Beautiful, Borrowed, and Bent: "Boys' Love" as Girls' Love in Shôjo Manga

Academic Commentary
Title:	Beautiful, Borrowed, and Bent: "Boys' Love" as Girls' Love in Shôjo Manga
Commentator:	James Welker
Date(s):	2006
Medium:	Academic journal
Fandom:	Boys' Love
External Links:	Link to article
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Beautiful, Borrowed, and Bent: "Boys' Love" as Girls' Love in Shôjo Manga is an academic article by James Welker about gender, sexuality, and 1970s Boys' Love manga. It was published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society in 2006.

Excerpts

The genre that I am taking up here, the “boys’ love” (shônen ai) manga of the 1970s, illustrates how visual and cultural borrowing helped to liberate writers and readers to work within and against the local heteronormative paradigm in the exploration of alternatives. This article aims to complicate the popular understanding of the genre and the ways in which readers’ identification with “beautiful boy” (bishônen) characters functions in the construction of their sense of sexual subjectivity and identity.

This beautiful boy is visually and psychically neither male nor female; his romantic and erotic interests are directed at other beautiful boys, but his tastes are not exclusively homosexual; he lives and loves outside the heteropatriarchal world inhabited by his readers. He seems a queer character indeed.

Shôjo manga’s lithe beautiful boy characters with their large twinkling eyes evolved out of a tradition of cross-dressing and transgender performance, both as the characters are drawn and as they perform on the page much of the sexual ambiguity that they represent.

I would further argue that through identification with the feminized beautiful boys, either as boys, girls, or androgynes, the readers are encouraged to experiment with nonhegemonic gender and sexual practices, a spectatorial act that “both resists and gives support to the representation of female agency and female desire” (Mayne 1990, 51). As Kaja Silverman writes, “for a female subject to re-encounter femininity from within a male body is clearly to experience it under different terms—to live it no longer as disenfranchisement and subordination, but rather as phallic divestiture, as a way of saying ‘no’ to power . . . to alter forever her own relationship to femininity’s defining tropes” (1992, 389). This beautiful boy shows that the male body itself can become a trope for femininity.

In spite of the connections drawn on the pages of these magazines, the possibility that these narratives might be seen to actually depict homosexuality remains broadly denied. To allow that the narratives might truly be about homosexuality—between these girls-cumbeautiful boys—would be an apparently unthinkable invitation to read the narratives as lesbian. Thus, the attempt on the part of manga artists and critics alike to control the interpretation of these narratives can be seen as manifestations of “lesbian panic,” which Patricia Smith has defined as “the disruptive action or reaction that occurs when a character—or conceivably an author—is either unable or unwilling to confront or reveal her own lesbianism or lesbian desires” (1997, 2).

Constrained only by the limits of the pen and the imagination, the ambiguous form of the beautiful boy shows readers that neither the body nor the psyche need be shackled by norms.

See also

• Girls who love boys' love: Japanese homoerotic manga as trans-national Taiwan culture