Fri 21 Mar 2008 In: Worth Checking Out View at Wayback View at NDHA
In Japan, there's a graphic art tradition that represents the love between exquisitely beautiful young gay men. And its audience? Japanese schoolgirls. Bishonen ('beautiful boy') manga (comics) might come as a revelation to those of us familiar with strangely dubbed juvenile Japanese anime like Sailor Moon, Astroboy or Speed Racer from the past. However, at the same time, Japanese female graphic artists and writers were working on manga targeted at Japanese younger female audiences that depicted beautiful younger gay men as objects of mutual romance, which began in 1970. It's not as odd as it might sound. Bishonen are usually set in a romanticised "Europe" where homophobia doesn't exist, and the 'beautiful boys' are strikingly androgynous and gender indeterminate, which raises some interesting questions about 'reading' the protagonists as young women, which raises some interesting questions about transgender identities and lesbians. As well, it's also about misogyny and the absence of imagery of strong, powerful active heterosexual female role models, alongside profound scepticism about whether heterosexual romance is viable amidst the existence of everyday atrocities that heterosexual feminist criticism of violence against women has uncovered. Paradoxically, some Japanese lesbians discovered their own sexuality while reading bishonen, even given the absence of same-sex female romantic manga until recently. Given the androgyny of the bishonen, it was comparatively easy to read them as 'lesbian' romance for those so willing. To complicate matters, one subgenre of bishonen actually does depict girls, but cross-dressed as male. These manga are almost cinematic in quality. They emphasise movie techniques like closeups, fades, visual flashbacks and multiple angles of vision. In any case, bishonen have acquired a cult following in Japan, and in a shrinking globalised world, they're starting to enter Western consciousness. Apolitical romanticism, or affirmation of same-sex romantic love? And so the debate goes on. Recommended: Tomoko Aoyama: "Transgendering Shojo Shoshetsu: Girls Intertext/Sexuality" in Mark McLelland andRomitDasgupta (ed) Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Japan: London: Routledge: 2005. MidoriMatsui: "Little Boys were Little Girls: Displaced Femininity and the Representation of Homosexuality in Japanese Girls Comics" in Sneja Gunew and Anna Yeatman (eds) Feminism and the Politics of Difference: Boulder: Westview: 1993. Fusami Ogi: "Gender Insubordinationin Manga for Girls" inJohnLent (ed) Illustrating Asia: Richmond: Curzon: 2001. James Welker: "Beautiful, Borrowed and Bent: Boys Love as Girls Love in Shojo Manga: Signs: 31:3 (Spring 2006): 841-670. Craig Young - 21st March 2008