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…
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…
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.)…
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…
What is yaoi research, anyway? Technically, yaoi research is research about Japanese male/male romantic and/or erotic manga, colloquially known in the West as yaoi or boys’ love, and in Japan as ビーエル (BL). These genres are most commonly written by women for a primarily female audience. However, in this blog we will be extending the…
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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