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Japanese Homoerotic Manga in Taiwan: Same-Sex Love and Utopian Imagination

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Women’s Manga in Asia and Beyond

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels ((PSCGN))

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on young female consumers of ‘boys’ love’ (BL) (and some ‘girls’ love’ [GL]) manga in Taiwan to consider how these genres contribute to girls’ and women’s participatory pop culture outside Japan. BL and GL become indigenized cultural resources in Taiwan, speaking to the local social experience of readers while also fitting into the gendered transnational history of Chinese cultural modernities. Based on interviews with readers, the chapter shows how BL and GL narratives allow them to engage in a critical project of utopian imagination on same-sex love. The manga enable the imagination of individual authenticity, in conflict with a conformist education system and familial pressures; the imagination of pure love, in conflict with cross-sex marriage; and the imagination of the plasticity of selfhood, in conflict with the rigidity of adult social roles.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The term ‘Sinophone’ is drawn from Shu-mei Shih’s pioneering work on cultural modernity in geographically dispersed Chinese-speaking communities. Here, I use it in a relatively simple sense, to indicate forms of transnationally mobile modern culture, in Sinitic languages, that produce certain common patterns across representations produced and consumed in Taiwan, mainland China, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora in the Asian region.

  2. 2.

    For example, Taiwan’s Tong Li Comics, which went on to become the island’s largest publisher of Japanese manga, was established in 1977; it has since published over 1000 Japanese series. Yi Shi Man, today trading as Da Ran, was set up during the same period. See also the account of Tong Li’s history (Tong Li Comics Website 2014).

  3. 3.

    This mirrors a parallel development in Japan: the key example here is the CLAMP collective, which is a group of women manga artists now producing shōnen-ai works commercially, but which began as a dōjinshi circle in the late 1980s. CLAMP’s works were among the favourites of many of the Taiwanese interviewees.

  4. 4.

    Here and throughout, interviewee responses have been translated from Mandarin by the author.

  5. 5.

    In the context of growing trends toward women’s ‘delayed’ marriage and non-marriage, popular media in Taiwan post-2000 are uniquely fixated on the figure of the unmarried-and-anxious twenty-something urban career woman; see Martin (2016) and Yang (2002).

  6. 6.

    Fujimoto speculates that the relative unpopularity of GL with girls, as compared with BL, may be connected with the familiarity of the subject matter, hence its unamenability to pleasurable fantasy (Fujimoto 1998: 177–206). This was borne out somewhat by my discussions with the Taiwanese interviewees. Even out, lesbian-identified interviewees tended to prefer reading BL to reading GL; and several respondents told me that they were first prompted to seek out BL manga when they experienced (female) same-sex attraction in middle school or high school.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Fran Martin

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  1. Fran Martin
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Correspondence to Fran Martin .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English, Chikushi Jogakuen University, Dazaifu, Fukuoka, Japan

    Fusami Ogi

  2. Japanese Studies Department, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Rebecca Suter

  3. Global Education and Intercultural Advancement Center, Oita University, Oita, Japan

    Kazumi Nagaike

  4. International Journal of Comic Art, Drexel Hill, PA, USA

    John A. Lent

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Martin, F. (2019). Japanese Homoerotic Manga in Taiwan: Same-Sex Love and Utopian Imagination. In: Ogi, F., Suter, R., Nagaike, K., Lent, J.A. (eds) Women’s Manga in Asia and Beyond. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97229-9_1

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