Women’s Manga in Asia and Beyond: Uniting Different Cultures and Identities

By Rebecca Suter and Kazumi Nagaike

Women’s Manga in Asia and Beyond offers a variety of perspectives on women’s manga and the nature, scope, and significance of the relationship between women and comics/manga, both globally as well as locally. Based on the activities since 2009 of the Women’s MANGA Research Project in Asia (WMRPA), the edited volume elucidates social and historical aspects of the Asian wave of manga from ever-broader perspectives of transnationalization and glocalization. With a specific focus on women’s direct roles in manga creation, it illustrates how the globalization of manga has united different cultures and identities, focusing on networks of women creators and readerships.

Taking an Asian regional approach combined with investigations of non-Asian cultures which have felt manga’s impact, the book details manga’s shift to a global medium, developing, uniting, and involving increasing numbers of participants worldwide. Unveiling diverse Asian identities and showing ways to unite them, the contributors to this volume recognize the overlaps and unique trends that emerge as a result.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Mar 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9783319972299

Book preview

Section I

Rethinking Women, Queering Asia

Through a close examination of manga-oriented texts and cultural practices, this section establishes significant premises on the basis of which the formation of queer desires and sexualities may be explored. The term women in the title of this book, Women’s Manga in Asia, does not just refer to biological women but includes other non-masculine subjects, as well. Moreover, the activities of these new participants in the world of manga are not limited to reading manga. That is why we begin with a section that attempts to destabilize such key concepts as Women, Manga, Asia, and Japan.

The queer subjects presented in this section may primarily be characterized in terms of a BL (boys’ love) discourse that transcends the cliché that BL merely represents the fantasies of heterosexual female producers and consumers. In this regard, Fran Martin analyzes BL in Taiwan as a means to enhance female-female homoeroticism, while Kazumi Nagaike, in introducing male participants in BL subcultures in Japan and other Asian countries, raises questions similar to Martin’s in relation to the heterosexualization of BL. As well, the salient issues regarding BL political strategies are vividly presented in Katrien Jacobs’s discussion of the relationship between Hong Kong’s BL activities and students’ political resistance.

Martin demonstrates that BL and GL (girls’ love) manga and associated subcultures have become an indigenous cultural resource in Taiwan, arguing that these narratives enable women to engage in a collective project of utopian imagination regarding same-sex love, and that this may at times perform a critical function. On the basis of interviews conducted with Taiwanese BL and GL consumers, Martin shows how the representations of same-sex love in BL and GL narratives enabled her respondents to imaginatively affirm their individual authenticity, in opposition both to a conformist educational system and to familial pressures. Martin’s respondents also felt themselves empowered by these narratives’ depiction of pure love, represented as in conflict with conventional cross-sex marriage, as well as by their portrayal of the plasticity of selfhood, in contrast with the rigidity of adult social roles.

Nagaike explores how and why (self-identified) heterosexual men dream of the homosexual characters represented in the (seemingly) female-dominated popular BL genre. Nagaike delineates the characteristics of fudanshi (male BL fans) in Japan and other Asian countries (e.g. mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Korea). This comparative cultural study of fudanshi enables us to reconsider diverse ideas of masculinity within the Asian context, as well as to explore the ways in which fujoshi (female BL fans) in various Asian countries respond to the desire of fudanshi to access (and appropriate) the space within a specifically female-oriented cultural sphere.

Jacobs’s discussion of attempts by the Hong Kong BL community to initiate a political movement analyzes the actual political conflict between Hong Kong and mainland China. As part of this movement for universal suffrage and autonomy from mainland China, some women in Hong Kong started a Facebook campaign called Alexter that encouraged web users to post political updates alongside soft-erotic BL fantasies about the male student leaders, Alex Chow and Lester Chum. This campaign became highly popular and was also attacked by left-wing activists. Nonetheless, it signified Hong Kong women’s desire for a form of political change that would include gender emancipation, sexual diversity, identity politics, and media platforms for exuberant eroticism.

In this section, Monica Chu’s analysis of the very particular manga drawing styles employed in female homoerotic narratives demonstrates the ways in which manga queers such visual elements. Chu argues that Kiriko Nananan’s manga Blue invites an Althusserian reading: as a stylistic device to transcend the visual clichés of hetero-normative reproduction, this manga’s female characters are continually being called out by their teacher or each other, obliging them to turn back to acknowledge these calls. This is depicted in the manga’s fetishistic focus on heads: numerous inked-in circles depict the black-haired backs or tops of the heads of female high school students. Thus, this visual depiction of how Blue’s subjects turn back to heed the calls which they receive, rather than focusing on their forward-looking faces, also reflects the manga’s attempts to resist their incorporation into conventional narrative forms diegetically.

Lastly, expanding the label manga itself by also considering manga-based cultural products and activities, such as cosplay, Akiko Sugawa-Shimada reinforces the queer theoretical supposition that the topic of manga is not limited to the world of manga. Sugawa-Shimada discusses how gender representations are blurred in cosplay due to the fact that mass-produced costumes representing anime characters are marketed for a reasonable price, and more boys and girls without funds or manufacturing skills have thereby gained easy access to cosplay. Based on her qualitative research regarding young people’s consumption of Japanese anime and manga in Singapore and the Philippines, Sugawa-Shimada explores how Singaporean and Filipina young women use cosplay as a means of self-expression and how they struggle with, or take pleasure in, confronting, gender norms in their own countries. She concludes that cross-dressing cosplay can serve as a site in which conflicts and negotiations between traditional gender norms of femininity/masculinity and challenges to them may be put into play.

© The Author(s) 2019

Fusami Ogi, Rebecca Suter, Kazumi Nagaike and John A. Lent (eds.)Women’s Manga in Asia and BeyondPalgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novelshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97229-9_1

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

Fran Martin¹  

(1)

University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Fran Martin

Email: [e-mail]

Introduction

In Taiwan today, as elsewhere in East Asia and beyond, Japanese ‘boys’ love’ (BL) manga is big news. Tens of thousands of girls and women are reading, making, distributing, trading, discussing, and re-enacting BL’s homoerotic narratives (a smaller number, too, engage just as passionately with narratives of ‘girls’ love’, or GL). BL and GL are trans-media narratives of love, sex, and romance between young people of the same sex that originated in Japan but are now deeply entrenched in girls’ and women’s popular culture across Asia. In this chapter, I focus on young, unmarried female consumers of BL (and some GL ) manga, anime, and popular novels in Taiwan in order to consider how these genres contribute to girls’ and women’s participatory pop culture outside Japan. BL and GL, I argue, become an indigenized cultural resource in Taiwan, speaking to the local-level social experience of readers while also fitting into a wider transnational history of Chinese cultural modernities in which women’s media genres have enabled girls and women symbolically to negotiate some of the dominant structures and contradictions of their gendered experience. Based on interviews I conducted with Taiwanese BL and GL consumers in 2005, I will show how these narratives enable them to engage in a collective project of utopian imagination on same-sex love, which at times takes on a critical function (see also Jagose 1994). Specifically, my discussions with respondents revealed how representations of same-sex love in BL (and some GL) narratives enabled the imagination of individual authenticity , seen as in conflict with both a conformist education system and familial pressures; the imagination of pure love, seen as in conflict with conventional cross-sex marriage; and the imagination of the plasticity of selfhood, seen as in conflict with the rigidity of adult social roles.

I begin this chapter with a brief history of Japanese manga in Taiwan, before moving on to offer an analysis of responses gleaned from my reception study, in order to illustrate and elaborate critically upon the utopian imaginaries outlined above. In the final section of the chapter, I develop a brief discussion of how my respondents’ BL and GL engagements may connect with a broader representational tradition across the modern Sinophone (Chinese-speaking) world (Shih 2007),¹ in which same-sex love has functioned as a utopian signifier especially when it appears in connection with young women.

A Brief History of Manga in Taiwan

²

Following the immediate post-war period of intense cultural censorship in Taiwan, local comic art blossomed between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s (Zhong 1999: 19–22; Wei 2001). In 1966, however, the government introduced a political censorship law that severely limited the content of locally written comics; as a result, informally copied editions of Japanese manga proliferated (Wei 2001: 68–69; Lent 1995, 1999; Ng 2000). Ten years later, a Taiwanese publisher created a test case by submitting a pirated Japanese manga to the censorship body; when it was formally approved, local publishers saw that the censors did not intend to apply the harsh censorship standards to Japanese imports (Zhong 1999: 20). The year 1976 thus marks the beginning of the ‘piracy period’ (daoban shidai), when Taiwanese publishers began publishing a massive volume of pirated photocopies of Japanese manga. Many major Taiwanese manga publishers were set up during this period and established their foothold in the market by selling the cheaply copied Japanese works (see Lent 1999: 122–126; Tong Li Comics Website 2014).³ Pirated Japanese manga dominated the market until the early 1990s, when formal copyright contracts were finally drawn up between the Japanese publishers and the Taiwanese translators and distributors. Japanese manga—now in copyright-cleared editions—continue to dominate the Taiwanese manga market today; however, in recent years the rise of informal Internet distribution makes it more and more difficult to track the reach of the genre based on sales or rental figures for printed copies.

It is difficult to piece together an accurate picture of exactly which manga series circulated during the piracy period. Photocopying, translation, and minor editing were carried out by the various Taiwanese publishing houses in an informal, ad hoc fashion, and no reliable records remain of precisely what content reached Taiwanese readers (Martin 2012). But given the prominence of shōnen-ai as a subgenre of girls’ manga in Japan since the 1970s, and the lack of official restriction on the content of Japanese manga pirated in Taiwan, it seems probable that the major shōnen-ai works of that period and after will have made their way to Taiwanese readers. Certainly, the young readers interviewed for my study were very familiar with iconic shōnen-ai works of the 1980s, such as Marimo Ragawa’s New York, New York (NYNY/Niuyue, Niuyue, 1988) and Minami Ozaki’s Desperate Love (Zetsuai/Jue’ai, 1989), and some of the slightly older respondents recalled having read 1970s works like Keiko Takemiya’s Song of Wind and Trees (Kaze to ki no uta, 1976) in childhood.

BL surged in popularity in the 1990s, and today in Taiwan, it forms a major niche market within the broader category of girls’ manga, with hundreds, if not thousands, of titles currently available. Today Taiwan’s BL culture encompasses a range of texts, practices, and sites far exceeding its original instance in the Japanese comics. The consolidation of a local fan world, known as tongrenzhi following the Japanese dōjinshi , is particularly notable (see Figs. 1.1 and 1.2). Commercial BL’s popularity boom in Taiwan over the past two decades can in fact be traced back to the rise of the local tongrenzhi subculture during the early 1990s (somewhat mirroring the case in Japan): the commercial publishing industry followed the lead of fan production.⁴

../images/426429_1_En_1_Chapter/426429_1_En_1_Fig1a_HTML.png../images/426429_1_En_1_Chapter/426429_1_En_1_Fig1b_HTML.png

Figs. 1.1 and 1.2

Cover and artwork from a Taiwanese fan-produced (tongrenzhi) BL manga series by Taiwan Dokoshu. Taipei, 2004 and 2005, self-published. (Copyright permission granted to the author by the artist for reproduction)

In the sections that follow, I present material gleaned from interviews I conducted with female BL (and some GL) consumers in Taipei in the first half of 2005. I spoke with a total of 30 unmarried women aged between 19 and 34, including some who produced their own BL texts and were otherwise active in the tongrenzhi subculture, plus one professional male manga editor. Participants were interviewed both singly and in friendship groups, with each semi-structured interview lasting between one and two hours.

‘We Really Are Different, You Have to Accept Us’: BL and Individual Authenticity

In discussingtheir enjoyment of BL narratives, the young women I spoke with often noted their enjoyment of BL’s dramatization of conflicts between the individual and wider social values. These readers valued a modicum of social realism in their BL, where the characters’ same-sex love came into conflict in some way with the dominant sex-gender system. On the one hand, this marked preference for representations of conflict between the lovers and the wider society might be seen simply as a novel permutation of the standard romance narrative, in which true love proves its power by overcoming a series of obstacles in its path. Indeed, commentators in both Japan and Taiwan have pointed out the generic parallels between ‘[straight] girl-oriented’ (女性向) BL and the conventional cross-sex romance genre (Fujimoto 1991: 36). Supporting this interpretation are statements like the following:

Lilian (a 24-year-old student):

If I seek out this type of (BL) comics, it’s because their plots are different from most of the ordinary popular ones. I expect that in this type of comic or novel what I’m going to see is society’s conflict with the gay characters: that’s what draws me to read them. […] I think that very tortuous sort of love story is attractive to many people.⁵

Motoki (a 25-year-old designer):

For me the love stories in BL are more dramatic, because they’re the same sex, they’re under more pressure, and there is more conflict in the storylines. […] It’s more fun than ordinary girls’ comics.

Yahui (a 25-year-old student):

[One] thing that attracted me [to BL] was that I enjoyed reading stories where the progress wasn’t so smooth, where there’s some sort of struggle between the lovers, not like the kind where the prince rescues the princess: plots with much stronger psychological tension. It’s rare to find that in regular boy-girl stories or manga […]. I especially like love stories where one [character] clearly likes the other but can’t say it out loud. Because sometimes when that kind of unspeakable love is buried in your heart for a lifetime, it keeps getting deeper and deeper. I think that kind of love is extremely beautiful.

In these responses, readers explain their own pleasures in terms of the ‘attractiveness’, ‘fun’, and ‘beauty’ of narratives of tortuous, unspeakable love, which some BL provide by dwelling on homophobia and social pressure as obstacles to the central romance. In such cases, BL pleasures might perhaps be seen simply to replicate the generic pleasures of standard cross-sex romance: obstacles in true love’s path leading to a long delay in the lovers’ final union.

However, at other times, readers’ discussions of their enjoyment of stories about conflict between individual desires and collective values also seemed to indicate a deeper attraction to the value of anti-conformism in the specific contexts of readers’ own life experience. For example, the following detailed discussion from Hong, a 27-year-old accountant, highlights how Japanese manga enabled her to articulate a critique of Taiwan’s 1980s school system, in which she herself was immersed at the time when she first became a fan of BL:

In middle school, everyone was under the pressure of the college entrance exams—especially in my generation, that’s the way it was, still, everything was completely pressurized. Some describe it as, if you had to return to the past, you’d rather be beaten to death than be put under such pressure again. It really was a type of repression. Reading [BL] at that time provided a kind of relief. […] Back then homosexuality was a form of rebellion. […] Back then, even manga itself was banned […]. Imagine it: from Monday to Friday we had classes every day until 9:30 pm, and then on Saturday we had to go to the school to do revision, it was totally, you were pressed down into that environment 365 days a year. You couldn’t even think about rebelling against your parents or your environment, so you looked for an escape route to let you vent. […] I read something pretty interesting that said that today, when girls read BL, sometimes they project their own real selves onto the shou [receptive/bottom] character. That way, when you read it, it’s exactly the same as reading a [conventional] romance novel, except that it’s a form of rebellion against society. You project the repression that you feel in your own real life onto the book or the manga. It’s a sort of defiance of real-life society, since in Eastern societies homosexuality is, um, quite an unapproved behaviour. [You] use this type of rebellion to highlight your own situation.

For Hong, reading BL in the historical and social contexts of 1980s Taiwan, when not only were Japanese manga technically illegal, but social opprobrium against homosexuality ran high, felt like a symbolic resistance to the stifling conformism of the school system. ‘Homosexuality was a form of rebellion,’ and the ‘repression’ of homosexual desires was felt to run parallel to the education system’s repression of students’ autonomy and individuality, so that in identifying with a BL character, Hong was simultaneously identifying with the feeling of being repressed, and with the rebellious individual mounting resistance to that repression. The hydraulic metaphor of the repressive hypothesis that she constructs, with its language of pressurization and venting, enables her to formulate her own critique of her situation to herself by implicitly figuring her ‘true self’ as a force of nature pushing back against the weighty constraints of Taiwan’s education system.

Other respondents, too, made a similar conceptual linkage between BL narratives and their own questioning of social conformity in the name of individual autonomy and difference. Consider the following statements:

Mandy (a 27-year-old administrativeassistant and author of both straightand BL popular romance novels):

A lot of people don’t accept this kind of thing [same-sex sexuality as in BL] – it’s just like when a lot of parents don’t accept things their children want to do, but you just stubbornly insist on doing them anyway, for lots of reasons. Why do they insist on doing it anyway? It’s this that makes me feel that [BL] are different from ordinary comics. They touch more on life’s true significance.

Joanna (a 34-year-old secretary):

I always wonder why, even under this kind of collective pressure, does BL continue to exist? I think that people want to read them because they touch a certain spot in people’s hearts, maybe some sort of dream, or maybe just the fact that you’re different from other people. In our society, we’re born to be the same as others, so [difference] has to develop underground. But it still needs an outlet, because people are different from each other, it’s impossible for everyone to be exactly the same. I think [through BL] the pressure [of that difference] forces itself to the surface to declare: we really are different, you have to accept us.

In Mandy’s discussion, we again see same-sex sexuality used as the symbol of a more generalized discontent with existing social structures. Specifically, she touches on the family as a disciplinary apparatus: ‘it’s just like when a lot of parents don’t accept things their children want to do, but you just stubbornly insist on doing them anyway.’ Furthermore, in Mandy’s view, understanding the meaning of such defiance is extremely important: it constitutes nothing less than ‘life’s true significance.’ Mandy’s friend Joanna, too, frames BL’s value in extremely broad philosophical terms. For her, the genre stirs the ‘dream’ of ‘difference’ in a Taiwanese society that—again borrowing the hydraulic metaphor of pressure and outlets—she sees as characterized by strong expectations of social conformity (‘we’re born to be the same as others’). All of these responses frame BL’s thematization of same-sex love metaphorically, as a vehicle for readers’ utopian imagination of individual authenticity and difference in the face of enforced conformity at the levels of the school, the family, and the society in general.

Elsewhere, in my research on Taiwanese women’s television, I have explored how popular media stage some of the tensions surrounding the rise of what sociologists call ‘individualized’ formations of feminine identity in Taiwan today (Martin 2016, forthcoming; Lewis et al. 2016; see also Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 54–84). In a context where highly educated, unmarried, urban working women under 40 constitute a significant and growing demographic, such media speak to understandings of such women as seeking ‘a life of one’s own’ rather than—or, more accurately, in continuing tension with—a life lived for (familial) others (Dales 2012; Jones 2007). Space constraints prevent a full consideration of these complex social transformations here. It is worth noting, however, that although in Taiwan as elsewhere many married women read BL manga, it happens that all of the 30 women I interviewed in 2005 were unmarried, and many were working and living independently from their families. They thus occupied—whether temporarily or permanently—a zone of partial structural independence from familial structures (both natal and conjugal family) (Galbraith 2011: 228–229). Such readers’ repeated invocation of utopian discourses on individual authenticity and personal difference, and their embedded critiques of social mechanisms enforcing conformity, including the family, may link to the wider cultural prominence of processes and representations of female individualization in Taiwan, as elsewhere in East Asia, today (see Kim 2010, 2012). In other words, BL’s popularity with young Taiwanese women could perhaps be seen as part of a broader pattern in women’s media cultures in Taiwan, where narratives foregrounding social conformity in tension with individual autonomy attract a female audience that is grappling in historically particular ways with precisely that (implicitly gendered) contradiction. Such an interpretation is supported by readers’ discussions of BL narratives in relation to the topics of love and marriage, to which I move below.

‘Apart from the Love Between Them, There’s No Other Worldly Reason for Them to Be Together’: BL and Pure Love

While the above responses frame BL’s representations of same-sex love largely in metaphorical terms, as a medium for exploring rather generalized (albeit implicitly also gendered) contradictions—individual versus collective; conformity versus rebellion—at other times, our discussions engaged far more specifically with questions around sexuality and gender. In a previous article drawing on this same research, I tried to show how these respondents’ BL engagements mediate multiple forms of sex-gender critique, including their liberalizing understandings of homosexuality; their critiques of the sexism of standard boy-girl romance narratives; their desire for symbolic ‘payback’ for women’s objectification in sexist media representations; and their negotiations of their own very complex gendered and sexual identifications, including transgender and queer identifications (Martin 2012). Here, I would like to extend that discussion by considering how BL engagements framed a contrast between ‘love’ and ‘marriage’, for some readers. For example, Joanna (quoted above) reflected:

What attracts people seems a bit like, girls have a kind of dream of pure love (chuncuide ganqing). You’ll think, why would a man be with another man? It’s definitely not because, as in real life, a girl gets married to a man maybe because of his background, like he’s wealthy, or whatever. But when you think about why a man would want to be with another man, you tend to think that apart from the love between them, there’s no other worldly (shisude) reason for them to be together. [Readers] may yearn for that sort of thing.

Joanna proposes that BL enables readers to imply a critique of marriage as a worldly contract by means of the utopian imagination of same-sex love as ‘pure love’. On the one hand, of course, this interpretation could be seen as simply another permutation of the standard romantic ideology of true love transcending worldly concerns. Yet on the other hand, when voiced by unmarried adult women readers for whom marriage is likely to be an institution of particularly personal concern, such an interpretation perhaps also carries an implicit critique of marriage as a coercive social institution; one that entails broader social and familial pressures on unmarried women to ‘make a good match’ with a man of means or appropriate background. Here, same-sex love appears as a utopian alternative to cross-sex marriage as a worldly institution to which women readers are themselves almost certain to be subject, in some form: whether or not they ultimately marry, they are sure to be made aware of broad social pressures to do so, which might operate through suggestions by family members and/or popular media representations.⁶ Further, as I will show in the final section of this chapter, this use of same-sex love as a utopian metaphor signifying pure love in distinction to marriage as a worldly contract resonates strongly with a longstanding pattern in modern Chinese girls’ and women’s literary and media genres.

‘She Might Die or Become a Grownup’: BL/GL and Malleable Selfhood

Elsewhere, I have considered modern Sinophone representations and experiences of the period between adolescence and marriage—precisely the life stage that my BL- and GL-reading interviewees occupied—as a zone of what we might call ‘limited autonomy’ for women (Martin 2010). I intend the emphasis in this phrase to run both ways: women’s independence in this period is limited in the sense that it is restricted; but at the same time, they experience a certain degree of autonomy within those limits (which are primarily of a temporal nature: the ‘autonomy’, such as it is, generally comes with a use-by date). Women’s years between their late teens and marriage (or marriageable age) have often been framed as a period of temporary suspension of some of the rules of ‘full’ feminine adulthood: a kind of ‘no-man’s time’ when women’s personal experiments, including their pursuit of same-sex love, are to a limited extent tolerated with the proviso that they ultimately submit to re-absorption by familial structures. In the following section, I consider how for my Taiwanese respondents, BL and GL manga and anime become woven into this cultural construction of youth as a liminal state: both in the plots of the works themselves, many of which emphasize a fluidity of gender and sexual orientation, and in the real-life experience of their readers, who are attracted to those representations of youthful of sex-gender liminality as they themselves pass through, or remember passing through, their teens and early twenties (see Galbraith 2011: