Boys' love fandom
Boys' love (BL), a genre of male-male homoerotic media originating in Japan that is created primarily by and for women, has a robust global fandom.
The reasoning behind this trend is sometimes attributed to patriarchy- that women who write BL fanfiction are in fact acting out heterosexual fantasies through these male figures.
[15] Lunsing notes that some of the narrative annoyances that homosexual men express about yaoi manga, such as rape, misogyny, and an absence of a Western-style gay identity, are also present in gei comi.
[3] Authors of BL present themselves as "fellow fans" by using dust jacket notes and postscripts to chat to the readers "as if they were her girlfriends" and talk about the creative process in making the manga, and what she discovered she liked about the story she wrote.
As of 1995, they "revolved around the most famous series", such as Ai no Kusabi and Zetsuai 1989; and by the late 1990s, English-speaking websites mentioning yaoi "reached the hundreds".
[22] Hisako Miyoshi, the Vice Editor-in-Chief for Libre Publishing's manga division, said in a 2008 interview that although Boys Love is more well known to the general public, the numbers of readers remains limited, which she attributes to the codified nature of the genre.
[33] Deborah Shamoon said that "the borders between yaoi, shōjo manga and ladies' comics are quite permeable", suggesting that fans of BL probably enjoyed both homosexual and heterosexual tales.
[34] Kazuma Kodaka, in an interview with Giant Robot suggested that the Japanese yaoi fandom includes married women who had been her fans since they were in college.
[39] Andrea Wood suggests that due to restrictions placed on the sale of yaoi, many Western teenage fans seek more explicit titles via scanlations.
[41] Japanese fan practices in the mid to late 2000s included the concept of the feeling of moe, which was typically used by male otaku about young female characters prior to this.
[44] Akiko Mizoguchi believes there is a "shikou" (translated as taste or orientation), both towards BL/yaoi as a whole, and towards particular patterns within the genre, such as a "feisty bottom (yancha uke)" character type.
She argues that the exchange of sexual fantasies between the predominantly female yaoi fandom can be interpreted that although the participants may be heterosexual in real life, they can also and compatibly be considered "virtual lesbians".
[16] Patrick Galbraith suggests that androgynous beautiful boys contribute to the appeal of yaoi amongst women who are heterosexual, lesbian or transgender.
The label encompasses fans of the yaoi genre itself, as well as the related manga, anime and video game properties that have appeared as the market for such works has developed.
The term "fujoshi" is a homophonous pun on fujoshi (婦女子), a term for respectable women, created by replacing the character fu (婦) meaning married woman, with the character fu (腐) meaning fermented or rotten, indicating that a woman who enjoys fictional gay content is ruined for marriage.
[49] Older fujoshi use various terms to refer to themselves, including as kifujin (貴腐人, "noble spoiled woman"), a pun on a homophonous word meaning "fine lady", and ochōfujin (汚超腐人), which sounds similar to a phrase meaning "Madame Butterfly", possibly taken from a character nicknamed Ochōfujin (お蝶夫人) in the 1972 manga series Ace o Nerae!
