Two other fans and I are seeking essays and artwork for a scholarly book about yaoi. Interested in participating?
Girls Doing Boys Doing Boys: Japanese Boys' Love Anime and Manga in a Globalized World will be an edited, interdisciplinary volume that examines the new representations of same-sex attracted males in boys' love and/or yaoi. The collection's primary focus will be the ways in which fans in countries and cultures other than Japan interpret and use these genres, although we're open to contributions about boys' love fandoms in Japan as well.
Potential approaches might include:
o Controversies and Legal Issues
o Fandoms and Fanfic
o Theoretical Models of Gender and Sexuality
o Genre Development and Adaptation
o The Publishing Industry
o Concepts of "Race" / Ethnicity in Yaoi and Boys' Love
o Queer / Gay Discourses of Yaoi / Boys' Love
o Comparison of Boys' Love and Yaoi Expressions in World Regions
Due date for proposals is July 31, 2008. The book will be published by McFarland & Co. in 2009.
You can find our contact info and discussion on
our wiki, but feel free to reply here or PM me if you like. The other two editors are Toni Levi, who taught at Portland State University and wrote
Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), and Dru Pagliassotti, who teaches at California Lutheran University and wrote the novel
Clockwork Heart (Rockville, MD: Juno, 2008). I (Mark McHarry) have presented papers about yaoi and boys' love at academic conferences and have had essays in the gay press and in scholarly books (the most recent being "Identity Unmoored: Yaoi in the West",
Queer Popular Culture: Literature, Media, Film, and Television, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). All three of us love yaoi and have attended Yaoi-Con (in my case since 2002); we intend to make
Girls Doing Boys Doing Boys celebratory as well as respectful and scholarly.
-- Mark
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