| This dissertation studies how fantasy, reality and representation work interrelatedly in the identity formation of a subject. It focuses specifically on yaoi fictions---male-male comics ( manga) and illustrated novels created by women for women---that have widely been in existence in Japan for several decades. Since the mid-1950s, the readership of yaoi is over a million. I write from the position of a fan and a researcher who "became" a lesbian via perception, in my adolescence, of the 1970s "beautiful boy" comics, the precursors to yaoi. Defining the larger yaoi pehomenon as the one in which women create quasi-male homoerotic/homosexual narratives as their own since the 1960s, this study relates its history and identifies different subgenres within the larger phenomenon. The sub-genres include "girls' comics (shojo manga)," the fanzine world (dojinshi), and "boys' love (boizu rabu)." I also show how romance narratives with two male protagonists serve women's sexual fantasies even though women's "real" position is not represented in them. What is examined includes heteronormative values that are reflected in typical yaoi texts especially since the 1990s. At the same time, I argue that yaoi is significant because it provides the only discursive space in modern Japan that serves women desires, including sexual ones, in a sustainable manner. Also, hundreds of professional yaoi women have gained economic independence. Yaoi women fans are struggling to "rise" to the position of the subjects of representation, albeit through pleasure. Responding to a critical tendency to treat male characters in yaoi as either the inaccurate and strange representation of gay men or the agents for heterosexual women to simulate male-female romance, this study starts with a premise that yaoi does not represent any person's "reality," but rather is a battlefield where straight, lesbian, and other women's desires and political stakes clash and representations are born. This study uses an interdisciplinary approach that draws from feminism, queer theory, cultural studies, and feminist studies. It finally argues that yaoi has an unprecedented potential to function as a lesbian and feminist one. |
