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.

Let’s take a moment to parse out the vocabulary we’re using. I’ll be simplifying some of these definitions, but you’ll find numerous works listed in our bibliography page that provide more nuanced definitions and approaches, if you’d like further information.

Boys’ love is a broad term used to encompass all varieties of male/male romantic and/or erotic manga and dōjinshi. Although the term “boy” may suggest under-aged protagonists, BL embraces a spectrum of ages, from the subgenres of shota (featuring prepubescent boys) to oyaji (featuring men usually in the 30- to 50 year-old age range). Most of it — and most of what you’ll find in English — features young men in their teens to 20s. BL manga is typically written by women for female readers, although we know from research that some men write and read BL. Gay manga in Japan is called bara and, confusingly, may be referred to as “men’s love,” or ML. It is typically written by men for men, although again we know that some women write and read bara.

Yaoi and BL tend to be used interchangeably in the U.S. Those with a taste for precision might prefer to apply the term yaoi (which is an acronym coined in 1979 from yama-nashi, ochi-nashi, imi-nashi [no climax, no point, no meaning]) to dōjinshi containing much sex and minimal plot that use pre-existing characters appearing in commercial works, and to use BL for more extended romantic stories featuring original characters. In the U.S., the abbreviation OEL, “original English language,” is often attached to homegrown BL to differentiate it from BL imported from countries such as Japan, Korea, or China. But such definitions can always shift.

Although BL manga are the best-known manifestations of the genre in the U.S., BL is properly a genre name, and BL anime, novels, movies, CDs and games also exist, and some have broken into the English-language market. For example, DMP’s Juné imprint translated a number of BL novels, including Ai No Kusabi (The Space Between) and Only the Ring Finger Knows; Right Stuf has licensed the BL anime series Antique Bakery, Gravitation, and Junjo Romantica; and JAST USA has licensed the BL games Absolute Obedience and Enzai: Falsely Accused.

Slash is a form of fan fiction that takes two or more characters from a commercial television show, movie, novel, or, in some cases, real life (e.g., rock and boy-band members, or political figures), and puts them into romantic and/or sexual situations with each other. Almost any popular TV show or movie you can name is likely to have slash associated with it; just try a Google search on the protagonists’ names and include the terms slash and fanfiction. Although slash was originally written in story form beginning in the 1960s, slash artwork and amateur music videos are also popular today. As literary forms, slash and yaoi, in the original sense of the terms, have many similarities; both were originally written by women for women, both use copyrighted characters, and both arose, apparently independently. Slash, however, can now refer to m/f, m/m, or f/f pairings, whereas yaoi is still used to refer to m/m pairings only.  Of these three forms, this site blog will concentrate on m/m slash.

Slash is sometimes referred to as m/m fiction, but it’s useful from a scholarly viewpoint to differentiate between the two, so that slash is used to refer to fanfiction that uses somebody else’s characters, and male/male fiction is used to refer to original fiction featuring the author’s own characters.

Male/male fiction has been defined by Josh Lanyon as original fiction featuring emotional and romantic relationships between male characters. Although it’s often written by women, many of whom also wrote slash or have grown up reading yaoi, today it includes male writers such as Lanyon, who specified in Man Oh Man!: Writing M/M Fiction for Kinks & Cash, that m/m is “a more sentimental and romantic approach to love and sex than you might find in a gay romance novel — let alone gay porn. It is — forgive me — a more feminine approach” (p. 8).  He notes that although gay male readers aren’t currently reading as much m/m fiction as are (often straight) female readers. Male/male fiction always features a romantic relationship, although it may also cross into many other genres — Lanyon writes m/m mysteries and thrillers, whereas others write m/m tall ship stories, m/m paranormal romances, m/m fantasy, and so forth.

M/m fiction began earlier than slash and yaoi, if we consider Mary Renault’s work; she touched on homosexuality in her first novel, Purposes of Love (1939), although her historical works The Charioteer (1953) and The Last of the Wine (1956) were more obviously m/m works. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Catch Trap (1979) was a later contemporary example of m/m fiction, arising around the same time as slash and yaoi. Today, it’s a rapidly growing publishing niche. I believe its rise in the late ‘00s can be traced first to the maturity of slash, which over the last half-century has allowed many authors to gain the practical writing experience that they’re now shifting into the commercial sector; second to the boom of yaoi in the early ‘00s, which alerted publishers to a hitherto unrecognized, or at least unacknowledged, potential market for m/m romance; and third to the rise of digital publishing, especially with the advent of the Kindle in 2007 and the iPad in 2010, which has permitted numerous small presses to tap into the m/m romance market.

I suggested in my chapter in Boys’ Love Manga (2010) that the term male/male romance should be used as an umbrella term embracing the subgenres of yaoi, BL, slash, gay fiction, etc., for ease of reference. My genre definition was, “Any narrative that contains as a central plot element the romantic relationship between two or more male characters and is marketed primarily to a female audience” (p. 78). My hypothesis, which I hope to develop further in my newest research, was that m/m romance positions the reader as female in terms of the (culturally biased) assumptions it makes about the reader’s desires, values, and expectations for a story about a romantic relationship, whereas gay romance positions the reader as male with regard to these assumptions. Is there really a difference between the two?  We can probably all offer anecdotal evidence in response, but if you’ll wait to ask me in another year, I hope to be able to offer a response supported by rigorously gathered and analyzed data.

However, I suspect, like Lanyon, that as the m/m romance genre continues to boom over the next few years, it will eventually become impossible to differentiate between “male/male fiction” and “gay fiction.”

Yaoi Research is dedicated to the scholarly discussion of m/m romance in all its aspects. If you create, enjoy, and/or study m/m romance in any of its forms and would like to contribute well-informed descriptive or analytical writing to the site, please contact us. Commentaries, research notes, reviews, analyses, and opinions are welcome.

You don’t need to provide original research or complex scholarly analyses, just interesting ideas that may stimulate thought. Please don’t worry if your first language is not English. If you wish, we will help you copyedit your contribution.

Happy 2012, from Dru Pagliassotti & Mark McHarry.

Notes:

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

2. Pagliassotti, Dru, “Better than Romance? Japanese BL Manga and the Subgenre of Male/Male Romantic Fiction,” in Boys’ Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre, edited by Levi, Antonia; McHarry, Mark; and Pagliassotti, Dru, 59-83. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2010.