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BL Roundtable: Conclusions: Ceci n’est pas une tautology by “Kinukitty”
Posted by admin on June 11th, 2010 at 12:02 AMThe following is neither a joke nor as blindingly obvious as one might initially think: Yaoi fans love gay men. For what it’s worth. And what is it worth? I have wondered. On the one hand – love. Good! On the other hand, love because of sexual preference. Creepy. It isn’t possible to objectify someone respectfully.
We try, though.
Opening shots by Shaenon Garrity, Noah Berlatsky and Kinukitty; Sidebar by Dirk Deppey; and conclusions by Berlatsky, Garrity and Deppey.
BL Roundtable: Conclusions: I didn’t make him for you!
Posted by Dirk Deppey on June 11th, 2010 at 12:01 AMPerhaps the best criticism applied to Boys’ Love Manga came courtesy of Noah Berlatsky, who wrote:
So to all these gender-theory steeped writers trying so hard to show that they’ve overturned patriarchy, heteronormativity, and even the c-word of capitalism itself, I say to you: the next time you read a BL manga or slash fiction story? If you really want to be subversive, instead of trying to figure out what that story says about yaoi readers and the yaoi community, and gender and homosexuality and what have you — could you start by figuring out whether you like it? Not whether you like yaoi in general, but whether you like that particular story.
I note this at the outset because the above critique could be applied just as easily to my own essay. Truth to tell, there isn’t a great deal of BL that I enjoy.
Opening shots by Shaenon Garrity, Noah Berlatsky and Kinukitty; Sidebar by Dirk Deppey; and conclusions by Berlatsky, Garrity and Kinukitty.
BL Roundtable: Conclusions: On Dream Police, Cigars and Maybe Not Shutting Up Forever
Posted by Noah Berlatsky on June 11th, 2010 at 12:01 AMFor me, then, the problem with Boys’ Love Manga’s forays into analysis isn’t that one shouldn’t analyze sexual fantasies — it’s that the analysis in question was fucking stupid.
Opening shots by Shaenon Garrity, Noah Berlatsky and Kinukitty; Sidebar by Dirk Deppey; and conclusions by Garrity, Kinukitty and Deppey.
BL Roundtable Sidebar: The Mirror of Male-Love Love
Posted by Dirk Deppey on June 10th, 2010 at 12:01 AM
Reflections on being both central to a genre and completely irrelevant to it, why women should be more confident in letting their freak flag fly (and a few possible reasons why they sometimes don’t), why the similarities between men and women are just as interesting as the differences, a brief history of world pederasty, what it’s like for a boy (on bottom), the inevitable coming-out melodrama — oh, and a review of the collection of academic essays, Boys’ Love Manga. Not necessarily in that order. 10,000+ words, not even remotely safe for work.
Opening shots by Shaenon Garrity, Noah Berlatsky and Kinukitty
BL Roundtable: Anthropologize Me One More Time, Baby by “Kinukitty”
Posted by admin on June 9th, 2010 at 12:05 AMIn the first part of a three-part roundtable (with opening shots on Wednesday, a sidebar on Thursday, and conclusions on Friday), “Kinukitty” offers a yaoi fanfic writer’s perspective on Boys’ Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre, Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry, and Dru Pagliassotti, editors (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co. Inc., 2010)
BL Roundtable: No Point, No Meaning, Maybe Tenure
Posted by Noah Berlatsky on June 9th, 2010 at 12:03 AMBoys’ Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre really helped me come to terms with my past, my regrets, my desires. Speaking as a straight white cisgendered male, I occasionally regret my transgressive decision to drop out of grad school to explore the fluid, abject jouissance of the non-(i)voried and nontowered. But then I encounter a text like this, and in its quivering, jellylike prose I remember why, though riven by radical difference, still numerous numinous heterogenous communities speak with a single pleasurable speech-act when they utter: “academics fucking suck.”
BL Roundtable: Do we really need to spill this much ink over the question of whether girls like porn?
Posted by Shaenon Garrity on June 9th, 2010 at 12:01 AMIt’s fun when people get all intellectual about porn. I’m impressed by the level of research and familiarity with the subject matter in most of these papers—with a few exceptions, like Mark McHarry’s “Boys in Love in Boys’ Love,” which seems to think that yaoi is mostly shota—but at the same time there’s a running sense of the academic protesting too much. Do we really need to spill this much ink over the question of whether girls like porn?
Maybe we do.
Journalista for May 24, 2010: Form follows function
Posted by Dirk Deppey on May 24th, 2010 at 1:00 AM
Timespirits creator Steve Perry missing, foul play suspected ♦ RIP Howard Post ♦ more
Manga 2.0: Yoshitoshi ABe’s Digital Dojinshi by Jason Thompson
Posted by admin on May 18th, 2010 at 9:00 AMJason Thompson, author of Manga: The Complete Guide, reviews both Yoshitoshi ABe’s I am an Alien. I have a Question., and the mode of delivery, as it’s only available in the U.S. via the iPhone and the Kindle; “As the traditional publisher-centric, print-oriented model of manga dries up, artists like ABe may be the ones best positioned to stay on their feet.”
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