The tactics of mistake

wherein your correspondent finally winds up a post that started as a review of “Boys, Be Ambitious!; Shounen yo Taishi wo Dake!” that went nowhere for the longest time, even though he should be doing homework…

Shounen yo Taishi wo Dake! (Boys, Be Ambitious!) is a so-so drawn soft-pr0nish manga about a gormless lad who goes to an art school in Hokkaido and gets lucky, repeatedly. It claims to be written and drawn by HANAMIZAWA Q-taro (see also this), but is really written by a gaggle of graduates from a Hokkaido art school, to convince gormless boy manga readers to go to art school in Hokkaido.

It might be cold as heck up there, but you will get laid! (they lie!)

It could solve a lot of problems for the ronery boys, girls and in between – both real and imagined… If only…

It also illustrates a few problems with the kind of manga that Genshiken-ers and other dojinshi enthusiasts are reading and creating.

But first, a word from our sponsor:

I think that scanlators must have the best fun reading manga, even if they have the hardest time of it. In going slowly over the originals, photoshopping out and/or over the original text, figuring out the japanese, the idioms, the references – you would have to be without curiosity to not be drawn in by every reference that you need to track down, to get it all just right. Anime fansubbers used to be obsessed like this too – I remember the first grey copy of Spirited Away I saw, there were so many footnote subs running with the dialog subtitles as to shame an undergraduate essay. The immersive feeling was breathtaking. I guess this kind of obsession is now considered to be too invasive, but some of it still survives, for some series. The folks at Sumimassen used to go completely crazy on my favourite Despairing Sensei. Alas, that is all over now, and I have no idea if the detective episodes in the anime somehow refer to Genei Hakurankai.

Blogging has its advantages too: Half of me is greedily consuming slightly outre, often cheesy manga, the other part of me is trying to situate it in my crummy understanding of Japanese society, of otaku tropes, and of the various harebrained theories that I am trying to trot around the park. And I have an excuse to try to read almost any genre I can stomach, at least for a few pages, on the principle that I need more data.

Mmmmmmmmm Shoujo Manga! Do Japanese girls read this treacle! Wow! this one is a bit low-class (underage monogamous sex, wish-fulfilment fame and money, absent upper middle class parents, la la la, true love, happily ever after at 17) Who the heck is this aimed at.. (shibuya? gayu? yankee girls?) Oh look: another bishie male lead! here comes a shout-out to the “goggles” tribe.

Class-S Yuri? Wow! her first boyfriend caught a bad case of magic cock syndrome and acted like a snotty 14-year-old boy who thought he was a Host – plot crank! “She cannot trust men after this!” -crank- Query: are Japanese LFB’s subconsciously “absorbing a “don’t do this” lesson while they turn the page waiting for the next 2D thigh shot? Whooooeeeee! Here comes the “mother set up interviews for an arranged marriage” trope! What exactly are the current m-f demographics in Japan right now for teens, young adults, etc. A demographic gender imbalance should cause a certain change in behaviour. Hmmmmmmmm.

Revolutionary Girl Utena? Don’t know if I can handle the pointy faced artwork and the high-school fight tropes without retching. Oh well, It is undoubtedly a milestone first order derivation from a certain groundbreaking historical gender-bender. ROSES! get it? ROSES!!! Oh wait, have to work tomorrow, and for the next few weeks, months..

Heh! free Penguin Musume Heart on Viki.com (wow: legal fansubbing model!) wait! Gahhhhhkkkkk! Oh! A “Sebastien” butler! Cosplay geek girl school election! Hijinks galore . This thing is still pretty lame. I wonder how much of this POS shows up in slightly mutated form in Genshiken. In SZS? Do I care?

Franken Fran: Huh! where the ^&%&^%* does this fit in? Oh fugget it!

etc…

Back to “art school confidential”…

Why am I bothering?

I wanted to take a break from challenging manga for a while, and since I wandered into the shallow end of the gender studies pool, I thought I would back out and try to find some good wholesome guy manga (Gintama to be dealt with later). Next thing you know I find myself in ecchi-land.

Besides – “art school confidential” is a subject dear to my heart, even if the
school ‘o’ art that our happy hero bumbles into bears no relation whatsoever to any real- life art school on this planet. Come to think of it, the movie was pretty fail as well.

Cue the synopsis that snagged me:

“Without doing much research on the school or surrounding areas, Hibino Ryouichiro picks an art school in Hokkaido. Tricked by the school advertisements, he goes to the campus only to find out it is a desolate and cold campus. The only glimmer of happiness for Ryouichiro are the girls on campus. Just hours after meeting Kisaragi Riho, the cute girl on campus, she seduces him only to find himself outside naked after she is done with him. Feeling heartbroken and used, he finds comfort in Aso Tomoe, who lives on the floor below at the dorms. Although it is freezing outside, it is hot underneath the sheets for Ryouichiro.”

That’s pretty well it, except that girl 2 refers to, and gets the boy to secretly refer
to girl 1 as “the slut”, boy gets to have pagan/ fake witchcraft sex with the hawt 28-year-old lady teacher (gets scared, runs away after), boy and girls 1 + 2 go out drinking and end up in a drunken threesome, boy makes a list of pr0n sex tricks to get the girls to agree to, gets caught out, boy and girl 2 break up, boy seeks solace in the arms on girl 1, and so it goes, on and on and on.

Looking at the mess askance, it is like Archie comics at an art school, with sex – the girls are even somewhat jp-manga-ized versions of Betty and Veronica.

Again why bother?

The smut pages are what gives it away: if Hato drew het scenes, they would be like this!!! They are usually full-page, focus on the girl (or woman) involved, are laden with flare effects and sensitive lines, with the women in the throes of pr0ny passion.

“My characters are making love”

Well, they are doing something.

The quality of the drawing in the rest of the scenes is just enough to bump the plot on down the road – lots of it is extremely weak, even factoring the comedic “chibi” sections, the fave crutch of deadline challenged manga artists.

One can surmise that the artist started with, and still dotes on static sex scenes in dojins, then tries to flesh out a plot as best as he/they can! A missing link in the jump from dojin to pro manga! Discovered in the wild! Wow!

The style, kleenex-thin plot and treatment of the sex scenes also follow the norms of soft core dojinshi and manga pr0n. The lad’s member goes transparent/ outline, and then disappears for a better view of the “action”. The girls look too damn young. Girl 1 is a dark-haired princess type, girl 2, is labeled “plain” even though she is of course good-looking, and the intimacy is fast, forced, lacks whole-body contact (sometimes referred to as cuddling), and affection. You would think buddy boy would at least fall in lurv, get a bit sentimental, but to him the whole mess is the frantic clearing an eroge. If he was caring and sensitive he’d be too much of a Mary Sue – this way the otaku readers can identify with him and feel superior at the same time. This is how we do characterization.

At least they use rubbers; two cheers for health education.

In contrast to a slew of other school harem manga (well this IS a University after all) the girls don’t just fall all over the idiot boy and flash their breasts and panties. All that relentless and essentially chaste teasing falls away before a “might as well get it over with now” approach to moar hawt secks naow dammit!

In her 2009 TED lecture Cindy Gallop put out a very short critique of internet delivered pr0n as default sex education for American males, and claimed that it made them lousy lovers (she likes younger guys, dates them, and gets intimate with them). She even tried to set up a web 2.0 site, to flesh out the idea, but it is pretty thin, looks like she hoped she could get an instant book off the effort and then gave up/ wrote one anyway. (the possibility that she could just be enjoying a bit of boasting as an experienced older lover should not be discounted either)

In Japan, the default sex education for males must be “modern visual culture” – as well as net pr0n. For women? Hmmmmmmm.

What of the “ambition” (or perhaps “daring”) of the title. Our hero isn’t very either,
unless you count his urge to go through a little black book of porny things to try on women once they invite him into bed. Most of the time he just walks around in a daze and gets hit on be bored women. Girl 1 seems to use sex as a way of getting and keeping friendship – our hero is a side interest to her between sessions with her (offscreen, never seen) boyfriend. She will even try to make friends with Girl 2, and then cement that friendship in the only way she knows how. The older (oops, past 25 – practically a crone!) lady professor is taken with the idea that the kid would stare at her boobs and likes the idea of going all pagan while making big ugly sculpture.

Girl 2 is mildly jealous of Girl 1 and wants to “lose it”. She also wants to try things
like a better hairstyle and nail polish, and going steady, which of course boy doesn’t notice and screws up. I would venture that %99 of all males in a relationship have fucked up on this one too, so it is cruel to expect buddy boy to come up with the accepted response, but heck, it lurches the plot forward, so whatever. Not that any Otaku out there are going to be suddenly more observant while dating because of this, but they might be a tad less bewildered when they mess up in the real world.

“Oh shit! I did that! Duh!”

Wonderfully educational this wish-fulfillment manga is, neh? Gallop also makes the point that pr0n grazing allows young guys (and I suppose young girls) to sample and then draw their own personal lines, beyond which lies the “too weird” stuff, thereby constructing and validating a “normal” desire.

So a simple romp like “ambitious” can hide a few tricks in plain sight.

Like a dog that finally catches the car tires he habitually chases, and unlike the usual takes- forever- before- they- finally- get- up- the- courage vehicles such as “my too-hawt aunt wants me to seduce 14 coeds so that she can finish her research on Genji, but so far it’s an uphill climb, because I was bullied by girls as a kid” we get to imagine what happens when normal clueless manga lad catches the eye of one, or two, or three, or more manga girls. At least he hasn’t gone all “leisure suit Larry” yet. That will lose him his stunned deer- in-the-headlights charm.

He hasn’t forced himself on any of them, and the manga is doing its best to make such an approach pointless, so ‘Ambitious” gets another two points for teaching the important stuff first (no forcing, use a condom, smile and go for it) before it starts preaching fine points of etiquette and sensitivity. Oh, and the girls always take the initiative in sex and relationships – at least in mangaland. I am not too sure what the guy’s duty is. Perhaps the next few chapters will whittle it down to daily bathing and rudimentary grooming… and getting rid of that damn list. This kind of list-ticking-off seems to be an endemic error of western pr0n watching guys, and the habit looks like it is near universal. A ton of ero-games and ecchi manga, on top of the net-pr0n has probably exacerbated this problem – though it would be interesting to see if certain sub-forms and narrative tropes actively resist it.

If “Ambitious” is “wholesome”, normal, ecchi or hentai manga, it isn’t any worse – and perhaps a lot better than a previous generation’s reliance on skin magazines (hundreds of them, easily accumulated when the university students moved home in spring – literally bales of porn, free for the hauling! gahhhhhhhhhh!) Of course, there is an abundance of squick out there, but as Gallop suggests, it serves a small purpose as well.

Part of me can see the advantages, in terms of plot novelty, of forgoing another 20-chapter boy meets girl, girl meets boy, but both are too shy to confess fest to cut to the chase and tackle basic relationship etiquette.

To expand the argument a bit, a noted reviewer / blogger on Yuri, has often commented on how she gets bored and annoyed with what she calls “story A” (meet cute, overcome shyness and misunderstanding, declare love – even in face of societal pressure, have some idealized girl-sex, walk off into sunset.) I presume she means that she would prefer to see some more working out of the day-to-day frustrations of relationships, beyond simple fight- over-nothing-make-up-with-sex scenes.

The trouble is that within the flavours of Yuri that valorise f/f love (as opposed to
pure nasty hentai for LFB’s), the sex act itself is privileged – it is the holy defining
big thing of the relationship and the participants’ identities, and of course it is perfect and satisfying beyond all bonds of imagination. Uh huh! Yuri lesbian characters don’t have problems with one or more of the couple being lousy, clumsy, clueless lovers? having pr0nish lists? having personal grooming and hygiene issues?

I won’t even speculate about yaoi puppets..

Recall that monsieur Zizek characterises all eroticism and fantasy within the realms of repeated, epic fail.

Kio Shimoku’s Spotted Flower has a nice het couple with otaku backgrounds trying to get through their first few year of happy domestic life, with job pressures, looming GROW- UP!/ maturity fears and pregnancy making the road a bit bumpy. Whether or not they are alternate-reality versions of the Genshiken characters is beside the point. The big question is how they can reconcile their otaku tastes (and yup – these tastes are “libidinized”) with the “realities” of domesticity.

Here’s some rai-ju “same-old same-old” on the pr0n vs reality debate in the west:
(http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/11/11/does-pornography-deserve-its-bad-rap)

Shimoku-sensei (remember, his mangaka persona is a pseudonym – he is a well-married, somewhat normal-ised family man in the solid world) will occasionally try to work the difficult, grotty bits of “life” into his manga: A little searching will find grey zone scans of Digopuri /Hell’s Princess (Jigo Puri: The Princess of the Hell)
to frighten the heck out of prospective couples.

Could it get worse? How about a “yuri” manga based on this story:
http://www.japantoday.com/category/national/view/transsexual-denied-recognition-as-father

So… Did the “father” really want to do a full re-assignment, (news report unclear if the change was paper work or paperwork + surgery) or was originally-she just a bit butch and wanted to marry her sweetie? No matter, the ass-hat bureaucrats in Japan required her to “become a man”. Fine! Ok!, Happy marriage! Later, after a bit of turkey baster improvisation (or clinic fees) sweetie is with child. Surprise! The ass-hat bureaucracy strikes back: the kid is a bastard! What next? A tsunami? A power plant melt-down?

All epic Japanese tales either start with an ass-hat inflexible judgement from authority, or a suicide.

Do the vast panoply of narratives in manga offer more in the way of possible social scripts to Japanese readers than the more segmented paperback fiction/ comic book/ high literature/ net pr0n categories offer Western consumers.

Japanese auteurs seem far more willing to stretch a narrative beyond any reasonable limit if they feel that the story is gong nowhere. How else does one explain the movies of Minoru Kawasaki Fave domestic send-up: http://www.smh.com.au/news/film/koala-carnage-whale-of-a- film/2006/02/03/1138836416714.html

So, the problem resolves simply: Western fiction is too effing limited, and lingering puritanism segments fictional narratives in a way that undermines possible benefits to developing social scripts. Anyone want to ride this hobby-horse through some grad school halls?

Only Futurerama can save us.

Yawn!

Finally, as for real art schools:

1) Art school girls are exogamous. The last thing they need after a hard day of forced creativity is another budding narcissist under foot, especially one with an earning potential as low as theirs. Art-school guys, be ambitious, go after the Drama dept. girls. As a friend remarked: once one does you, it becomes a competition. Higgamous hoggamous..
2) Tip for getting along with your peers: NO ONE likes your taste in music – try
earbuds!
3) Learn to floss! Your breath stinks! Bathing and laundry are good too.
4) Protip: Boys and girls – resist the urge to chat up the life-drawing models. Polite interaction during breaks to demonstrate that you do not objectify them is ok – anything more ist verbotten! Snap out of it and keep drawing!
5) Sex is ok, but learning to draw is better than the “I know Kung Fu!” thing in the Matrix.

Ars longa, vita brevis

Contested spaces

I invoke the Commonwealth!

I know what was in Orthroerir;

Orthroerir was in it,

In it, it was hoarded,

Hoarded, it was stolen,

Stolen, it was spilled,

Spilled, I caught it,

Caught, it was given away,

Given away, it stays my own,

My own is the Commonwealth

I invoke it!

The land may not be hidden from its lover.

Silverlock – J.M.Myers (1949)

John Myers Myers “Commonwealth of Letters” is an imaginary space carved out of the western literary canon by a fan of the classics. Perhaps one of the oddest sub-culture books of the 20th century, it was rescued from obscurity by science fiction fans who adopted it in a fit of mad love. It is still recommended as an odd treat within that community.

As proto-fan-fiction or fiction of enthusiasm, it situates its adventures within a space bounded by the enthusiasms it celebrates, and populated with the characters of the same. Amusingly enough, the climax of Silverlock’s quest is to emerge from a descent to the lowest levels of the underworld to drink at the spring of wisdom – only to be expelled from the space, back into the real world. A less elegant but analogous process would end a fan fiction about a fictional fan-space fanning over fannish things in a feedback howl and system crash.

Multiplying entities without necessity is an act of love.

Kio Shimoku’s Genshiken and Akiko Mizoguchi’s virtual lesbian yaoi-space are closely related “commonwealth of interests” propositions that attempt to impose a narrative onto layered readings of real life conditions. Both center around communities of play and imagination, both are minority reports, and both contest issues within these larger communities and their shared cultural fantasies, as they relate to larger “solid” social realities.

Genshiken to Otaku/Fujoshi to real-life current Japanese society as Mizoguchi’s virtual lesbian space yaoi-verse to bl/yaoi enthusiasts to current Japanese society.

Mizoguchi would probably protest that her theoretical space entails has a different project than Shimoku’s:

“My critical examination of yaoi begins with the premise that yaoi does not represent any person’s reality, but rather is a terrain where straight, lesbian, and other women’s desires and political stakes mingle and clash, and where representations are born.” (Mizoguchi 2010, see below)

Why does she give rats ass? Well, she likes the stuff, but doesn’t like the potential for less-than-nice depictions of gay folk to bleed over into the real world. Such bleed-over could (1) reinforce stereotypes in the larger community and aid and abet the pain such misunderstanding causes real life LGBTQ folks, and (2) This is a wild guess, but since she found support in the commonwealth of bishonen stories when she needed it at a young age, she wants to make sure the life preservers are well maintained.

So she is going to contest and encourage the contestation of depictions of gay folk in BL/yoai works, even though they are pseudo-gay fantasy characters made in overwhelmingly large part by heterosexual women for purposes that run on a continuum from escapist pop fiction to escapist pop friction. This urge is sometimes refered to by its N.American moniker when taken to extremes as “Politically Correctness”.

On the other hand, Mizoguchi is a citizen and member of the downtown business improvement association of the commonwealth of yaoi, and recognises its pleasures and its worth; she doesn’t want to break it. She is sensitive to and feels for the needs and wants of its sister-citizens. I am guessing that potential improvements have all been well thrashed over before in slash-space and queer-space:

Such typically include less negative stereotyping, more complexity and nuanced characters, more public health and safety awareness and the importance of agency and consent: less catching, more inviting, etc. Cultural differences between the slash-verse and the yaoi-verse make the details different, and I can only infer her concerns from her writings and footnotes. Her views remain necessarily complex, even quasi- ecological:

“My research is informed by Teresa de Lauretis who has written in relation to her analysis of the feminist debates on pornography (produced for heterosexual men). “Feminist analysis and politics have always proceeded concurrently with—indeed have been prompted by—the social injury suffered by women, but the strength of feminism, or what social power it may have, does not disprove that injury” (de Lauretis 1994: 146). In other words, de Lauretis suggests that neither the propornography position that pornographic representation occurs in the realm of fantasy, nor the anti-pornography position that pornography equals violence against women is entirely appropriate.

By theorizing the female subject as a complex amalgam of conscious and political subjecthood and private and psychoanalytic subjectivity, she has shown that the seemingly contradictory double movement is inherently necessary in feminist work on representation (de Lauretis 1994: 147) 

As Judith Butler argues, theoretically a female subject is not restricted to identify with the female position in a fantasy scenario, but is also capable of identifying with the male position or the scenario as a whole. However, as the female subject always also functions at the level of social subject, she—who de Lauretis calls “Dworkin”—may not be able to secure enough distance from the pornographic text, since such a text is a public representation that depicts women’s debasement.

This double movement is clearly manifest in the context of the yaoi phenomenon. The fact that women have engaged in reading these male homoerotic representations as representing their fantasies for several decades attests to the efficacy of the theory of the psychoanalytic subject of fantasy; that is, the fact that the subject is not restricted to identifications with one position (usually equivalent to their own position in real life) in the fantasy scenario. At the same time, however, the fact that so many Japanese women continue to need male homoerotic representations that are significantly remote from their own reality (emph. added) also indicates the injury suffered by women. “

“Theorizing comics/manga genre as a productive forum: yaoi and beyond” – Akiko Mizoguchi

 

In other words; don’t kill the freedom and the diversity that is so critical to the empowering nature of the space – just try to nudge the canon to spruce it up a bit.

Then there is the issue of her proposition that yaoi is an emergent sexuality in its own right:

“The majority of yaoi women fans are heterosexual. Some might argue that calling those fans who are in heterosexual relationships in real life “lesbian” is inaccurate. Of course, they are not generally considered lesbians nor are they lesbian-identified themselves. But, if their sexual fantasies are filled with male-male homosexual episodes, is it still accurate to call them completely heterosexual?

A friend, a happily married woman in her 30s with two kids, told me, “Not so much these days, but until a few years ago, I could not really recognize sex with my husband as a male-female act. In my mind, I transformed what I was doing to the male-male act in the BL fictions”. Is it adequate to call her completely heterosexual? From the point of view of defining sex as genital activity, the answer is yes. At the same time, however, we know that fantasies are deeply involved in human sexuality. My friend’s male-male fantasy, which happens simultaneously with her heterosexual genital act, is as important as the act itself. In this sense, it is not accurate to consider her 100% heterosexual. In addition, I would argue that a person’s sexual fantasies, accompanied by her genital act with another person, a masturbatory act, or no act at all, are equally significant for the subject of such fantasies to such an extent that calling such fantasies “virtual sex” is appropriate (Mizoguchi 2007: 56-62).

Of course, at the most overt level, my friend was engaging in sex with her husband as “virtual gay men”, just like the male characters in yaoi narratives in her mind, but at the same time she was aware that the characters were women fans’ agents and not really representations of real-life gay men. Thus she was psychologically in the company of her fellow female fans in the yaoi community while physically she was with her husband.” (Ibid. Mizoguchi)

Hmph! Sounds crowded.

Like the protagonist of Moso Shojo Otaku-kei / Fujoshi Rumi (Natsumi Konjoh) when our heroine gets interested in the guy she had previously objectified, she is unable to contemplate relations with him unless she adopts a yaoi-space derived “male” persona. (the boy, Takahiro might be more adaptable than she thinks: “I am shocked and appalled Rumi-san! – oh what the heck, the power of romance has won me over – gimme some sugar!”)

Contrast this to the Genshiken-verse. Kio Shimoku’s Genshiken is a reflection of, and a prescription for Otaku-and-Fujoshi space as much as Mizoguchi’s virtual lesbian separatist space is a reflection of a greater yaoi-space. Both are popular cultural products; though they sell in different markets I would even expect some cross-over customers now that Shimoku is creeping around in fujoshi territory. Both situate within the phenomena of their attentions as well; they “ride” on cultural phenomena that in turn ride” on larger cultural tendencies within the solid/ real world.

In Genshiken, the tropes of the “school club” dictate the story setting: the club has to attract members or it will be de-authorized. The club serves as a haven for outcasts with differing ideas and interests within the “visual culture” universe, within a real world of impending disenchantment and preparation for adult work life. Club members have to deport themselves with minimum standards of restraint in their own enthusiasms and respect for other member’s enthusiasms. Solidarity against outside threats is required; as well, a group-produced product for the larger enthusiast community and/or “outside world” is a stated group goal and measure of the vitality of the entire micro-social fiction. Of course, the odd thing about the Genshiken member’s varied fan interests reside in their one common perversion: they all have to one degree or another libidinized their fan interests.

Hmmmmmm… That sounds familiar.

The action in Genshiken lies in working out the rules of how exactly to deal with the natural urge to contest the space of a commonwealth. Myers’ commonwealth was a violent anarchy; Silverlock needed a savvy friend to get through it in one piece. Genshiken starts off as a male bastion invaded by a riajuu woman’s desire, followed by a woman cosplayer and finally a horde of fujoshi. These in turn are joined by a crossdressing boy who wants to share their interests, all while foreign fangirls stir the pot and the old-guard otaku males get used as material for pairing fantasies. Only the promise of a safe space for their interests keeps them together. They try to work things out. We read about how they try. We gain comfort in the idea that such a space can be imagined. Then some of us blog, start Genshiken inspired groups at Universities, make lewd doujins and scurry around the web getting obsessive and derivative.

The Genshiken-verse is less overt or ambitious in its commitment to guilt-free
weirdness that Mizoguchi’s virtual-lesbian yaoi-verse, but the urges are somewhat parallel. Shimoku’s space is heteronormative, but strives for understanding. Misoguchi’s space is activist queer, and at times separatist, but it looks like it values a certain degree of diversity. (though I am betting that it privileges women’s diversity, as it is currently is %90+ female in Japan) Both stress the importance and fun of active participation in the production of artifacts for their communities.

In the past, human societies could only get worked up about and “contest” the space of “faith”: help build a cathedral, go on a pilgrimage or burn a heretic. Today, while it has been said that all roads on the internet lead to either pr0n or linux distributions (or cat pictures), the volume of nested commonwealths has expanded in a way that recalls bacterial growth, or the old commie joke: “you put three Trotskyites in a room – how many factions do you get?”

(This overload effect also refutes the worst fears of the Frankfurt School, and calms most of their radical-though-intolerant aesthetics. Nuremberg has been trivialized by rock concerts and home shopping tv – there is no need to ban epic poetry. Rejoice!)

The only side effect of this wave is that all of these commonwealths appear to pick up a sexualized charge the minute they wade into the world-wide webs.

When too much weirdness seeps out of fan-space, real solid-world authorities get concerned and start stomping around with big muddy boots. The big issue in last year’s solid-world Japanese popular visual culture community has been the Tokyo regulations banning “indecent acts depicted by imaginary persons” as championed by a right-wing populist politician who used to write porny stories about dissolute rich youth.

Meanwhile in China and Hong Kong, wholesale yaoi crackdowns raged through the latter half of the last decade, much to the shock of innocent Funu (chinese rotten girls), who just wanted look at the pretty cartoons and relax. As for the west, the potential for moral panic has kept most yaoi-stuff off commercial shelves and in shady back rooms: Definitely not on Amazon or your fave online e-book sales site. Besides, western fans are cheap-ass leeches who are used to pyr8 goodies, free fan-fiction and dodgy web scanlations.

Here’s a new space of contention: Pay for the damn stuff!

There is a whole body net-enabled sociology/ anthropology/ theory that peeks in on communities of enthusiasm: I recommend a glimpse at the infinite variety of the madness of fans at the Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) site. While the writing is of variable quality, the range of subject matter is far-reaching and interesting. Care to read about a tempest in a teapot at a Dr Who fan-fiction site? TWC has got it covered, although after a while all the accounts of fan-fights begin to merge into one another (meh!). My past-life experiences in the pits of fannishness taint my views. I was a geek youth in pre-internet days; shared its culture terms and rites, and carried with me the sense that whatever the future brought, I had already read about it. I even did cosplay, before it was cosplay – when it was the costume ball at fan conventions (only once, and the sad state of my costume lead to my discovery of  FAIL). I bought and hoarded dittoed fanzines and fanfiction. All of that stuff got put away when I went off to University. See this fun paper for an expanded view of this kind of nostalgia  I miss you [all] dreadfully!

For up to the minute serious contestations, don’t forget the fun folks at Intersections; who when not doing boring gender theory studies are always on the prowl for a weird new thing – especially when it is an example of local (mis-) appropriation of Cool Japan detritus, This one caught my eye:

On the Japanese Doll Complex – by Katrien Jacobs

“”On the Japanese Doll-Complex highlights Chinese people’s appropriation of Japanese dolls or doll-like alter egos. I conducted interviews with several people in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China. I wanted to analyse the experience of ‘owning a doll’ or ‘identifying with a doll’ by looking at several kinds of doll fantasies and how dolls assist people in recovering innocence and gender-fluidity. Chinese men are massively into Japanese porn stars, into hentai figurines, or life-size dolls that have a convincing and arousing skin texture. They also manifest themselves as cosplayers or cross-dressers who want to embody pretty girls. Women, on the other hand, construct fantasies about gay love and they impersonate the beautiful and effeminate men of yaoi animations (Boy Love).””

Behold the documentary – You couldn’t make this stuff up!
Sex Brain Melody (Episode 2): On The Japanese Doll Complex
(Warning: NSFW!)

http://vimeo.com/3017377
Embedded at http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue20/jacobs_film.htm

Also see her part 1 video on Hong kong pr0n panic: http://vimeo.com/3016343

On the Japanese original:
http://tokyoscum.blogspot.ca/2012/05/making-sense-of-dollers.html

Contestation of fan-space is a symbolic libidinous exchange in its own right.
Life would be boring without fans running wild.

The shadow of the warrior

In her doctoral thesis: “Reading and Living Yaoi – Male-Male Fantasy Narratives as Women’s Sexual Subculture in Japan” Akiko Mizoguchi posits the radical proposition that Japanese women fans of BL/yaoi are engaging in virtual lesbianism and/or creating a virtual lesbian/ gendered space when they discuss and meet to pursue their hobby of reading, talking about, exchanging and sometimes creating fantasy male-male romance/ sex narratives. (Holy Joanna Russ Batman!)

“Doing yaoi” is seen not only as a real exchange of highly sexualized fantasy material, but a symbolic lbidinal exchange, complete with “preferences”, “roles” and a free-floating sense of agency /command of lore or “law” that can be self- mockingly ascribed a phallic function.

Did Kio Shimoku ever read or consult with Akiko Mizoguchi? An an “out” lesbian manga enthusiast and academic theorist, who also studied in the USA and teaches in Tokyo, she writes in both English and Japanese, and her work is personable and easy to follow even as it is resolutely feminist, pro-yaoi and pro-LGTBQ.

Any random mangaka looking on the net or through the journal stacks for bl/yaoi information from a fan-academic would probably run into her work. Knowing Shimoku’s m.o., her personal (well resolved) contradictions would draw him to her work like a moth to a flame. (1)

Hold that though, but first more on Mizoguchi’s work:

That the precursor to bl, “bishonen” manga helped her navigate her sexuality at a young age makes perfect sense as she relates it, even if “yaoi helped me come out as a lesbian” sounds at first like one big mess. A script that valorized “other” desire valorized and empowered her desires. It even provided her with the language she needed to answer graciously after her first crush rejected her. Even in the absence of scripts better  tailored to her desires, this was enough. She found allies when she needed them, and later she realized that while the character mouths that spoke them were nominally male, the hand that wrote them was most likely a woman’s.

She has maintained her interest in BL/yaoi to the point of earning a PhD on it, teaching theory around it, and unlike numerous western lesbians who have “adopted” yuri and shoujo-ai and are trying to raise it to respectable maturity,(2) Mizoguchi, while not condemning it in its entirety declares yuri problematic for her and not really her number one fave thing. She’s sticking with BL/yaoi.

An extreme simplification of the view she puts forward in her thesis is that yuri for her is “tainted” by the mark of the patriarchy. As an occasional Loser Fan Boy (c.f. E.Friedman’s blog’s rating system) I know that the majority of the stuff is mostly written by males, to satisfy my male gaze, my curiosity and my – ahem- prurient interests. Especially when Ken Kurogane writes it – “PWP” doesn’t just mean plot- what- plot, (pr0n w/o pecker works too) and that can be a fine thing indeed!

Still I might have learned too much since my first brush with yuri pr0n: his signature work – which on first encounter bowled me over now re-reads as clumsy, repetitive and occasionally mean-spirited – besides being little more than near plot-less smut in manga form. Only the “mermaid” chapter, the series resolution and the joke bonus after-series/ omake redeem it a bit. And like yaoi-bait characters, its creatures are nothing close to human; gay, lesbian, straight or otherwise. Not realistic at all, but mercifully free of “I must pine away silently while I build up my courage to confess” tropes. His puppets clang together like magnets and fuck like rabbits. Then when I shake my head and wonder why I keep reading, he throws in just enough humor or over-the-top gushy romanticism to get me to read the next page. And damn if there isn’t more smut there waiting for me. Unfortunately after reading too much theory I now must ask if (gahhh!) I am engaging in a symbolic libidinal exchange with a bunch of otaku guy pr0n addicts when I read the stuff? That somehow feels not good. Curse you Mizoguchi <grin> for planting the seed of doubt.

Disenchantment is the sacrament of modernism. (TM)

On the other hand, there is material here that can be used for further exploration of the Genshiken- verse. Remember that the Genshiken is different from all the other “visual culture” clubs at the University: Its cover story is that it a hybrid model, its reality is that the “study material” is highly sexualized, starting with the initiation rites and running through the dojinshi expeditions. Everyone goes to comiket, then runs home to enjoy their loot. The place is a cesspit of pervy otaku, and later a den of pervy fujoshi. Notable members have been expelled from other clubs and dumped in the Genshiken for their sins. “I am Ogiue and I hate Otaku!” Concepts of symbolic libidinal exchange emphasize the weirdness of the Genshiken; a club that has in the past been presented as a covert field observation post for post-graduate social science research into pr0n consumer-fans.

Back to Mizoguchi and yaoi-space: for her: authorship, rather than chara is the most important thing in romance and raunchy manga. Women’s authorship! Women’s authorship that creates out of a culture of interaction with women fans! “Virtual lesbian separatism” – in her own words.

Most Yuri, to radically simplify her position, feels fake and exploitative to her, and is made by and /or for guys. For instance, she bristles at Maka Maka, and hey, it drags, and it is thin on romanticism, and the sex stuff is formulaic – the only thing that redeems it is that the characters are drawn as adults and not loliconstructs. For Mizoguchi, Maka Maka is annoying because the two main characters play with each other, but still center their emotional lives, desires and sexuality on men, which privileges the gaze of the male reader. No matter how much LFB’s protest that the characters are written as “bi”, they are inscribed as available- and- willing to male fantasy: typical japanese rezbian sex-show fodder in manga form. I bring this up, because it is an odd complaint. Lots of yuri pr0n posits male- less space (pwp) and is still built for the male gaze. Is it that with adult women characters, the s-class tropes (impending boyfriend/ husband?) are absent and so the unsatisfying boyfriends must be dropped in, to get in the way? Is this analogous to the “why doesn’t she just die in a ditch” effect in yaoi?

Mizoguchi’s section on Yuri also in some way mirrors the discomfort that het males feel with BL/yaoi – she even addresses this by arguing that the serious and persistent power imbalances within society make for significant difference between males looking at yuri and women looking at yaoi. Fair ’nuff – I’ve heard these arguments before, mostly in heated discussions in crit classes. The only way I made it through them was by muttering the old sci-fi/ fantasy mantra “magic is matter of symbology and intent” to myself. (It helped a bit – hooray for displacement strategies!) Shimoku in Genshiken (and also the parodic yaoi episode in Girl Saurus) takes this on with “Ogiue’s sin”. I guess no one likes to be objectified, but without it the whole fantasy exercise, as noted previously in the Zizek quote (and the masthead of the bwog) falls apart. “all of our desires are just things we force on others” indeed.

If Mizoguchi’s position at first glance seems conflicted, she appears to have resolved it quite well. Why the M-M fake gay stuff? Because she likes it, so piss off! Reading her footnotes, you get the sense that she even takes some small credit for trying to make the genre a bit more sympathetic to real-world LGTBQ concerns by smearing the rapey stuff and the signature “I’m not gay but,” line with a big gooey bad-taste brush. From what little I have heard of the western analog to bl/yaoi – slash fiction, its champions try to enforce similar if not far more stringent codes of political correctness on it – which sounds like herding cats to me.

Three cheers for cat-herders everywhere!

Mizoguchi also brings up the “conflict of interest” or “wolf in the fold” question by proxy in her discussion of a “more modern” yaoi series that deals with an openly gay Japanese construction worker. She notes how the writer of the series deals with the het guy characters worrying that their gay co-worker will “come on” to them with a blend of humor and a series of teachable moments that aim to put down the prejudice that all gay males are ultra-promiscuous predators, so all gay male yaoi characters (and by inference all other LGBTQ characters and real-world LGBTQ folk) must be too. To hold to the old view is hurtful, offensive, in bad taste, and worse: bad writing – them’s the new rules! (3) Never underestimate the power of a “canon” within a fan genre.
Contested space indeed!

All of this leads back to Kio Shimoku and his Hato character. Did he toy with the idea of dropping a lesbian fujoshi into the pot? Too dangerous! The yuri trope temptation would lurk in the shadows and drag the whole exercise down the wrong path. Besides, as I have idiotically asserted previously, “There Are (almost) No Lesbians in Japan!”

There are plenty of women who love other women; a few publicly declared activists; plenty of gaijin gals who are looking for lurv and material for a masters thesis from the that Monty- Python- skit University in Australia; but the term seems obnoxious to many of the Japanese sisterhood – poisoned by plain pr0n, including yuri, and s-class shoujo-ai, nosy media and a century of push back by an extremely patriarchal society. I wish I could find that online journal article – now lost, that had an exasperated gaijin lesbian researcher looking for genuine Japanese lesbian survey respondents at wimmins bars and meetings. The punch line is that she gets repeatedly brushed off by Japanese- women- who- happen- to- love- other-women- and- wish- that- the- rest- of- the- world- including- nosy- furreign-girls- would- just- mind- their- own- business. Did they really start calling themselves something that sounds like “carpenter” in Japanese or did our plucky researcher get her leg pulled? (Perhaps this is changing: more and more folk show up at the two pride parades in Tokyo each year – did I get that right? there was something in Metropolis about why they have two Tokyo parades – oh well, matsuri are movable feasts in japan, the more the merrier!)

Remember, this is a culture that won’t countenance same-sex marriage, but will readily allow gender reassignment in the official rolls, as long as you bring a doctor’s note (LATER: ooops: actually a whole lot more and it will still be a damn hard slog) or you can adopt your significant one. Perhaps also incorporation as a partnership works?

So dropping a “lesbian” main character into the Genshiken would pose too many problems (though I am still convinced that one could show up if handled as already happily in a relationship). But take the manga flavor of the month – a trap ooops cross-dressing guy who just so happens to look like a cute girl and give him a conflicted back story that makes him want to re-construct himself as a rotten girl, for the purpose of entering into a (crit-speak on) symbolic libidinal exchange within a community of women/ fujoshi and voila! we have a very serious, very truthful “I’m not gay!” Hato with no “buts” needed. And he only falls for women, (Later: at the time, it will take years before the “only you” effect raises its head) even while reading and drawing man-smut.  And damn if he wont turn out to be perfectly well-behaved, and he won’t jump anyone because that would be gauche and poor writing.

Madarame’s virtue (and anatomy) is safe, no matter how much stand-chan prods Hato-kun. It’s the frisson of dangerous possibility within the prodding that is being exchanged, because that’s what fujoshi with over-active “goggles” do. “Unfair!” say the girls: “you get more frisson because your alter-ego is a guy! You can ship yourself! SHARE!” And Hato-chan likes to share! (Note well that I use “ship” as pairing fantasy; the currency of the exchange within the fujoshi social. Still I wonder why Mizoguchi never discusses “the goggles”) (4)

Having worked so hard, Hato will never risk destroying the magic circle he joined by getting a crush on any of the Genshiken fujoshi either. Why look for sex when he has found something better, something that he has sought with single-minded determination for so long. We are told that BL/yaoi piqued his interest even before he sought out the fujoshi at his high school art club (V10 p148) We assume that what piqued his interest was the subject matter. Was there more to his desire? Could it be that he is written as a young male who gets his satisfaction from the exchange of man-smut with women, and/ or the degree to which he enjoys man-smut depends only on the degree that it fits within the potential for such an exchange? One can get off on all kinds of things,  and a convoluted solution like this maintains Genshiken as a heteronormative space,  but where the heck would Kio Shimoku get such an idea?

Where indeed?

Hato is not only Kage-Kaminaga, he is Shimoku’s Kage-Mizoguchi

Wait, I’m confused now…

Such a solution ensures that no matter how many yaoi puppets he has looked at or drawn, Hato has always spoken truthfully (if incompletely) about his desires:

He has only ever fallen for women.

Next up: Contested spaces

Footnotes:

(1) Whoa! I just hooked extra batteries to the playset field and have expanded its scope beyond all reasonable boundaries of playing what if with Genshiken characters, to suggesting authorial influences.. For now lets just consider the fantasy of Kio Shimoku getting ideas from the works of Akiko Mizoguchi as shorthand for “dealing with somewhat similar concerns”, zeitgeist, working the same district on different sides of the street etc. You want a down to earth essay, go read a mechanical engineering paper. This is my toy! Mwaaaahahaha! I push the lever forward…

[Much Later: I think I have found enough circumstantial evidence to suggest that if he would have had to work hard to miss her stuff and research yaoi at the time he started with fujoshi characterizations.]

(2) Mizoguchi’s real-world academic space is a small village; she has run into Erica Friedman a few times at least  – they go to each other’s conferences, and while they hold opposite preferences on yuri and yaoi, they strike similar activist chords. I hope they consider each other allies. I was also surprised to see that Mizoguchi supervised the translation of Allucquére Rosanne “Sandy” Stone‘s work “The Empire Strikes Back: A posttranssexual manifesto”  – anyone who is a friend of Sandy Stone must be way kewl. I first ran into the amazing Sandy Stone years ago at a puny little conference where she wowed everyone at the proceedings and the after-party. Two years later, I am hundreds of miles away, walking around Toronto and suddenly I hear my name called out and it’s Sandy Stone saying Hi! and inviting me to another of her conferences that evening – and I have no academic rep or anything. I was just a late-return to school undergrad art student of one of the profs who invited her to speak at the University of nowhere-ville two years before. Now that’s class! So Akiko Mizoguchi  goes up 3000 points in my books by association. Stone’s work is not just for readers of queer theory, but for anyone who wonders how technological extensions of identity have and will induce extreme states of flux in how we define ourselves, as selves. If you’ve enjoy John Varley’s sci-fi novels you’ll enjoy Stone.

(3) added later – yup, its a canon rule now: the later scanlation of Aoi Hanna by Dynasty is finally out (though the  /u crew did an amazing job of the 1st pass) and during the election arc we have the senior-most of the out couple making the pronouncement in a class group that “It’s not like we’re nymphomaniacs! I don’t go chasing after anyone wearing a skirt!” (ch40 p17) Of course the entire plot of Hanna hinges on the backstory of Kazama developing serial unrequited crushes for “cute girls” and needing support from her straight and “not-cute” friend. But these were politely unrequited pining-away-from-a-distance crushes.
No harm no foul.

(4) Again, later – Almost missed this one, because it flew by so fast: Hato’s sharing can at times have an odd effect on his fujoshi friends, and the effect is magnified for Ogiue who is a published mangaka. Recall when she was reviewing materials for the club zine and came upon a steamy grope scene done by Hato featuring her characters. “My characters are making love” “Is this what a doujinshi of my manga would be like?” (ch74) Is this a translator shading or a spot-on rendering of Shimoku’s nuanced description? Because she could have used other terms.

You will see rare beasts and have unique adventures

What to do with Genshiken Ch 79? Nothing but wait until ch80. As we have been told that this forms the last chapter of a collected volume/ tankoubon, we at least know that G2 is not going to vanish suddenly away. As for the rest of it, speculating about what happens next is too vexing, both on a plot and meta- level.  One talk in the club room is not going to cure Madarame, unless something momentously strange happens.

At least Mada is going to get his little problem addressed by a sensible “normal” woman.  Hmmmmm, I wonder if it means anything that only Keiko, Sue and Hato decided to launch this odd initiative?

Meanwhile, more reading and research:

I thought I would try a bit more of Boy’s Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre, edited by Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry and Dru Pagliasotti (the pdf still in some demented unicode variant so I cannot cut/ paste quotes dammit dammit dammit!) This time I tried ch4: Better than Romance – Japanese BL Manga and the subgenre of male/Male romantic fiction by Dru Pagliassotti. Pagliassotti ran the now- dormant Yaoi Research wiki site, which held the raw survey results http://yaoiresearch.com/2012/05/03/bl-survey-qualitative-dat/ (try: https://web.archive.org/web/20131123200744/http://yaoiresearch.com:80/2012/05/03/bl-survey-qualitative-dat/ Half the responses are lost, the other half saved here: https://web.archive.org/web/20131203083102/http://yaoiresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/OtherBLComments.pdf) An earlier, more detailed take on the material in the chapter can be found here: http://www.participations.org/Volume%205/Issue%202/5_02_pagliassotti.htm

As with another chapter in the book, which I reviewed earlier as a straw man
(I admit it – used it to set up an oddball application of Adrian Piper’s ideas on modernism), the Pagliassotti chapter gives plenty of insight into western fan interest and hobby-horse jockeying – both theoretical and practical, but very little insight in to what makes straight Japanese women want to read and make the stuff. At least the participations article comes right out and deals with the fact that her interest has always been centered around the diffusion of BL/yaoi across borders, and into “western” space. Then again, the collection IS about the Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre, so perhaps I am being unreasonable to expect anything but reports from the diaspora.

One important point that her survey, (including the results of a similar Italian survey) made was that BL/yaoi readership outside Japan was split near equally between straight women and gay folks. Japanese studies still show a %90+ straight female readership. The book chapter seems to gloss over the radical difference in readership inside and outside of Japan. (again, Piper’s “assimilating our culture, that’s what they are doing” observations prove valuable) It takes a while for it to kick in that she is as clueless as to why individual Japanese wimmen-folk do this stuff as the rest of us heathens. Or she has her suspicions, but ain’t telling.

Fortunately, while digging through the pdf pile, I also stumbled upon:
Reading and Living Yaoi – Male-Male Fantasy Narratives as Women’s Sexual Subculture in Japan by Akiko Mizoguchi, University of Rochester Phd thesis 2008

https://urresearch.rochester.edu/fileDownloadForInstitutionalItem.action?itemId=5822&itemFileId=9077

https://urresearch.rochester.edu/institutionalPublicationPublicView.action?institutionalItemVersionId=5822

Wow! Testimony by a japanese fujoshi! Download this, read it! Fujoshi Confidential!

Right from the start, Mizoguchi proclaims that reading yaoi helped her become a lesbian (!) and then gets down to individual, personal questions of desire versus societal expectations. Testimony from an actual Japanese women fans of the genre, with historical research, anecdotes and just enough theory to entice the reader, without the usual citation procession of orthodox gender theory sages.

What Mizoguchi brings to us poor gaijin is the sense of complicated fluidity that surrounds desire and sexuality (as private matter and public face) in contemporary Japan. I swear that Shimoku-sensei must have had something like this in mind when he filled his venerable otaku-pit with young fujoshi. In her introduction, Mizoguchi remembers an early Lesbian and Gay film festival attended by only a few gays and “out” lesbians; the inference being that a large number of the women present were straight, and there for some “new and different” BL fare.

This stuff is gold! Testimonials from early adopters torn between the feelings that their previously secret deviant hobby is now so mainstream and popular as to be a subset of “normal” women’s interest (at least in Japan), but at the cost of losing the feeling of being a part of a (self-) chosen elite.

And what is an “out” lesbian doing proclaiming that her fujoshi-dom helped her cope with her feelings for her first big girl-crush? Read that part and note the language she places into the scene! I was moved, but I also smiled as her statement was pure genre trope.

As she discusses the genre, and its evolution, she tries to keep things from getting too graphic, but since this is about pseudo-gay pr0n, there is the inevitable illustrations and ahem, details. Yikes!

This is compensated for by a lot of work on the idea of the fan community as a woman’s space – at times an insanely crowded public woman’s space (eg comiket among others; I am sure that if this thesis had been written 2 years later, Genshiken would have popped up in the footnotes) and on the distinctions between public identity and private desire that are emphasized by Japanese notions of honne and tatemae (alluded to but not pushed too hard – all societies have their public and private faces). There is also a good section on why Japanese gays, and lesbians find the genre annoying as hell – the signature “I’m not gay, but” line of the genre grates them just as much as it would their western counterparts, and the genre has in the past been chock full of heteronormative stereotypes about “real” gay men being un-selectively promiscuous, to the extent that when a nominally “gay” male in yaoi is smitten with a yaoi -crush he turns “straight” in the sense that he will forsake his errant ways for monogamous forever “trew ruv” with his one and only. (2 points for Shimoku for having Saki discombobulate the Genshiken fujoshi with reference to 3D gay folks – Hah!!)

The comiket testimony could be unpacked a bit more with theory and real-world contrasts: floating behind the scene is the ghost of french structuralist/ poststructuralist anthropology’s trope of the “exchange of women” inverted into a 400,000+ attendance public, outdoor space where fantasy male-male sex puppets are exchanged by and for women to bond in a “community” and then later drag home and “enjoy”. This is like some Planet of the Amazons 1950’s sci-fi movie! Except of course that the wimmins don’t need the men for breeding, just as tokens in a game of “symbolic exchange”.

Also of note was the way the issue of rigid seme x uke pairings was treated: Queer folk in Japan and beyond find this really annoying, but the fangirls seem to find the formula reassuring. My suspicions center around the popularity of fan-produced work: the (ahem) rigid scheme makes fan writing/production easier.
Rio Otomo has more to say about this, aparently, but of course mere mortals like me can’t get their hands on the research paper (1) Mizoguchi hints that she believes commercial publishers support and even [yikes! A patriarchy of editiors!] enforce the formula, as essential for situating work within a genre that keeps selling. Mizoguchi also asserts that tastes in the genre have recently moved towards championing sensitivity towards LGTB real-world issues, if only because “rapes-of-love” and “I’m not gay but” should be seen as unrealistic and distasteful – and therefore shoddy constructs for a fantasy setting.

A real live Japanese lesbian fan-girl woman academic is in some ways a far less intimidating guide to the genre for those of us with little interest in the full gender  studies theory universe, but with a nagging sense of curiosity as to why so many Japanese straight girls really really want this stuff. But make no mistake; Mizoguchi considers yaoi-space as women’s space, to the point of it serving as a zone of quasi/ virtual lesbianism/ lesbian separatism.

I get the sense that a real-life Hato would severely annoy her unless he could summon up the courage to declare himself as some kind of “queer”. Then he would get a hall pass – until he declared himself thoroughly acquainted with her theories. In such a case Hato-chan would be something dangerously close to a gappel-san of her: seeking a  community where symbolic desire is exchanged with those who you also happen to be interested in, in real life. Hmmmmmm! We have a potential “explanation” for Hato here!

Still, with its candid, personal and rigorous approach to the genre, in Japan, by a Japanese fujoshi / o-kifujin  this is by far the most detailed work on the Japanese fujoshi-verse I have yet come across. Anything that helps make sense of the whole odd bl/yaoi phenomenon in situ is a major addition to the field!

Good Great Work! (cartoon double thumbs up!!!!!)

Someone get Shimoku-sensei the Japanese version of this one, so he can drop a few more realistic fujoshi into the pot! (well, she publishes widely in Japan too – perhaps he already reads her stuff for background?) Akiko Mizoguchi is currently teaching at Tama University in Japan. Her blog can be found here:
http://akikomizoguchi.blog.so-net.ne.jp/

Google xlate works well enough on her blog: She seems to be active in a lot of academic and community queer theory stuff, but retains her interest in yaoi. She is still a fujoshi, and makes a point of helping out with sales of tiger x bunny dojins produced by her friends at current comic markets! Wow!

Her recent thoughts on yaoi, an update of her thesis with added concerns can be read here: http://imrc.jp/images/upload/lecture/data/143-168chap10Mizoguchi20101224.pdf

This article is part of a symposium on manga and comics, all the papers can be downloaded in one giant pile, in english, at the bottom of the page, here:
http://imrc.jp/lecture/2009/12/comics-in-the-world.html

And finally, published as a thesis at the same time, a western fujoshi finds a similar community among western fen: Amy Ann O’Brien, “Boys’ Love and Female Friendships: The Subculture of Yaoi as a Social Bond between Women” (2008). Anthropology Theses. Paper 28. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/anthro_theses/28

Footnotes:

(1) “An Essay on Pornography: Readers and Their Multiple Realities”  Rio Otomo, University of Melbourne. Qote abstract from http://www.isc.oita-u.ac.jp/e/news_window_epdf/BLworkshopprogram.pdf :

“While sameness thus enables a quick fix, as it were, it controls 
the process of association and crucially precludes the possibility of her transformation, or at least of her finding a new form of pleasure. In contrast, when a pornographer pursues her artistic end and attempts to focus on difference, transference on the part of the reader becomes onerous and devious. As usual, the reader tries to associate two sets of relations and creates the third one in her mind. By then, however, she will have had to deconstruct her knowledge of existing relations, and the experience as such will affect and possibly transform her, though at the cost of erotic achievement. I discuss a cause to re-articulate the seemingly ordinary statement that pornography, including BL, does not exist outside readers’ reality.”

The paper is from a workshop at Oita University in Jan 2011: “Glocal Polemics of ‘BL’ (Boys Love): Production, Circulation, and Censorship” . Despite the damn Glocal neologism, the topics sounded interesting  with a lot of powder burned about the Tokyo anti-pr0n regulations. The previously discussed Uli Meyer paper popped up there too. Facilitator was Mark McLelland, University of Wollongong, who is unavoidable in the gender -studies fujoshi/ Japan field and organizer was probably Kazumi Nagaike, of Oita University who also presented: “Do Heterosexual Men Dream of Homosexual Men?: BL Fudanshi (‘rotten men’) and the Discourse of Male Feminization”  – which sure looks like somebody has been reading a lot of Genshiken lately. She has a $140 book out on fujoshi/ bl/ yaoi that mere mortals will never read.

Why can’t they put their stuff online? Many taxpayers from many countries supported their research: time to share folks!

I know where I came from, but where did all you zombies…

This is becoming monotonous!
HATO X HATO or GTFO!

How insensitive

Well the cat is out of the bag. Chapters 75 – 77 bring Hato face to face with HER, and we learn a few things about Hato’s past, who his “Stand” is (/modeled on), and we get a glimpse at a truly frightening uber-fujoshi.

I have to go with my initial impressions; while some commentators find her refreshing, my initial take on Kaminaga is that she is a cast iron, brass plated asshole.

I won’t use the usual feminine conjugation “bitch”. While she appears to be able to deploy a sophisticated emotional understanding, it is ruthlessly applied only in the service of her fujoshi-ness. In that she has an extremely instrumental view of males, when she finds one trespassing in her favourite stomping grounds she knows exactly what to do with him. Otherwise they are chess pieces. Hato can poke her back any time he gets the guts to, and he really should, if only for the sake of his brother.

Thanks, but

Put simply, she is conservative and far less understanding of folks and their oddness than the Genshiken tribe. I will take back 2 asshole points if she later lets on to being shocked that Hato “became” her and was just pulling a fast recovery.

And 2 more points if she admits later that what she never found was her Genshiken, a group that could accept her without her having to be in full-bore uber-fujoshi mode all the effing time.

If you are going to be single minded about your brand of fun, you can at least do it with a bit of style, like Sue.

And yup, Madarame saw through it immediately, and she knows that he knows, and….

Assholes have their uses though: Kaminaga points out the essential problem with Hato-kun and Hato-chan: What the heck is he doing with all that yaoi???

Sex and fantasy (and the grotty physical realities of self-pleasuring) are alluded to in Genshiken, but occur like murders in Greek tragedies – discretely offstage.

If we believe Ohno, she uses her favourite yaoi just like a male Otaku uses his pr0n dojins. The actual details of the fantasy – place of the subject, role taken, or not , etc) remain a matter of conjecture and individual preference. One can posit a wide range of fantasy meta-plots within the “solid” fujoshi domain, as well as for the fictional variety. But what does our favourite trap/ fujoshi/ fu-whatever dream of?

If he is gay, this is easy: he fantasizes of being seme or uke. Time to chase after Madarame.

But if he is still confused/ and/ or defiantly ambiguous and trying to live his split personality…

??????????

For one thing, does he have any idea of what a fujoshi fantasizes about when she gets all hot and bothered with her newest doujinshi? Does he seek to replicate his understanding of this? How? Does he have to become Hato-chan in order
to ENJOY the stuff? Has he made up his own unique fantasies? Or is his pleasure completely intellectual?

This is untenable.

He is either gay or is developing a new kind of queer. Or he is gay, but “simply” a voyeur – simple if he fantasizes about watching man-sex when in his male persona, as well as when in his female persona; less simple if he divides his interests according to which persona he has decided to put on. “Simply” “Bi” if he can get a good rush over a polymorphous tangle, but that (as previously mentioned) is a boring old Heinlein book – Yawn!

All we need for confusion to reign supreme is for S-sensei to bring a few “dollers” into the Genshiken. Or not; the mangaka has to maintain a balance between Genshiken-as-parable-of-a-supportive-social and Genshiken-as-freak-of-the-week-club.

Or we stay in manga-land and look for a easy-peasy comedic solution.

Perhaps I have been reading too much fluff like “Fakee Yuri”, but I know that a different author would just solve everything by having Konno let it slip that she likes dressing up as a guy.

“they argued all night, and proceeded to fight,
over who should do what and to whom…”

And so you shall..

Another explanation” exists if we step outside of the Genshiken world and back into the “solid” world where Hato and all the other Genshiken characters become elaborate mediation and play about the difficulties and fun of “assuming a voice”; a minor thought crime from a few decades ago’s culture wars, and a gross simplification of the essential problem of all fiction.

From this point of view, the Genshiken once again reveals itself as a wonderful maze of mirrors, with characters all obsessing about sexualized visual culture products, while trying to create them, while being warped by them, while being them… la la la.

Only Ogiue instinctively grasps/ telegraphs the real essence of Hato’s desire.

By becoming a fujoshi, by becoming Hato-chan, he is able to draw.

As for his fantasies, he dreams only of her.

We so seldom speak of love. . .

On Moso Shojo Otaku-kei AKA Fujoshi Rumi by Natsumi Konjoh

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujoshi_Rumi
Natsumi Konjoh http://www.mangaupdates.com/authors.html?id=1892 http://www.punkednoodle.com/champloo/2007/10/14/09-mousou-shoujo-otaku-kei-by-natsumi-konjoh/ http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/review/fujoshi-rumi/gn-1 http://www.sequentialtart.com/article.php?id=1740
and part 2
http://www.sequentialtart.com/article.php?id=1741
See also O’Brien, Amy Ann, “Boys’ Love and Female Friendships: The Subculture of Yaoi as a Social Bond between Women” (2008). Anthropology Theses. Paper 28.(http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/anthro_theses/28)

Moso was serialised after the Fujoshi / Ogiue arc of the first Genshiken saga, (2006-2008 vs G1’s 2002-2006). Later Genshiken GN episodes drop shout-outs to it, marking it at least as a fellow traveller on the fujoshi pilgrimage path. However in Moso Shojo, the play between yaoi-obsessed girls and the hapless guys who chase after them is front and center. No losers club with an unspoken social contract between its members can get in the way of the girls vs boys fun.

Not as scary as Ogiue

In Moso, the yaoi fantasies of the typecast fujoshi main character (Rumi Asai), and the popular girl with a secret taste for yaoi stuff (Yasuko Matsuura) serve as a bond of friendship and a shield against the annoying and somewhat threatening interests of the two hapless guys who yearn for their attention. Compared to Genshiken’s Sasahara, these two fools are in for all kinds of abuse, and by the iron laws of manga irony (Lol!) the most earnest and unworldly of them – Takahiro Abe, is going to get the worst of it. When will he clue into the fact that the girls want them around ONLY to serve as inspiration for their lewd pairing fantasies?

MULTIPLE SPOILER(s) WARNING! No.. I will not take the time to learn how to code a spoiler tag into this mess.. go find the series in your library, or the usual grey places and have fun..

The more worldly of the two lads – Shunsuke Chiba has a deep dark secret of his own: he has grown up amid the fallout from his big sister’s yaoi habit; she is an accomplished yaoi (and yuri, and straight Hentai doujinshi creator and perhaps a stand-in for the mangaka). As such, he is a bit more at ease with the fake-gay fantasies of yaoi fanatic girls, but has not yet internalized the deeper problems suggested by a fujoshi world-view. And he figures that his lady-killer charms will be able to punch through the yaoi fantasy veil and snag him an “interesting” girlfriend – which might mark him as an even greater fool than Abe!

Abe, the naive male lead does not have the luxury of Chiba’s experience, or even recourse to something like Sasahara’s believable “acceptance” speech, because he lacks Sasahara’s Otaku interests. Worse, he is beginning to attract the attentions of a man-mountain upper-year judo champ who has just developed a powerful love-at-first sight crush on him.

Kumeta’s SZS has made a point of highlighting a difference between the imagined fantasies of its’ fujoshi dojinshi creating girl, and the beefy gaiyu guys that seems to occasionally pop up in the way of the not-so-despairing Sensei, but Moso renders its only true male gay character in starker tones: Hidemi Tsukamoto is no muscle-shirted nose picker – at first he appears as a looming ass-raping threat, barely able to control himself, but he soon sheds this yaoi-goggled first impression and then acts so damn noble, as to remind me of the gay-male-wish-fulfilment fantasy character in the (dreadful) Denis Arcand movie “Love and Human Remains”(1993). (Bleh! Arcand! From now on I pirate all your movies – Barbarian Invasions made up a bit for this stinker, but you STILL OWE ME!!!!)

Tsukamoto is probably the smartest and big-hearted character in the whole 3 volumes that are available so far to western fans. His “solution” to Abe’s inability to directly confront Rumi with a declaration of love is a brilliant trick that one-ups Cyrano De Bergerac. And he steals a smooch! Even then, Abe is not out of the woods – Rumi decides that she can only “love” him if she adopts a yaoi-imagined “male” persona. Poor Bastard!

Young heterosexual love is poisoned and much too dangerous for a delicate fujoshi girl.

It is also of note that Moso and Genshiken agree on the need for bent male characters to be good at judo.

As mentioned in some of the reviews cited above, Moso Shojo shines in the depth of its references to otaku/ fujoshi culture. And while it has some really fine laugh moments, until us poor gaijin get beyond vol 3, it is going to be hard to position this one as anything more than light fun.

Do future volumes pledge themselves to the conspiracy – the Otaku mating project, or is Moso in league with the “database” and the NHK? (no, not the broadcaster dammit!)

This blog is going to have to soon attempt a typology of yaoi, if it is to get anywhere, but first (and next up) – Critical Theory and Poetics – gals vs guys on a mythic scale.

survey & research methods

After more digging through various manga, blogs and the like, it seems my research is a bit tattered around the edges. <grrrrr!!>

Many of the assumptions of this blog are too simple, lacking recent historical background, original sources, and validation.

“You are too naive, Ufu fu fu …”

” Yeah, I work hard to give that impression.”

On the other hand; I have found plenty more neat stuff to add to the pile:

First, a rather good Master’s Thesis, late 2008 from Amy O’Brien, Georgia State University on american yaoi fandom: O’Brien, Amy Ann, “Boys’ Love and Female Friendships: The Subculture of Yaoi as a Social Bond between Women” (2008). Anthropology Theses. Paper 28. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/anthro_theses/28, which has some rather good explorations as to “why?”.

Query: how does this track back to Jp. fans?

Also, another fujoshi-meets-boy manga: Fujoshi Rumi (妄想少女オタク系, Mōsō Shōjo Otaku-kei?, (Geeky Girl Obsession) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujoshi_Rumi by Natsumi Konjoh (http://www.mangaupdates.com/authors.html?id=1892)
Timeline roughly coincides with Genshiken Ogiue introduction. Natsumi Konjoh,  a woman mangaka who has done other stuff, mostly described as Hentai. (hmmmmm.. must research!) Nice light writeup at:  http://www.punkednoodle.com/champloo/2007/10/14/09-mousou-shoujo-otaku-kei-by-natsumi-konjoh/

More background at: http://bangin.wordpress.com/ see:
http://bangin.wordpress.com/2007/07/25/the-classification-for-%e8%85%90%e5%a5%b3%e5%ad%90fujoshi/
and browse the site for his very detailed cosplay shots, which endear him to the western (does he have a Jp blog?) yaoi fans.

Light survey, not much meat:
http://kotaku.com/5534893/ten-reasons-why-teenage-girls-become-otaku

The good news is that an expanded version of the thesis (no, not academic, just for fun.. ) is developing, but needs to be solidified into a simple plain english declaration, rather than pomo/ soc/ anthro/ structuralist speak. Something like the situationalist slogan: I TAKE MY DESIRES FOR REALITY, etc…

Must remember not to do the Wizard of Oz again. The archetypes for women’s fantastic bildungsroman are a bit thin.

Could it be that discomfort with, and the rejection of societal “maturity” scripts constitutes an erotic act in itself?

Sometimes a popsicle is just a popsicle. . .

But not this time!!!

What the heck is Sue doing ??? (Ch 67)
Is there more to this than fanservice fun?
Here, in case you missed it, the xfer student, Sue is (unconsciously ?) demonstrating a rather involved way of eating a popsicle as the genshiken fujoshi gang natter on about showing solidarity with Hato, so that he will not be shamed within the group by the revelation of his prurient interests to Madarame and the rest of the old-guard male members.

I am getting a feeling that there is yet another sneaky subtext in Genshiken, first tried in G1, and to be further explored in GN. Is S. Sensei trying to suggest that if, (big if) a guy is able to win the heart (and the stereotypically slightly dishevelled, mildly plain/ overweight, pasty body) of a fujoshi, (Hey Otaku Dude: you ain’t no great prize yourself) that she will surprise him by being extremely well versed in yaoi rebu secrets ?????

Perhaps this only works with angry American female xfer students, or Its easier to get away with it with the Sue Gaijin character.

Is it being suggested that if fujoshi spend so much time reading and drawing the stuff, they are going to pick up a few tips from the conventions of the genre? This is somehow very wrong on so many levels! Wasn’t the entire enterprise supposed to remove males to a manageable 2D / fantasy world? Empower female fantasies? Dispense with the need for weak-willed 3D (mirror to solid real) guys? Is this just an updating and mirroring of the same ole same ole debbil patriarchy? She’s a virgin and yet she has the skills of a whore! (or at least a rent boy.)

In contrast to an earlier ridiculous stereotype of japanese female passivity in bed, is Genshiken really trying to creative a new form of school romance / pairing/ mating narrative for the Otaku and general population manga readers?