Speaker: James Welker, Kanagawa Unviersity

Japan is known for its gender-bending and sexually transgressive manga, anime, video games, and other related media. Among the most popular genres of such media, “boys love” (BL) depicts male–male romantic and sexual relationships for a predominantly heterosexual female audience. “Yuri,” a loosely defined genre depicting female–female intimacy, has a more diverse, if smaller, fandom. Some narratives focused on transgender characters have also garnered a great deal of attention from fans. While these media began to attract fans outside Japan since the 1990s, their histories are significantly longer. In this talk I trace the overlapping histories of these and related genres. Moving from early twentieth century girls’ fiction to postwar commercial manga magazines to the colossal Comic Market to the small screen, I consider why such narratives have emerged in Japan and how they have evolved today into BL, yuri, and more.

James Welker is an associate professor in the Department of Cross-Cultural Studies at Kanagawa University. He is the author of Transfigurations: Feminists, Lesbians, and Shōjo Manga Fans in Late Twentieth-Century Japan (Hawai‘i, forthcoming), and co-editor of Rethinking Japanese Feminisms (Hawai‘i, 2018), Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan (Mississippi 2015), and Queer Voices from Japan (Lexington, 2007). He is currently editing a volume on boys love (BL) media across Asia.