It came as no small surprise to this reviewer to learn that a huge market exists in Taiwan for Japanese manga-style magazines featuring male-to-male love between handsome youths, targeted almost exclusively at female readers. Yet to many Taiwanese young women such publications are as common as the air they breath.
Boys’ Love, Cosplay, Androgynous Idols, from Hong Kong University Press, demonstrates that there is an intense interest throughout the Chinese-speaking world of East Asia in gay friendships and the cultures they produce. But to the three editors, all female and attached to universities in Chicago, Xiamen and Warwick, individuals don’t need to be involved in an actual gay relationship to be of interest. Any behavior that exhibits androgyny, cross-dressing or non-macho behavior qualifies for their curiosity and examination. But the main area of interest is nonetheless the female readership of romantic stories exclusively involving male-to-male lovers.
BOY-ON-BOY MANGA FOR GIRLS
Throughout this book “BL” is used to mean “boys’ love,” with “BG” a less frequently encountered acronym for “boy-girl” romances. But there are also “H-ban BL” texts (hard-core BL) that are sexually more explicit, not to mention ‘nan-nan’ (male to male), also called “A-man,” or manga made specifically for gay men and containing plenty of hard sex.
Taiwan is at the forefront of this phenomenon, which is not to say that China and Hong Kong are not also heavily involved. The strongest contribution to this book is by Fran Martin who looks at the teeming world of Japanese manga, reworked for Chinese-speaking female audiences, available in Taiwan. These products, she reports, focus on idealized romances between beautiful young men, with sex sometimes included.
“Frequently there is reference to the ‘normality’ of the characters,” she writes. “They declare explicitly that they are ‘not homosexual,’ but simply in love with a unique individual who ‘happens to be’ male.” But theirs, she adds, is essentially “a fantasy world free from homophobia where same-sex love is universally accepted.”
Two other points stand out: that the BL stories are strongly associated among Taiwanese with Japan, not only because that is where most of the stories originated, but also by the use of Japan as a fantasy world. And secondly, it’s almost universally the case in Taiwan that these products are read exclusively by females under 40.
The interviews on which Martin’s absorbingly fascinating account took place were in 2005, and since then an attempt has been made to enforce an “over-18” regulation regarding printed manga with a sexual content. But in a postscript written in 2015 Martin points out that much of this trade has now gone online, where checks on age are notoriously difficult. But she also quotes here the celebrated activist and scholar Josephine Ho (何春蕤) as pointing out that Taiwan has long imposed laws on a variety of subjects with the aim of securing diplomatic recognition by conformity to international norms.
Chang Wei-jung, a PhD student at Japan’s Ochanomizu University also writes about the relation between Taiwan and Japan in the context of these homoerotic manga texts. She points out that their female Taiwanese fans express an intense interest in Japanese pop groups, and eagerly speculate on possible gay relationships between their members. They’re also often fascinated by the Japanese language itself, listening to it while not understanding a word.
Nostalgia for a colonial past, Chang argues, is part of the phenomenon (Japan was often associated with modernity in the colonial era), but of course this kind of nostalgia is not confined to Taiwan. Both then and now idealization plays an important role in the Taiwanese attitude to Japan.
ADDICTED TO BEAUTY
As for China, in a major and lucid article Ling Yang and Xu Yanrui describe how in the past two decades a home-grown form of the Japanese same-sex manga has grown up. Known there as danmei (酖美, literally “addicted to beauty”), this culture, the authors argue, has grown upwards from the readers themselves and is in many ways in opposition to the more conservative official line on sexual relations. It is a culture that is driven by fan demand, or “globalization from below.” Some China publishers, interestingly, have opted to publish their BL material in Taiwan in the hope of evading censorship at home.
Next, Chao Shih-chen writes about “cosplay” in China, an activity in which males or females cross-dress as females/males and imitate (but in a sympathetic, non-satirical way) what is deemed to be the typical behavior of the opposite sex. Whatever their sex, these players aim to appear cute, charming and “ostentatiously adorable.”
Finally, two chapters examine the Hong Kong fans of Denise Ho (何韻詩) “one of the few celebrities in the East Asian Chinese-language entertainment industry to have come out as a lesbian in public,” and Chinese idol Li Yuchun (李宇春).
An extraordinary fact about this book is that all 10 contributors, plus all three editors, are female. While it’s true that the focus of many of the essays is the devotion of feminine readers to male same-sex stories and magazines, the 100 percent presence of female commentators is, to put it mildly, unusual.
ANDROGYNOUS UNDER-40S?
But what’s going on? Is everyone under 40, or at least all women, becoming androgynous? Or are significant numbers of women merely attracted to handsome young men, especially where there is no other woman present (as in the BL manga) to act as competition? Some skeptical critics have been quick to point out that enthusiasm for these BL manga among young girls represents a sublimated dream by which many of them see themselves as the recipients of the sexual advances of the more masculine of the two boys depicted.
Whatever, the truth, there’s no doubt that this is an extraordinary, even startling, phenomenon by any standards, and well worth the close scrutiny it receives here.
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