Subverting masculinity, misogyny, and reproductive technology in SEX PISTOLS Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto
Abstract: Superficial readings of works in the yaoi (also called ‘boys love’) genre outside of Japan often condemn or dismiss the genre as (more) misogynist, (more) homophobic, and occasionally (more) racist (than works in a similar ‘Western’ genre called slash). The yaoi genre is seen as ideologically inferior to its ‘Western’ counterpart, and the root or cause of this
inferiority is often ascribed to its creators living in and being shaped by what is seen as a (relatively more) sexually oppressive society, contemporary Japan. In this paper I suggest that superficial and antagonistic readings of the fairly small amount of translated works may be missing the subversive and satirical elements inherent in the genre.
These elements are very visible in SEX PISTOLS, (LOVE PISTOLS in English translation because of intellectual property rights issues with a band by the same name) a manga in the yaoi genre written and drawn by Kotobuki Tarako and published as six consecutive volumes between 2004 and 2010. The work is well known both to Japanese and foreign fans of yaoi. Rich with subplots, Kotobuki puts unusual spins on tired old tropes like how (female) attractiveness
depends on fertility, stalking is true love, and women will trick men into getting them pregnant to trap them. The phenomenon of pregnancy itself is drawn as parasitic and alien to the body, and characters are literally conceived as animals. I will examine how within the pictotext of SEX PISTOLS the oppressive -isms mentioned above are explored, satirized, subverted, but also, and necessarily, reproduced.
Keywords: yaoi / fan fiction / romance tropes 1. Introduction
Ever since I discovered the parallel genres of slash and yaoi, both genres of homoerotic fiction about male characters but for the most part produced by and for women, I have been occasionally amused, often annoyed, and puzzled by a particular kind of discommunication in which some dismiss the other’s authorial/reader activities as ‘less subversive’ than their own, and therefore subordinate and of lesser interest at best, unworthy of inclusion in both fannish and academic discussions at worst.
In ‘Western’, although I prefer to talk about English-language fandom,1 this is expressed as disdain for the yaoi genre and its narrative ‘stereo-types’ (tropes). This disdain occasionally goes hand in hand with a disdain for Japanese manga and anime as a whole or views the crossing over of yaoi into ‘old school’ slash fandom as a kind of pollution and unwelcome hybridization. It works both ways however, an easy to understand example is fig. 1. BL author Est Em, of works like Red Blinds the Foolish and Seduce Me After the Show, describes our first meeting in 2005 in an essay manga about fujoshi (lit. ‘rotten women and girls’, a self-depreciating name for yaoi fans) in 2009. We talked ‘shop’ for hours, chased everyone else from the room, and while I’m no longer clear on the particulars since we drank a great deal too, one instant she keenly remembers is me talking about ‘slashers’ (authors of mostly amateur male/male romance) in English language fandom ‘slashing’ (pairing two—occasionally more—men up and turning their homosocial relationship into a homoerotic one) the 2004 U.S. democrat presidential and vice-presidential candidates, John Kerry and John Edwards.2
Most fan fiction about them I had seen online portrayed Mr. Edwards, shorter, younger, and arguable more conventionally pretty than Mr. Kerry as the one penetrated rather than the one penetrating during sex, as the one coded in a more ‘feminine’ way in the relationship. Due to my inability to give a wholly accurate view of the slash genre, this conversation led Est Em to conclude that slash is more like Harlequin romances than yaoi. In this context, ‘more like Harlequin romances’ means less subversive and more heteronormative, and perhaps even more boring and less fun, or less adventurous. As a rule both slash and yaoi fans are dismissive of
mainstream hetero-sexual romance, and the notorious pulp Harlequin romances are seen as representative of and as good as synonymous with the genre.3
As mentioned above, the act of slashing is the rewriting of a homosocial relationship into a homoerotic one, and yaoi, what is known as BL (boys’ love) in Japan (in English-language fandom too the term BL is gaining popularity at the cost of yaoi but hasn’t obliterated it yet), does this too and has a corresponding verb for it too, yaoru. Both Pugh (2005) and Mizuma (2005) point out how similar the genres are, Pugh in a discussion of slash and Mizuma while writing about yaoi and claiming that the genre is “a universal psychological phenomenon” (2005, 20); Mizuma considers them so similar that she doesn’t mention that abroad it is called slash, not yaoi or BL. In a recent discussing, Oto and Itō discuss slash and the dangers of judging slash from their own cultural context, but proceed to call slashers ‘foreign fujoshi’ too anyway, again aware of an acknowledging the many parallels. In fandom then, the twain didn’t meet or cross-over with high frequency until the advent of the Internet, turning geographically apart fandoms into a global village, or more something like a global, never-ending fan convention.4 Free from geographical restrictions and only hindered by different time zones, it’s easier than even to find other people with the same interests.
No matter how easy it is to find fandom content from all over the world with the click of a mouse now, because of the language barrier and because a lot of yaoi is still published on paper rather than digitally, the amount of works available abroad is still a lot smaller than that inside Japan, and access to a limited amount of works runs the risk of skewing readers’ perception of the genre a s whole.
There are several problems that stem from looking at the limited amount of works in the yaoi genre that have been translated and judging them as ‘worse’. First because some of them aren’t necessarily worse but in a sense plain ‘bad’. Two reasons why they can be judged as ‘bad’ without the necessity for cross-cultural comparison are, for one, because the works translated and popular abroad aren’t necessarily the best or even those that sold best in Japan, but the ones that made the most waves, wadai sakuhin or controversial works. One example is Ozaki Minami’s Zetsu-ai 1989, one of the first yaoi works in translation to enjoy widespread popularity abroad, although it was never officially licensed in English4. I label this work as ‘bad’ not because of its quality as fiction, but from a Gender Studies perspective, and bad as a representative of the wider
yaoi genre. Most if not all sexual activity in the series is violent, obsessive and abuse, and the series can be summarized in one sentence as: ‘It’s all violence and rape until someone loses an arm’. This happens when the seme character cuts off one of his own arms, irrationally hoping this will stop his brother from continuing to rape his lover, the uke character.
The popularity of this work, in Japan where it was published first, during a period within the genre in which a lot of yaoi stories still ended in tragedy, with the death on one or both of the main characters (like in many of its predecessors by the 24 generation, a very talented group of mangaka born in 1949—Shōwa 24—who created many classic shōjo manga and shōnen manga works), and out of Japan, is puzzling unless we take into account the interest of female fans in stories that either have rape as a plot device to create a crisis that kicks off a story, or stories in which the rape fantasy is the point. This interest of female readers in rape and abusive
relationships as a whole is not limited to slash and yaoi or fanfiction, it is also apparent in the popularity of classics like Beauty And The Beast and Dracula (Beres, 1999).
A second reason why these works can be considered ‘bad’ is because by the time translations became available they were already out of touch with the times. The time lag
between creation/publication in Japanese and official translations in German and French spanned ten to twelve years. By the time fans outside of Japan read Zetsu-ai and its sequel, Bronze, yaoi stories with over the top violence and tragic endings were no longer considered popular sellers in Japan (where a happy ending became a must for stories published since the early 2000s). Here we see where fans, reading the work in a time frame in which it is already very dated, would consider the Yaoi genre ‘backward’ from a social justice perspective; sexist because of the abuse the character drawn as the coded-as-female uke in the relationship suffers, and homophobic, since it portrays sex between men as invariably violent and painful.
Casual observers, critics, creators, fans, and even some scholars of yaoi and slash have described the genres as pathology, therapy, and pornography (or its less inflammatory
euphemism ‘erotica’), but I see both as a form of parody first, a rewrite of heteronormative relationships that, to remain recognizable as such, retain a lot of heteronormative traits, that sometimes do and sometimes don’t successfully subvert the heteronormative order of the cultural context they are produced in. This form of parody is mostly not intentional, scarcely few yaoi or slash fans start creating a story with as a purpose to ‘stick it to The Man’, however both genres
are what Renold and Ringnose call “girls’ subversive and resistant practices to hegemonic gendered and sexual scripts” (2008, 320). Read coming from a different cultural context, parody always carries the risk of being mistaken for ‘the real thing’, of reproducing what it is aiming to subvert.
A very damning example, a work that is occasionally read as extremely sexist, homophobic, and transphobic and at first glance a prime ‘worst of what yaoi has to offer’
representative is SEX PISTOLS.5 Drawn by Kotobuki Tarako, it was published as six consecutive volumes between 2004 and 2010. The work is well known both to Japanese and foreign fans of the yaoi genre.6 As Mizoguchi (2010, 181) points out, SEX PISTOLS is both heteronormative as well as subversive. In the following part I would like to demonstrate how reproducing a certain amount of heteronormativity in a work doesn’t have to be accidental or even unfortunate; it is a condition to achieve effective subversion, to make the work meaningful as parody.
2. Traditional romance tropes and their subversion in SEX PISTOLS
At first glance there is nothing extra-ordinary about the quality of SEX PISTOLS, nothing that explains its popularity. Even fans of Kotobuki decry her art as mediocre at best and the story as nonsensical, as 'crack'. That a flow chart of one of the main characters’ family structure (provided by the author in vol. 4) is necessary to follow the thread of the story should have provided another obstacle to SEX PISTOLS gaining popularity. But it didn’t. Kotobuki’s acknowledgment of the short-comings of her work, and the way she remained undeterred by them, helped rather than prevented SEX PISTOLS gaining readers. I would go as far as to say that it has reached cult status, being so notoriously ‘bad’ it’s ‘good’.
The main character, introduced in the first pages, is the ‘uke’ (coded as feminine) of the main pairing, an almost sixteen year old high school student called Norio. This appearance of a character that to habitual readers of yaoi scans as an ‘uke’ from page one, is one reason why some fans are critical of the yaoi genre the way they aren't of slash. What is seen as yaoi's worst feature is the labeling of the characters gendered roles in romantic relationships. The 'seme' (attacker) character is coded as 'the male' in the relationship, usually described or drawn as physically taller, heavier, and often darker in colouring than his partner, a characteristic the yaoi genre has in common with many romance novels with a heterosexual pairing, and a trope clearly
present in SEX PISTOLS. This seme, the ‘hero’ in traditional romance novels, is usually the more 'active' partner in pursuing the relationship, and sometimes literally aggressive. His partner is the 'uke' (receiver), 'the female' in the relationship, in the role of the heroine in traditional romance novels, usually described as physically shorter, lighter in body weight as well as colouring.7
The closest equivalent terms for these character types in English would be top for seme and bottom for uke, not necessarily equal to dominant and submissive. Uke can be dominant and seme can be submissive, or they can be equals, neither role nor position during sex are
necessarily indicative of any kind of subordination to the other. Occasionally there are reversals, called switching in slash. In one of Asia Watanabe's stories, a dominant uke expresses the desire to be on the penetrating side for once, and the seme agrees, like he agrees to most everything his lover suggests.
We can judge the yaoi genre for it's prevalent seme/uke trope as heteronormative, as a slasher however this is disingenuous considering that many slash fans have just as set
preferences about which character is a top and which a bottom, to the extent that fans will have long-lasting disputes and carry grudges against other fans because of disagreements about which character should fulfill which role. If a character switches in a story or performs a certain sex act that is coded as dominant/submissive without prior warning some fans will take umbrage, and this slasher can't count on all fingers the times she's been accused of 'ruining the entire day' of a reader by having the 'wrong' character perform a certain sex act. Some critics also judge yaoi as less ‘realistic’ and therefore of lesser worth because of its clearly defined seme/uke roles. ‘Realistic’ is a very subjective category, also heavily reliant on context, an in this context often means ‘like real homosexual relationships’. This critique that the one genre is more realistic than the other is hard to corroborate given that both yaoi and slash do not, for the most part, spring from the imagination of people who have a solid grasp of what ‘real homosexual relationships’ between men are like; that romantic relationships are too diverse for there to be an average realistic homosexual relationship authors can model their stories after; that heterosexual romance stories in fiction aren’t pressured into being paragons of realism either; and that many real
homosexual relationships, gay male or lesbian, do adhere to a varying amount of heteronormativite aspects, as in lesbian butch/femme dynamics.
Looking then beyond the two main characters at the basic premise of the work, it becomes clear that heteronormative gender roles in romance in SEX PISTOLS is one of its least ‘unrealistic’ aspects. The basic premise, which to many would-be readers may sound off-putting, is: all men are animals (this category includes the few but important female characters in the story).
After an accident Norio feels different from the way he felt before. The most shocking at first is that most people suddenly look like monkeys to him, and these monkeys sexually molest him on his way to school. Here the message is obviously that men who cannot control their sexual urges are no better than animals. It is not just men however, the most popular girl in the school, whose face looks like that of a mandrill to Norio, comes on to him too.
Monkeys are not the only animals interested in Norio, he is also accosted by a senior who looks like a bear. Whether this is a reference to gay bear subculture is left in the middle, but eventually this bear meets his match and becomes the ‘wife’ of foreign bear with the
unambiguous surname McBear. Back to Norio’s trials then: his bear senior presents him with a love letter that is thirteen notebooks long, a scene that informs readers that this character is undoubtedly a stalker and will likely not be the one who ultimately becomes Norio's love interest. The one who does is Kunimasa, a seventeen-year-old jaguar.8
In what is one of the most problematic scenes in the series, Kunimasa, after catching a whiff of Norio’s scent, drags him off and starts making out with him in a bathroom stall, running out of time because he will be late for his part-time job, pressed by the need to ‘mark’ Norio as ‘his’ so other animals will know he is off limits, Kunimasa comes over Norio’s face and rubs it in.
Context for why this scene is particularly shocking and seen as misogynist, although it doesn’t contain violence or physical injury, stems from mostly feminist critique on mainstream (heterosexual) pornography, where the ‘facial’ (or money shot), is routine and seen by many feminists as one of the most humiliating sex acts a man can perform on, or ‘do to’, a woman. Even within the yaoi genre, a scene like the one described is an exception. In other stories, most scenes that contain sexual activity or either by mutual consent or 'dub-con': whether there is consent may be dubious, but the dub-conned character invariably ends up enjoying the sexual encounter, which clears the aggressor of sin within the genre's parameters.9 Norio however does definitely not remember this encounter fondly.
Kunimasa later explains that Norio’s sudden sexual irresistibility was caused by his accident, which triggered a recessive gene, and he is a ‘throwback’. If that label isn’t offensive enough, he is also called a missing link, or arguably less offensive ‘a rare premium’ (partner for reproduction).
Because his parents are both monkeys while Norio is a cat, he is very rare yet very fertile. That both of his parents are monkeys however, is occasionally brought up as a way to harass or discriminate against Norio, and makes the other characters speciest in what could be a metaphor for classism, racism, or both. The way in which attraction to fertility is portrayed as natural and attractiveness automatically linked to fertility hard to suppress lampoons what many of us know about pop evolutionary psychology.10
It is Kunimasa’s family structure that finally shows us something truly subversive. Whereas 70% of the world’s population are monkeys, Kunimasa comes from a long line of ‘Zoomans’. But SEX PISTOLS is not all about the ‘mans’, and it is not about zoophilia either; the women in Kunimasa’s family play a very prominent role.
Kunimasa’s mother, Makio, is married to another woman, Karen (and their two children are Kunimasa’s half-siblings), while his biological father, David, is married to a man,
Maximillian. David and Maximillian are the fathers of Kunimasa’s half-brother Hidekuni. Kunimasa’s mother also had a child with his father’s husband, his half-brother Yonekuni, who was born at the same time as Kunimasa and exposed Maximillian (who later gave birth to Hidekuni), as bisexual to David, who expresses surprise at Maximillian having an interest in women too.
Anticipating confusion among her readers, Kotobuki included a flow chart with details of Kunimasa’s family tree in volume 4 of the series (p. 111) reproduced below (fig. 2). While there are more manga, even BL manga, in which characters have complicated family back grounds and a hard-to-keep-track-of amount of children, Kotobuki is possibly the only one who felt she pushed it so far it would be beyond her readers’ comprehension without a chart to come back to.
The global Zooman community completely disregards monkeys’ (normal humans’) laws and same sex marriage as well as having children outside the confines of marriage is nothing extraordinary for them. Although pregnancy physically anchors a character’s gender role at least temporarily, Kotobuki portrays those gender roles as very fluid here. Female characters are able
to father children with other women, male characters are able to give birth to the children of their male partners, and there is the occasional male/female couple in which both partners may or may not be bisexual.
(fig.2)
Since this is a yaoi/BL series, the focus remains on male/male romantic relationships, with many subplots avoiding the main arc of the underage Norio and Kunimasa’s budding relationship altogether and featuring characters who are only tangentially related to Kunimasa. Before we forget about Norio, while he is the one ‘destined’ to become the mother of Kunimasa’s offspring, and he is shown actively pursuing a more sexual relationship with Kunimasa, he often
changes into his true form (a cat), in the heat of the moment, and they never quite get there. His gender too is portrayed as fluid and he isn’t always drawn looking feminine, not unless he is drawn relative to Kunimasa. In the panel below, he is drawn as very masculine (fig. 3, from Vol. 4, 10), with his eyelids half-closed he sports a typical ‘seductive seme’ expression. It is a scene in which Kunimasa’s half-sister Manami, jealous of her brother’s affection for Norio and feeling he isn’t good enough for her brother, tries to bully Norio. He turns the tables by making a pass at her, saying that Kunimasa might treat him like a girl, he’s still a man, and his ‘type’, his preference is for a cute girl like Manami.
(fig. 3) 3. The ‘Womb Worm’ and male pregnancy
A prominent subplot in volume three of the SEX PISTOLS, and a favourite among fans of the series, is the viper and mongoose romance. The mongoose, Shima (a nephew of Kunimasa’s mother’s wife Karen), and the viper, Hiromasa, both twenty-seven, aren’t on friendly terms at the start of their story.
To complicate things, Shima’s brother Ume has a crush on Hiromasa and to avoid hurting his brother’s feelings, Shima hides that he and Hiromasa have a friends-with-benefits
relationship ongoing for the past ten years. While their parents are categorically opposed to Shima, Ume, and Hiromasa spending time together, Hiromasa bears no ill will toward
mongooses because he is half retriever. When Ume decides he will tell Hiromasa that he loves him, Shima despairs and on a whim decides to do something drastic to make sure a piece of Hiromasa will always be with him. He tries to trick Hiromasa into getting him pregnant by secretly using a ‘Womb Worm’ egg, a pharmaceutical product that is available to Zoomans. Implanted in the body of a man, it creates a temporary womb when hatching.
At this point their relationship looks like a classic example of a woman tricking a man into getting her pregnant so she will at least have the child left. The unexpected twist comes at the end of the story when it is revealed that in Shima’s body there is evidence of two womb eggs being used. The one that ‘took’ is not the one he planted himself, but a raw egg with a much higher rate of success. It is Hiromasa who got Shima pregnant to tie him to him, and who put time into carefully planning it rather than doing it on a whim.
Perhaps the biggest hurdle to readers’ suspension of disbelief in SEX PISTOLS is the way male bodies are provided with a female primary sexual organs, a female reproductive system that in the work is only described as consisting of the parts vagina and womb. As mentioned earlier, there are occasional lesbian couples in the series that reproduce with as much success as the male/male couples, but the mechanics of female/female reproduction aren’t expanded on.
Many fans active in English language fandoms see ‘mpreg’, the usual abbreviation for stories with ‘male pregnancy’ as a niche genre, with reactions from fans unfamiliar with the trope ranging from mild surprise to outright disgust.
It is similar in Japanese yaoi fandom, where as a rule flirting with mpreg is seen as a ‘death knell’ for a story. There are of course exceptions, dōjinshi that focus on comedy will occasionally feature mpreg, and of the 24 generation, Hagio Moto created a dystopian SF series in which some men can bear children, Marginal (1985-87). The story is set in a world void of women, where occasionally a rare boy capable of bearing children is discovered and depended on for the future of mankind. About Marginal Ebihara Akiko says, “Hagio tells this story to show how technology bends and twists maternity and turns it into a cradle for the grotesque delusions of men.” (2002, 17).
SEX PISTOLS does the same, though under the guise of fantastic comedy rather than dystopian SF. In the way the rarer and more ‘prized’ as a partner a ‘Zooman’ is, the harder it is for them, both male or female, to reproduce successfully, we can find echoes of real ‘grotesque
delusions of men’, natalist, eugenic, and racist discourse expressing concerns about ‘welfare mothers’, and ‘our’ populations reproducing at a much slower (or negative or sub-replacement) rates than ‘their’ populations. The way Kotobuki adds a pyramid chart explaining exactly how fertility in the world of SEX PISTOLS is high for those that are plenty and low for those that are rare, is not just a deviation of normal narrative flow in manga, it also serves as a reminder that reproductive rights discourse, forever preoccupied by who should (or ‘can’) reproduce under which circumstances and who shouldn’t, is anything but simple.
While insisting that all romantic relationships are about reproduction the way they are in SEX PISTOLS is indeed heteronormative, offensive, reactionary, and damaging, it is false to assume that all portrayals of same sex couples with a desire for a child (or several children) are unrealistic. People in same sex relationships may want a child not through the now available means (with an egg cell or a sperm donation from a different sex friend, family member, or anonymous donor, or through surrogacy or adoption), but one that shares the genetic material of both partners in the relationship. This is a development that scientifically, especially for women, might not be as far away in the future as it is in collective conscience.
There are more reasons why portrayal of pregnancy in fiction shouldn’t be seen as a negative and necessarily heteronormative. In a work that puts the focus on relationships between male characters, the introduction of pregnancy can also be read as taking the rewriting of a homosocial relationship into a homoerotic one a step further into subversion. In her book
Bodies: Exploring Fluid Boundaries, Robyn Longhurst argues that because some bodies are seen as 'leaky', as opposed to contained, solid, masculine bodies, their presence is seen as a
geographic disturbance. These leaking fluids are the kind healthy males do not have to deal with. Examples of individuals that are seen as disturbances in homosocial spaces are children that haven't been potty trained, as well as the possibly incontinent elderly or disabled, but it refers to women especially, who may be leaking several fluids foreign to male bodies at a time, like menstrual blood, breast milk, or amniotic fluid. Therefore, banning pregnancy and its physical manifestation from the public sphere is heteronormative and a means to keep spaces homosocial, allowing only privileged male bodies that can ‘contain themselves’, or keep a lid on it, in the public sphere. Concocting a narrative like SEX PISTOLS, in which males can become pregnant
and lose the privilege of being contained bodies can therefore be read as deeply subversive rather than heteronormative.
Conclusion:
In her book, The Democratic Genre; Fan Fiction in a literary context, Sheenagh Pugh refers the yaoi genre as similar to slash several times. She describes yaoi as ‘even a commercial proposition’ (emphasis mine), quoting Mark McLelland, to emphasize how general the interest of female fans is in works that are about romantic relationships between male characters (ibid., 155). Pugh also draws a parallel between RPF and RPS (Real People Fanfic and Real People Slash1) and yaoi, and states that while Western fan authors turned to real people, Japanese authors invented their own original characters (Ibid., 159). It is not as simple as that. Romantic fiction about male characters does not seem to have suffered the same amount of self-censorship in Japan as it did in ‘the West’. Morever, there is plenty of RPS in yaoi (called nama-mono, raw goods), with regular fan events where doujinshi that feature everyone remotely prominent are sold, from Japanese pop stars over Korean actors to popular British chefs. Mizuma Midory mentions the trials Takemiya Keiko had with her publishers, to have her series Kaze to ki no uta [The Song of Wind And Trees] published intact, with all the expression of sexuality she wanted to put into it. It took her nine years to get the series out like she wanted, but published it got, and in the seventies the early shōnen-ai genre boomed. The editors of the manga magazine JUNE started a companion novel magazine, at first filled with stories readers sent in. This mangazine, Shōsetsu JUNE, featured sexual descriptions so graphic that the magazine became known as ‘the magazine girls read one-handedly’ (Mizuma 2005, 25).
In the same time period, in ‘the West’, many producers and purveyors of slash fanzines acted as if they were dealing in contraband, sometimes paranoid about family finding and opening their packages or envelopes containing ‘gay porn’ since most fanzines were distributed by mail. Except for some speciality stores, book stores didn’t carry fanzines, and certainly not explicit slash fanzines. Until the Internet became broadly accessible to many fans in first world countries, slash fans relate of having fears of ‘getting found out’, of having to put a stop to their subversive hobby when getting married or moving back in with their parents, for fear their nearest and dearest would find out what exactly they were doing in amateur print. These fears
were mostly wiped of the chart thanks to the Internet, where both slash and yaoi authors, fans and professionals, can publish using pseudonyms, easily changing or erasing online identities that may have been compromised by being associated too closely with their lives offline.
However, there remain adult women who feel they have to hide their peddling in
male/male romance not just from their parents (where not just he generation gap and a reluctance to shock older fashioned sensibilities, but also to a certain extent the incest taboo—a reluctance to share anything of a sexual nature with close relatives—explains wanting to hide the hobby), but from their close-in-age, usually male, partners. They hide their interest in male/male romance not just out of shame about having a sexual interest in ‘someone’ else, but because they fear a confrontation, anger and judgment, even jealousy and retribution, and in some cases being seen as unfit mothers. These fears are indicative of a combined gender/power gap. In Japan this gender/power gap is not absent in female fans’ lives, and it is impossible to measure whether it is ‘less’ or ‘more’, stronger or weaker, but its manifestation is different where the treatment of their interest in male/male romance created mostly by and for women is concerned. The mere facts that for one, yaoi comics, novels, and magazines are available in all average book stores and not sold under the counter, or only to adults,3 and for another, that the yaoi genre grew out of the shōjo manga genre, seen as adequate and normal entertainment for girls, does protect fans from excessive judgment about whether they have a fit or unfit personality for their expected gender role based on what they choose to read.
The existence of the parallel genres of yaoi and slash in societies with very different cultures tells us that the desire many women have to read about romance with two male characters is universal, but that these very similar genres manifest in different forms and are published and distributed differently, can also tell us something about how women’s desires and thoughts are policed in different societies.
A superficial reading of SEX PISTOLS may give the impression that the work is extremely heteronormative, but a slightly more careful reading reveals that it’s treatment of heteronormative tropes is subversive. That these tropes are subverted does not mean that they are absent, on the contrary, but like all successful parody, SEX PISTOLS’ over the top presentation of heteronormative tropes questions, undermines, and lampoons them. To what extent this is
translators. Subversion is an act that is for a large part dependant on cultural context, what is subversive in one culture doesn’t necessarily scan for readers with a different cultural
background, to dismiss an entire genre as automatically inferior or of lesser importance is not a productive tactic.
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Bauwens, Jessica. 2008 “Mpreg, the male body as pregnant in female homoerotic fiction”. In: Annals of Kyoto Seika University, No. 34, pp. 157-193.
Beres, Laura. 1999. “Beauty and the Beast; The romantization of abuse in popular culture”. In: European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 191-207.
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http://www.genders.org/g36/g36_ebihara.html (Last access: 2003/04/12)
Est Em. 2009 “No Border?! Moe wa kokkyō wo koeru?” [No Border!? Does moe cross national borders?]. In: Takeuchi Sachiko, Kusare joshi! pp. 110-111. Tokyo: Bukkuman.
Longhurst, Robyn (2001) Bodies: Exploring Fluid Boundaries. London: Routledge.
Mizoguchi, Akiko (2010) "Theorizing the Comics/Manga genre as a productive forum: Yaoi and beyond". In: Berndt, Jaqueline (ed.) Comics Worlds and The World of Comics. Kyoto: Kyoto Seika University International Manga Research Center, pp. 143-168.
Mizuma, Midory (2005) Inyu to shite no shōnen-ai [Shōnen-ai as metaphor]. Tokyo: Sougensha. Oto, Akiko and Itō Hironobu. 2010. “Dō-itsu shikō no joshitachi wo meguru
media/hyōshō/jissen” [The media, expression, and practice of women and girls with similar tastes]. In: Journal of the Kyushu Anthropological Association, No. 37, pp. 69-87.
Pugh, Sheenagh. 2005. The Democratic Genre; Fan Fiction in a literary context. Bridgend: Seren.
Radway, Janice A. (1983) “Women Read the Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context.” In: Feminist Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 53-78.
Renold, Emma, and Jessica Ringrose. 2008. “Regulation and rupture: mapping tween and teenage girls’ resistance to the heterosexual matrix”. In: Feminist Theory. Vol. 9(3), pp. 313-338. Salmon, Catherine, and Donald Symons (2001) Warrior Lovers, Erotic Fiction, Evolution and Female Sexuality. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Manga:
Kotobuki Tarako (2004a) SEX PISTOLS ①. Tokyo: Biblos ____ (2004b) SEX PISTOLS ②. Tokyo: Biblos.
____ (2005) SEX PISTOLS ③. Tokyo: Biblos. ____ (2007) SEX PISTOLS ④. Tokyo: Ribure. ____ (2008) SEX PISTOLS ⑤. Tokyo: Ribure. ____ (2010) SEX PISTOLS ⑥. Tokyo: Ribure.
Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto is Associate Professor at Kyoto Seika University, Faculty of Manga, Department of Manga Production.
1 Talking about Japan vs. ‘the West’ is difficult, since large amounts of media fans active online in English are
not in parts of the world that are traditionally part of ‘the West’. However, many still choose to participate in English language fandom to the best of their ability because fan activity in a hegemonic language often means more information and more interaction with other fans with similar tastes. There is a lot of cross-over in online fandom, and ‘the West’ probably includes other large language online spaces, like those where Spanish or Portuguese are used. Other large fan sites, where the languages used are Russian or Chinese, are surely not what would be called ‘the West’, but the extent to which Asian and Russian fans cross-over with and participate in English-language fan activity makes it hard to draw clear demarcations, and makes it ever harder to talk about ‘the West’ in a meaningful sense, which is why I would like to avoid using it altogether.
2 Since a little before 2008 there was another surge in the amount of slash written about democrat candidates for
president and vice-president, as well as the rest of their new staff, in online communities like “Rahmbamarama” on livejournal.com.
3 Scholars of the traditional romance genre have argued that it is subversive and consciousness-raising in its own
right (Radway 1983, 75). However, slash and yaoi have a power Harlequin romances do not: they can make ‘normal’ men sneaking a peek to poke fun at the silly stuff women read recoil in homophobic panic if they are so inclined. This characteristic alone is sometimes enough reason for slash or yaoi fans to prefer the genre; they can be sure that any homophobic males in the household won’t mess with their computer files or books.
4 The beginning of these crossings were wrought with dispute caused by a difference in online etiquette and
practices; by and large Japanese fan artists, even now centering their fan activity around physical zine or dōjinshi making, were not favourably impressed with the way foreign, mostly ‘Western’ fans considered anything found online ‘free for all’ and would rip their art, scan their dōjinshi, and distribute them online without permission and often without attribution. Faced with a language barrier there often wasn’t much they could do about it other than preventing their work from being publicly viewable online.
5In English translation it was renamed LOVE PISTOLS to avoid intellectual property rights issues with a band
by the same name.
6In 2007 the literary magazine Da Vinchi listed Kotobuki Tarako as one of fifteen representative BL manga
authors (25)
7 It is not true that the presence of the character types of seme/uke in nearly all yaoi works means that there are
depictions of or even allusions to penetrative sex in every or even most of them; but when there are depictions of penetrative sex, the seme is almost always the penetrator and the uke the penetrated. The series Clan of the
Nakagamis by Homerun Ken, doesn't contain a single graphic depiction of sexual activity but has characters that
are clearly drawn as either seme or uke.
8 The characters do not engage in any sexual activity in their animal shapes, which sets the series apart from the
‘furry’ fandom, where anthropomorphism is not just welcomed but celebrated.
9 Fans of the slash genre sometimes critique the yaoi genre of being about rape all the time, but this isn't the case,
and any long-time fan of the slash genre can attest there are plenty stories of non-con (non consent) and dub-con (dubious consent) to be found there as well. Manga scholar Nele Noppe has found enough similarities between Japanese yaoi fan activity and English-language slash fan activity to notice a pertinent difference: that within a certain pairing in Harry Potter fan generated stories, published as fan fiction or dōjinshi, different nationalities have different preferences for which of the characters tops, respectively bottoms.
10 Slash and yaoi have been examined from this angle too; Catherine Salmon and Donald Symons' 2001 often
critiqued and naive analysis of slash fiction, Warrior Lovers tried to find a 'natural' cause for the fact that many women enjoy romantic stories about two men rather than about a man or a woman. Evolutionary psychology is a discipline that is the bête noir of scholars of Gender and Queer Studies because of its often flawed, biologically determinist theories and convenient-for-the-status-quo conclusions, like the notorious study that 'proved' that rape is 'natural'. In 2009 English-language online slash fandom collectively took a stand against and ran out evolutionary psychologist Ogi Ogas for presenting them with a flawed survey at first and later confronting them with offensive wording like ‘she-males’.
11A mostly fan-created subgenre of fiction in which authors write about real people instead of fictional
characters. Sometimes RPF is published however, where applicable protected by parody laws or as roman à clé. The people featured as characters in these stories are usually at least marginally famous and include not just pop
stars, actors, and athletes, but also politicians.
312Yet, but explaining why is beyond the scope of this paper. To find out more about why BL manga, provided there are characters under eighteen portrayed as having sexual activity, might soon disappear from book shelves read Patrick Galbraith’s paper “Manga-anime-like realism:’ Reconsidering virtual pornography in Japan”, in this issue.
