The word yaoi is credted to Hatsu Akiko and Sakata Yasuko, members of the Year 24 Group of female manga artists who created stories focusing purely on sexual relations between men. Soon after, other artists began drawing parodies of popular boys’ manga comics where the male characters were depicted as gay lovers. This genre is known as shonen ai, or “boy love” and sometimes abbreviated as BL. At the time, female manga artists were publishing stories for girls’ manga magazines about platonic romantic relationships between young boys. This queer reading of a work, that nimbly evades “traditional definitions” of sexuality, resonates with Sedgwick’s theory.Yaoi was created in Japan around 1980. This depiction by women fantasizing about homosexual love within the powerful friendship (bonds) between males included some extreme sexual imagery.
Yaoi definition series#
For example, the first yaoi work that I discovered was one that portrayed love between the boys who appeared in the shōnen manga Captain Tsubasa, which was a hugely popular series in the magazine Shōnen Jump in the 1980s. However, not only do the female readers who read something homosexual into the homosocial “bonds” between those male characters overcome the separation of homosociality and homosexuality discussed by Sedgwick with ease, but they also put physical sexual relationships between men clearly in the foreground. Generally, if the existing work is meant for consumption, heterosexuality is taken as a given, and either no particular reference is made to the sexuality of male characters within the work, or they are presented as heterosexual. The name “yaoi” is an acronym of the phrase “ YAma nashi, Ochi nashi, Imi nashi” (“no climax, no punch line, no meaning”), and the genre consists of derivative works originating from parodies of existing anime and manga works.
The genre known as “yaoi” blossomed within Comike culture. View CourseAnother literary movement that began in the 1970s worth noting is the first Comic Market held in 1975, also known as “Comike.” Originally billed as a dōjinshi fair, one might say that Comike was a space that made forms of expression differing from those found in commercial magazines possible.
De Lauretis emphasizes consciousness of internal differences, and through consciousness of male sexuality and female homosexuality, gender differences, and particularly differences in ethnicity and class, studies of sexuality that included these aspects came to be known as queer studies. At this point, de Lauretis advocated the use of the term “queer theory” to reconsider and reconstruct the framework of our sexuality, instead of using the term “gay and lesbian studies”. 3 no.2), objected to the dualistic view of homosexuality as the margin of heterosexuality, and attempted to treat it as something unique with a unique societal and cultural shape. Are heterosexuality and homosexuality simply binary opposites? If the nucleus of humanity is a fluid grouping-together of possible pieces of the self, then is it also possible to think of a person’s sexuality not as a fixed concept, but rather as an accumulation of fragments that can change shape? Is homosexuality even a uniform concept, or do differences exist within homosexuality? Teresa de Lauretis’s essay “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities: an Introduction,” published in Differences (1991, vol. However, from the late ‘80s to the ‘90s, a form of discussion emerged that harshly criticized the fact that homosexuality and the heterosexuality it marginalized were again falling into the trap of dualism.
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