Tonight, I was poking into AAR's columns on romance and feminism -- it makes me sad that so many of the more interesting columns on the site are "stale," having been published 5+ years ago -- when I ran into this opinion from Catherine Asaro:

Romance acknowledges the "female gaze." We hear a lot about the male gaze in literature. An author may extol the aesthetic value of the heroine to such length that female readers are tempted to say, "all right, already. Get on with the story." Romance is the only genre I know where it is perfectly fine to extol male beauty.

Meet Boys Love, a troubled feminist genre? I include the question mark because Asaro sandwiches that comment between two other observations about the "feminism" in romance:

1. "What the heroine values is given priority."

There are no heroines in BL. Can we substitue "what the (female) reader values is given priority"?
2. "The main character of many romance novels is 'everywoman.' She may be of noble birth, or have other qualities we don't associate with our everyday lives, but she doesn't have to be a male-identifed heroine to be considered interesting or worthwhile as a character."

I don't mean to repeat myself, but there are no heroines in BL. However, Asaro continues, "In so much fiction, female characters fade into the background unless they have qualities deemed 'important,' where too often the definition of importance ignores aspects of life traditionally in the female sphere, for example, child rearing, homemaking, or simply a female outlook on the world." BL does this in spades. Relationship-building instead of world-building.

I've been discouraged from politicizing yaoi/BL, and I can't say hushing me on this subject is inappropriate. After all, I really don't know the culture that produces the genre except through manga, and I would be the first to admit that an illiterate Western reader will bring her own world to the text. For a politically-incorrect instance, look at the way some gay men (LJ rant) have tried to "own" this imported genre. Still, if yaoi is not self-consciously, militantly political in the way that slash can so often be, BL does prioritize female values and celebrate the female gaze.
posted at 4:31 AM

 
AMLA is talking about this probable bit of manga plagiarism. The "borrowing" artist has assembled a patchwork of panels from Youka Nitta's "When a Man Loves a Man" and constructed a new story from them. Some of the panels had to be modified, because she took Urushizaki (the submissive seme) for the seme, and he doesn't have the dominating sex scenes with Ryo Takaaki that the new story required. In "When a Man Loves a Man," Urushizaki is a concerned older brother who comes to a host club to demand that the #1 host Takaaki stop seeing his sister. He doesn't realize that there are two Takaaki's at the club, and he's been matched with the wrong one, who seduces Urushizaki and uncovers his need to be dominated. In contrast, "Kyouken" ("mad dog") from Zettai Reido 4 is about the spoiled late-teen son of a corporate president who provokes his "keeper" (a 20-something man in his father's employ) into taming him through sex. The son-uke is Takaaki's character design, the keeper-seme is Urushizaki's character design.

It's an interesting reinterpretation of Nitta's visuals which hints at the hazards of picture-reading. Okay, maybe not so much, since the new story could only be created from cherry-picked scenes from different chapters in the original. The original is perfectly clear. What it does demonstrate is how easily more than one interpretation, more than one text, can be applied to the same image.

posted at 5:42 AM