Writing about the 1970s, with particular reference to Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner (1974) and Laura Z. Hobson’s Consenting Adult (1975): Reviews of the decade’s major novels collectively tended to disparage the contributions of women who wrote fiction about gay men, for instance, while attempting to create and regulate the boundaries of an elite,…
Why Straight Women Love Gay Romance (2012) by gay-romance author Geoffrey Knight collects interviews with 32 women from nine countries on four continents. It is not an “academic” book; it is a sprawling, descriptive, and deeply qualitative text written for a general audience interested in the title question and in m/m romance in general. The…
In reading Kazumi Nagaike’s <em>Fantasies of Cross-dressing: Japanese Women Write Male-Male Erotica</em> (2012), I have re-read the 1922 article “Beating Fantasies and Daydreams” by Anna Freud, which comments and elaborates on her father’s 1912 essay “A Child is Being Beaten.” Anna Freud’s essay seems so relevant to the study of BL or m/m fiction that…
In 1992 Japan, Satō Masaki, a gay activist, attacked yaoi as being exploitative of gay men. He complained that yaoi often misrepresents gay men and commodifies them as masturbatory objects (Lunsing 2006, para. 14). His concern was that the yaoi fandom has no accompanying antihomophobic politics and often makes use of homophobic, stereotyping tropes. In…
One of the hardest parts about writing my 2008 Participations article on boys’ love manga fans was leaving out all the rich qualitative data that I received in my open-ended questions. Since the article is now long since published, and other scholars are continuing to research BL audiences, I thought it might be useful to…