On Friday I realized I needed to add a more significant scene wherein King’s Monster character Corbin faces up to the changes he’s going through. So after a weekend of grappling with possibilities, I’ve decided to add a chapter between the current chapter 24 & 25. And here I’ve been worrying about how long the MS has turned out and looking for places to cut!
I’m not leaping ahead in my editing process to write the chapter, however. I’ve scribbled some points about the new chapter on my writing whiteboard, and I’m going to continue trudging forward chapter by chapter. My theory is that I might pick up more ideas that I can use in the new chapter along the way. Besides, once I write that chapter, I’ll have to tweak conversations and events in later chapters, so there’s no reason to rush.
Sometimes I wonder if I’d have been able to avoid problems like this if I’d been formally trained as a writer — earned an English degree and/or an MFA in creative writing and learned all about things like character arcs in some kind of systematic fashion, instead of picking it up piecemeal. But then I attend talks or read blogs by well-established writers describing their own problems with plotting and think, “no, maybe this kind of thing is just part of the process.”
However, my goal of finishing this MS before school starts is starting to look elusive. At least, if I want to, y’know, get any class prep done beforehand….
drupagliassotti @ July 21, 2008
Boys' Love / Yaoi Comments (0)
Yesterday, as I was (re)defining boys’ love, I spent a few moments wondering if I wanted to add the word “heterosexual” to my definition: a narrative about the romantic or erotic relationship between two or more male characters that has been created with the intention of appealing to a female audience.
I quickly decided not to, yet this morning as I was reading Benjamin Nugent’s American Nerd: The Story of my People over breakfast, I ran into a two-page description of yaoi nerds — provided as one of the few examples of a largely female nerdish subculture — that provides the standard definition of yaoi: “comic-book stories about male homosexual love written by and for straight women” (p. 139, emphasis mine).
I avoided the word “heterosexual” in my definition because although both my 2005 online survey of 478 respondents and my Italian colleagues’ 2006-7 online survey of 315 respondents showed that although many BL readers self-reported as heterosexual — a little less than half in the English-language version and a little more than half in the Italian-language version — that still left a great number of readers who self-reported as belonging elsewhere on the spectrum of sexuality. (These results and others from the two surveys are currently scheduled to be reported in the November issue of Particip@tions).
This last Wednesday I had lunch with a TokyoPop editor who commented that she’d been interested to learn that a number of BL mangaka are lesbian, which then prompted us to discuss lesbians we knew who read BL. I’m hoping this editor will write a paper on the subject for our upcoming anthology, Girls Doing Boys Doing Boys: Japanese Boys’ Love Anime and Manga in a Globalized World.
BL already calls into question certain assumptions about sexuality, with many outsiders unable to comprehend why women might enjoy reading about romance and sex between two men (fans often point out that nobody wonders why men might like to read about, well, at least sex between two women, though I don’t suppose many men read lesbian romances). If we add the fact that lesbians are among the women creating and reading BL, the issue becomes even more complex. There are a variety of explanations for this, but I won’t offer them here, because I’m hoping Girls Doing Boys will include some well-written articles that touch on the subject. The point is, boys’ love fans are not all straight women, and defining it that way excludes a large contingent of the BL readership.
drupagliassotti @ July 18, 2008
Boys' Love / Yaoi Comments (0)
Yesterday I was glancing through the Yaoi entry on Wikipedia and felt dissatisfied by the way the term was defined there. I’d like to propose a slight change in usage.
In Japan, the genre is called boys’ love, Bōizu Rabu, and I believe that term should be used in English, as well, to label the broad category of male/male romance and homoerotica that is (primarily) created by women for women. I intend, in fact, to define it more broadly than do the Japanese, as I explain below.
I realize that the term boy is misleading, suggesting as it does material centered around prepubescent males and calling to mind the North American Man/Boy Love Association. Despite these potential misunderstandings, however, I think it’s easiest to retain the term because of its existing widespread use among the genre’s readership. Readers concerned over the confusion simply need to make it clear that the genre addresses m/m romance and sex over a wide range of ages.
I’ve chosen to punctuate the term as boys’ love to indicate multiple boys possessing love. Boy’s love indicates only one boy possessing love, which may be the case in some BL, but usually isn’t. Boys love is grammatically incorrect in English.
The term yaoi is used interchangeably with boys’ love in English; I don’t expect the practice to stop, especially since it’s been well-embedded in the U.S. by manga publishers. However, whenever precision is important, such as in formal scholarship, the two terms should be differentiated. Properly speaking, yaoi is a subset of boys’ love. (It could be argued that yaoi should be capitalized as the acronym it is: YAOI — yama nashi [no climax], ochi nashi [no point], imi nashi [no meaning]. However, its capitalization has already fallen out of general usage, and there’s precedent for dropping the capitalization of acronyms in English, e.g., radar, laser, and scuba.)
I wrote earlier that I intend to propose boys’ love in the widest possible sense. The defining characteristic of boys’ love, I’d argue, is that it is a narrative about the romantic or erotic relationship between two or more male characters that has been created with the intention of appealing to a female audience. The creator is traditionally female, but need not be, just as the audience is traditionally female, but need not be. Many writers have described yaoi and slash as existing in a “female-gendered” space; this would be the space of BL.
Narratives about the romantic or erotic relationship between two or more male characters that have been created with the intention of appealing to a gay or bisexual male audience and are typically created by men are, properly, gay literature/film/manga/etc. Again, the creator and audience could be female, but it could be considered, overall, a “male-gendered” space.
These two categories are fluid, but at this historical moment, I believe they are applicable and useful, although I acknowledge that in the future they may become indistinguishable. Further work might be done on identifying those themes, narrative techniques, and cliches common to BL works in order to aid in the analytic differentiation between BL and gay narratives.
This broad definition of boys’ love has the advantage, to academics, of expanding it beyond its traditional application to Japanese or other Asian media (usually manga and anime) to encompass non-Asian genres such as slash and to permit the analysis of books about male/male relationships written by women that have otherwise been left out of such categorization, such as The Catch Trap by Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Last Herald-Mage series by Mercedes Lackey, Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner, and various works by Tanith Lee, Storm Constantine, and other women that have included male/male romantic and/or sexual relationships as significant or central to the plot.
Subgenres within boys’ love, then, would include those various categories based on setting, source material, age of characters, status of presentation, plot type, and the like. For example:
Setting: Boys’ love manga and anime, especially, are often categorized by setting: high-school romances, salaryman romances, etc.
Source material: Boys’ love that comes out of a fandom and/or is based on somebody else’s characters would be yaoi or slash; boys’ love based on real people would be real-person slash, and so forth.
Age of the characters: Boys’ love can be subcategorized according to character age, as in the case of shota BL or chanslash, in which at least one of the characters is a prepubescent boy.
Status of the presentation: Boys’ love can be categorized according to whether the presentation is professional or amateur — as in the case of mainstream BL manga versus dōjinshi, or officially mandated novelizations versus slash. Note that I hesitate to say “status of the creator,” because, for example, some professional mangaka have created BL dōjinshi and some professional authors have written slash.
Medium: BL might be categorized according to the medium of presentation: for example, BL manga, anime, novels, cosplay, roleplay, videogames, movies, songs, and so forth.
Plot type: Not only could BL be categorized as drama, comedy, science fiction, fantasy, etc., but also in plot terms that have arisen out of fanfic, such as hurt/comfort, mpreg, PWP, and so forth.
Level of sexual explicitness: Some boys’ love fans have used shōnen-ai to refer to works that are not sexually explicit and yaoi to refer to works that are. I would discourage such usage as confusing. The majority of BL fans have variously adopted other terminology — for example, MPAA ratings (G, PG-13, R, NC-17), manga ratings (G, OT, M), or color ratings (citrus, lemon, lime). Boys’ love material might also be sorted out in terms of romance, erotica, or pornography.
Country of origin: In a debate particularly associated with discussions of manga, some fans have considered “BL” to refer only to Japanese-language boys’ love and have sought to differentiate it from OEL BL (original English-language BL) and other types of native-language BL, such as that arising from creators born in Korea, Italy, Spain, German, and other countries.
Although in certain analytical cases it may be useful to differentiate BL works according to their country of origin, I prefer to apply the term boys’ love to all suitable works regardless of their country of origin. I appreciate Tina Anderson’s useful term GloBL to refer to the current international nature of boys’ love. When differentiation is necessary, it makes sense to use nation-specific or language-specific terms, e.g. Italian BL, English BL, Japanese BL.
My intention in this essay was to propose a slight shift in the use of terms in order to facilitate the discussion of boys’ love, which I feel is a much broader and thus more interesting category than set forth in general discussions of the subject. Including slash and hitherto uncategorized mainstream m/m novels and stories written by female authors into the BL category gives researchers and fans a more organized way to discuss, analyze, and critique the phenomenon.
I welcome elaboration and critique of this proposal.
drupagliassotti @ July 17, 2008