We Need to Reexamine Queer Manga

By Noki Parcel

 

 

In the last decade, queer media has exploded in popularity. This is only natural with giant leaps forward in queer rights, such as the USA’s legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015. While the overall war with legislators is ongoing, society overall has accepted queer people in both reality and the media they consume.

This same notion has slowly been expanding across the globe. Even in the more conservative Japan, queer media has grown more popular. Just go down to your bookstore and check out the offerings for WLW and MLM manga.

For Yuri, or ‘Girls’ Love’,’ there’s tons of romances that even break the boundaries of different genres. Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon is about a woman desperately seeking to be seen as ‘normal’ learning to accept herself as she falls in love with another woman. Kase-san and… is a simple romance series about two high-school girls falling in love. My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness is an introspective autobiographical manga about a woman’s struggles with her sexuality and mental health. There’s even Superwomen in Love!, a superhero action series with a romance between the two woman leads.

 

For Yaoi, or ‘Boy’s Love’, there’s lots of erotic material for you to choose from. There’s Seaside Stranger, a romance between a man who falls in love with a highschool boy. The Titan’s Bride is the story of a man who falls in a fantasy world and is forced to marry a much bigger man. Yarachin Bitch Club, about a boy who accidentally joins a club that prostitutes themselves to the students of his all-male school. Or we could just skip all pretenses and take a trip to Dick Fight Island. 

These are, of course, cherrypicked examples meant to show the extremes of this genre. Still, they’re very representative of the vast majority of books the genre contains and are some of the first manga that comes up when you search for Yaoi on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. 

So we must ask ourselves: Why exactly is Yuri so much more diverse and less fetishized than Yaoi?

Yuri

Girl Friends by Milk Morinaga 

So what exactly are Yuri and Yaoi? Just like straight romance, queer romance can be included in a story without it being labeled as a romance. How exactly are the two genres distinct enough to be labeled separately from romance manga or from each other?

As shown with the previous examples, Yuri can be anything. It can be romances, dramas, comedies, autobiographic works, and even crop up in the background of series that don’t focus on it. This is because both those who write and read Yuri are incredibly varied.

In 2007, the Comic Yuri Hime magazine ran a poll of its readership, with 70% responding they were female. The next year, Comic Yuri Hime S, a magazine aimed at males, ran a similar poll with the results of 62% of the audience being male. Later on the two magazines merged because, despite the different demographics, there was so much overlap in its audience.

A survey on Yuri readers conducted in 2015 by Verena Maser for her paper, Beauty and Innocent: Female Same-Sex Intimacy in the Japanese Yuri Genre, revealed 54.2% of replies identified as female and 46.1% identified as male.

I went into this project believing that Yuri was made by male mangakas for a male audience, but that just isn’t the case. Even when I was searching specifically for more fetishized manga, the mangaka turned out to be women. This is the case with Sakura Trick, a manga series whose basic premise is that two high school girls like kissing, and Citrus, a romance manga where the leads are step-sisters.

 

Sakura Trick by Taichi and Citrus by Saburota

 

But while Yuri can be sexualized, most of it is not.

Several Yuri series tend to aim for a laid-back and casual tone, one which allows for more playful comedy. These tend to be the focus of ones set in high schools, as ‘romantic friendships’ between girls are acceptable in Japanese society, viewed as an immaturity before they grow into ‘real’ relationships. As a result, they are historically infamous for their downer endings of the leads breaking up. A trope that is thankfully lessening with time and acceptance of queer relationships. As such, many of these types of Yuri series are only separate from any given romcom manga because the leads are both women.

Yaoi

 Therapy Game by Meguru Hinohara

 

Yaoi is a different beast altogether. A simpler beast, thankfully, as most Yaoi is smut.

According to the paper Loving the love of boys: Motives for consuming yaoi media, to draw readers to it for the purposes of it being/having, “Arousing/sexually titillating, Art and aesthetics, A female-oriented romantic/erotic genre, and Identification/self-analysis.” As it being a ‘female-oriented romantic/erotic genre’ should show, most Yaoi is written by woman with a female audience in mind. Specifically, a female audience here to be aroused by a male/male relationship.

 

The majority of Yaoi isn’t primarily about romance like in much of Yuri. Yaoi has stories which are excuses to get two men to have sex. Where Yuri is about emotions, Yaoi is about physical intimacy.

This is problematic on its own, depicting gay relationships as revolving around sex, but gets even worse when you take in the frequent tropes of the genre.

 

A common case of the Not Gays in Yaoi Protagonists, from Seaside Stranger

 

Most any Yaoi series will involve abuse and even possibly rape. It can be one of the leads being forced into the relationship, one of the leads outright being abusive, or sexual assault being a major component of a character’s backstory. There’s uncomfortably large age gaps and relationship between students and teachers. Even if a series manages to steer clear of all that, it may fall into the strange trope of one of the leads claiming they’re still straight. That they vastly prefer women, but are willing to be with the other male lead.

It really is no wonder that the Yaoi Tropes page on TV Tropes lists the entire Sexual Harassment and Rape Tropes subpage.

Otokonoko 

But there is one more surprise queer manga genre we need to talk about. That is, of course, the most common form of genderqueer representation in manga: the Otokonoko genre.

‘Otokonoko’ is a term referring to crossdressing males. While an acknowledgement of gender non-conforming males would be amazing, the Otokonoko genre, like the Yaoi genre, primarily exists to sexualize its representation. Often portraying them as young males in tight fitting, barely covering clothing and ‘charm points’ such as an emphasis on their legs or having exposed armpits and belly buttons.

The character Bridget from the Guilty Gear series is a perfect example of these problems prior to being reintroduced and accepting herself as a trans woman in Guilty Gear Strive. Despite predating the genre really coming together, her initial design was the mental image of the genre.

 

Bridget’s initial design and her modern design

Like sexualized portrayals of queer men being more common in manga than purely romantic ones, Otokonoko representation vastly outnumbers representation of trans characters. Even more, this type of character has brought out some very unhealthy stereotypes. For instance, the concept of a ‘trap’, a male crossdressing as a female to fool straight people, is common rhetoric when trying to denounce trans identities.

These problems get even worse when combined with reality and trans identities. Fans of the Otokonoko genre are often both homophobic and transphobic, despite their lust for crossdressing boys.

This leads to them going mad when a character is revealed to be trans and, in their eyes, not attractive anymore, as can be seen by the reaction of these types after Bridgette’s character development in Guilty Gear Strive.

Actual Official Bridget Art from Guilty Gear XX

Instead of being actual representation for crossdressers or trans people, it just ends up turning them into objects of sexual desire.

The Problem With Queer Manga

Two of the three largest queer manga genres are created for straight people for the titillation of straight people instead of being a way for queer creators to express themselves or show that queer relationships and identities are healthy.

This fetishization is far more common than any healthy portrayals and doesn't allow queer people to find or see themselves in the media they consume.

But as time goes on and queer rights evolve, so does queer media. While manga adapts to this at a snail’s pace, it is still adapting nonetheless.

These problematic series are still dominant, but that doesn’t mean there’s no good portrayals of queer men or trans people in manga.

Our Dreams at Dusk is a beautiful, heavily symbolic, and shockingly down to earth story about a gay teen finding companionship in a group of queer people.

The Bride Was a Boy is an upbeat, autobiographical manga about a trans woman figuring out who she is and falling in love.

While the Go For It, Nakamura! series is described as a parody of the yaoi genre at the end of its second volume, it plays out much more like a traditional episodic romcom manga that happens to feature a gay protagonist.

Love Me For Who I Am is all about genderqueer people trying to be comfortable with themselves. While it may fumble its representation at times, it does show that genuine attempts at telling these types of stories are being made.

Just like everything, queer manga is changing. While it may have a long and complicated past, the doesn’t mean its future is doomed to be dragged down by it.

Keep your eyes open. Even if it’s weighted in the favor of fetishization for now, that shouldn’t discount the attempts of those who are actually trying.