Beyond Duality and Heteronormativity: Gender Display and Manipulation in Japanese Yaoi/BL Narratives

Boys Love (BL) in Japan refers to commercial fiction and fictional media by and for heterosexual women that focuses on male–male erotic/romantic relationships. These works are more popularly known in other countries as Yaoi, a Japanese term often used as an umbrella category that can encompass various Japanese subgenres of male–male erotic/romantic fiction by and for women. The past decade has seen the emergence of studies of Yaoi/BL that have focused on gender and sex as analytical categories. Such scholarship is important in understanding fan-based cultures, production and consumption. However, a conflation of gender, sex, and sexuality at the analytical level in Yaoi/BL impedes further theoretical development. By making a clear conceptual distinction between these intertwined notions as distinctive analytical categories, this paper attempts to clarify Yaoi’s achievement in the (un)conscious feminist agenda among Japanese women. The study examines nearly 800 commercial Yaoi/BL novels written in Japanese, which were chosen based on a certain sampling method. Through descriptive statistics based on and textual analysis of the samples, as well as interviews with professional Japanese female writers, the paper first identifies some important features in the contemporary Yaoi/BL texts such as transgression of sexual norms, subversion of gender fixity, renewed definitions of masculinity and femininity, and highly context-dependent sexual orientation of protagonists. By doing so, I argue that Yaoi/BL has made it possible for Japanese heterosexual women 1) to transgress normative gender dualism, sexual acts and sexuality at least at the level of discourse; 2) to use men’s images not only for their empowerment but also for their own gratification as agent of desire. This is a significant step forward from early Yaoi works that focused upon getting affirmation from others and fleeing from patriarchy.