the main corpus…and its outside by dissolving the border (margo) of separation.” As the foundation of a system of strict oppositions, borders occupy an “uncanny, unheimlich position, at once central and marginal (errant).” (2009:133) Onnagata destabilize the fiction of a binary gender system. “Like border figures, or outlaws…their bodies enact their own culture, which is male embodied but not identified.” (Mezur 2005:251)

Much of gesaku (the playful parodic writing of the ukiyo) counterpoises bishōnen and women as objects of desire. But this comparison is not necessarily of one or the other. It could be both, none, or something else. Ideas of what constituted “woman” and “boy” were not altogether fixed, something in keeping with the idea of life as floating, without set boundaries, where categories could shift. Ukiyo works are remarkable in that not only was this concept of ambiguity widespread, but that it could be expressed so compactly for readers or viewers to recognize as describing their world.

Works cited

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987.

Gerstle, Andrew. “Creating Celebrity: Poetry in Osaka Actor Surimono and Prints” in Keller Kimbrough and Satoko Shimazaki, eds., 137-61. Publishing the Stage: Print and Performance in Early Modern Japan. Boulder, CO: Center for Asian Studies, U of Colorado Boulder, 2011.

Hirano, Katsuya. “Social Networks and Production of Public Discourse in Edo Popular Culture” in Elizabeth Lillehoj, ed., 111-28. Acquisition: Art and Ownership in Edo-Period Japan. Warren, CT: Floating World, 2007.

Hishikawa Moronobu. “Scenes in a Theatre Tea-house”, 1685. <http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/asia/h/hishikawa_moronobu,_scenes_in.aspx> Accessed 2 Jan. 2012.

Ihara Saikaku. The Great Mirror of Male Love. Trans. Paul Gordon Schalow. Stanford, CA: Stanford U P, 1990.

Jackson, Earl, Jr. “Kabuki Narratives of Male Homoerotic Desire in Saikaku and Mishima”, Theatre Journal, vol. 41, no. 4 (Dec., 1989):459-77.

Jenkins, Donald. “Paintings of the Floating World”, The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 75, no. 7 (Sept., 1988):244-78.

——. The Floating World Revisited. Portland, OR: Portland Art Museum, 1993.

Matsuo Bashō. “梅柳さぞ若衆かな女かな”. Haiku U: HS-152. <http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Template:Basho_Haiku_U> Accessed 2 Jan. 2012.

Mezur, Katherine. Beautiful Boys/Outlaw Bodies: Devising Kabuki Female-Likeness. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Mostow, Joshua S. Pictures of the Heart: The Hyakunin Isshu in Word and Image. Honolulu: U Hawai’i P, 1996.

Nenzi, Laura. “To Ise at All Costs: Religious and Economic Implications of Early Modern Nukemairi”, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, vol. 33, no. 1 (2006):75-114.

Rubinger, Richard. Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan. Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P, 2007.

Screech, Timon. Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700-1820. Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P, 1999.

——. The Shogun’s Painted Culture: Fear and Creativity in the Japanese States, 1760-1829. London: Reaktion Books, 2000.

——. The Lens within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan. Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P, 2002.

——. “Owning Edo-Period Paintings” in Elizabeth Lillehoj, ed., 23-51. Acquisition: Art and Ownership in Edo-Period Japan. Warren, CT: Floating World, 2007.

Statkiewicz, Max. Rhapsody of Philosophy: Dialogues with Plato in Contemporary Thought. University Park, PA: Penn State U P, 2009.