Yaoi-Con 2008 | A Celebration of Male Beauty & Passion in Anime & Manga

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

Whew... well that's a hefty bit of topics. Rest assured that if you ask specific questions here, you're probably going to get answers on... most of those. The information to be had is very, very broad, though, as you know... did you want to get board opinions on specific issues, perhaps?

Either way, it's always good to see more information out there.

Yeah, gomen for the list but hey, these are only a few examples of what could be done.

It's up to someone who thinks that s/he might want to contribute to decide what they would like to write about and then tell us. Almost any topic would be possible as long as it's about yaoi, it's interesting, and the author's essay about it is scholarly -- meaning in part that he/she can take a point of view as long as that view is well defended.

Feel free to bounce ideas for something you might want to write about or draw off of me, or Toni or Dru -- or all of us collectively.

And yes, any advice here on the forums as to what we should cover, specific issues, etc. is welcome.

Mark for fanfic are you looking for specific trends or topics that seem to be popular?

-Gryffindor

Hi Gryffindor,

Sure, something about fanfic trends or topics would be of interest, as long as your essay is grounded in theory and/or methodology. In other words, an essay about fanfic can (probably should) be descriptive, but it probably also should try to show how yaoi / boys' love fit or don't fit existing knowledge.

For example, some of the yaoi fanfic I've read rejects some types of current psychoanalytic models of erotic behavior in that the main characters in the fic move freely between being subject and object, fucking and being fucked, narcissistic identification and voyeuristic objectification -- sometimes encompassing all of these states simultaneously. In this, the fanfic IMO is describing reality better than some of the dominant models of psychoanalytic theory.

Another example could be publishing: describing not only how fanfic publishing has evolved but why, relating these to trends in technology, the economy, commercial media, globalization, etc.

Maybe the bottom line here is that for whatever approach you might take, describing the "how" would be good, but describing the "why" would be better and both of them need to account for existing knowledge.

Hope this helps and that others weigh in. Apologies for the length.

-- Mark

This -does- seem pretty nifty... I wish I had something material to contribute. My area of expertise inasmuch as Yaoi is concerned, though, is of the con culture, which is more or less unique to Yaoi-con and would end up looking like the inside of an ad brochure.

Best of luck, though.