Yesterday, Digital Manga Publishing announced that its publications have been suspended from the Kindle publishing platform for violation of Kindle’s prohibition against “Pornography and hard-core material that depicts graphic sexual acts,” according to DMP, presumably a result of DMP’s yaoi manga. (A warning that this was coming was first released via tweet on Feb. 22.)…
Un des premiers objets de la discipline, c’est de fixer; elle est un procédé d’anti-nomadisme. One of the first objects of a discipline is to fix. It is a product of anti-nomadism. —Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir, p. 254 Arriving at Edo by boat on the Sumida River, on his way to the kabuki, the…
What is male/male romance, and how is it different from gay romance? 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…
The idea of bishōnen (beautiful boy) as object of erotic desire has been present since at least the beginnings of the Japanese language. The poetic anthology Kokinshū (c. 905), which some consider the first authentically Japanese-language literary work, the war tale Heike monogatari (c. 13 century), chigo (acolyte) scrolls, and many other works from early…
50 Shades of Grey & Fanfic
CNN ran an article Friday placing the popularity of 50 Shades of Grey within an erotic fanfic context (the book grew out of what was originally a Twilight fanfic story). The article mentions the predominance of gay and lesbian fanfic, written, according to Dr. Francesca Coppa of Muhlenberg College, because in fanfic’s early ’60s-’70s heyday,…
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