Ranty manga pants

[owlectomy]

I feel sick and all my wishes are being thwarted.

The dryer I used to dry my clothes failed, and rather than do the sensible thing and switch them to another dryer I took them back to my apartment and put them in the oven for a while.

For my WisCon panel I wanted to take another look at Sandra Buckley's "Penguin in Bondage" article about manga, even though I remembered it being awful.

The shift to male protagonists took a further turn with Ikeda Riyoko's "Rose of Versailles" (Margaret, 1972-1974). In this work, heterosexual love was replaced by homosexual love, complete with "bed scenes," as they came to be known in Japanese (Beddo shiinu) depicting young homosexual couples. It is somewhat problematic to describe the "bed scene" in "Rose of Versailles" as homosexual. The protagonist, Oscar, is a girl who has been raised as a boy by her/his military family. Oscar eventually ends up becoming a member of Marie Antoinette's personal guard and falls in love with a nobleman called Von Ferson (sic -- but they didn't have Wikipedia when it was written, after all)...

Another homosexual relationship develops between Oscar and André, the son of Oscar's childhood nursemaid. Oscar wins André's lifelong devotion and love when she/he saves his life. When Oscar finally reveals her/himself to be female the story takes still another turn. André's love for Oscar is based on his homoerotic desire for the

pages 172 to 174 are not shown in this preview.

1) So I'm going to have to trek down to the NYPL main library just so I can find out how that sentence ends?

2) THAT ISN'T EVEN WHAT HAPPENED. Everyone knows that Oscar is a woman. You have gossipy noblewomen in some of the very early scenes saying "If she were a man, I'd hit that." (Not actually a literal translation). André is Oscar's closest friend from early childhood AND the son of her nursemaid (hmm -- grandson, unless I'm misremembering something, actually), and he's supposed to have no idea? I don't know what André's homoerotic desire may be for, but he does know Oscar's a woman. And if you're going to get something basic like that wrong, what are you doing writing pseudoscholarly articles about manga for?

...Plus, later she says that "The gay readership is in some sense the group with the least complicated relationship to these image-texts [what she calls bishonen comics, but basically Boys Love stuff]. In a cultural landscape that remains otherwise generally hostile to overt representation or expression of the homoerotic, these texts offer gay readers a rare site for the possibility of a direct and positive identification without denial or modification."

If you got that from them, I'm happy for you, but I would hardly characterize it as an uncomplicated relationship. I don't know the answer to this, but I want to at least ask the question, if you look at fiction from the 70s and 80s in Japan, or underground manga, or movies... I would hope that gay readers could find better sites for the possibility of a "direct and positive identification" without going to manga written by women, for women, who were writing to express their own subjectivity. Fujimoto is certainly correct that shounen ai isn't about actual gay people, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. In the sense that a lot of women of my generation got their first positive depiction of gay people through Mercedes Lackey, yeah, okay, but my basic reaction is still, "If you're looking for that, I'm not sure you're going to find it there."

Comments

[pinesandmaples]

Does the oven thing work or do you just get crispy clothes that smell like blueberry muffins?

[oyceter]

WAIT! I may actually still have a photocopy from my senior thesis! Lemme run and check...

[oyceter]

OMG I STILL HAVE IT! Yay packrat-ness!!

Uh, I can type it up here (possibly spread out in comments) or do it in another format if you'd prefer?

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

I wish I'd saved my course packs from my classes!

That would be excellent, but don't go typing out a lot of stuff just so I can have something to be mad about! I don't really mind going to the library, I'm just really curious about the end of that paragraph or so.

[oyceter]

Oh I totally don't mind! Anyway, the paragraph is:

[...] person he perceives to be a beautiful young man. Oscar's declaration that she/he is female is presented as a narrative escape from the "dilemma" of the homosexual relationship--the normative transformation of homosexual love to heterosexual--the solution is a false one, however, for there is an even greater barrier to Oscar and Andre's future together, and that is class. The female Oscar cannot marry someone as lowly as Andre. The story ends with the death of both--Andre at the barricades and Oscar at the Bastille.

"Rose of Versailles" plays endlessly with gendered identity and the relationship between that identity and sexuality, disrupting the myth of biology as destiny. Gender is mobile, not fixed, in this story. In 1971 Moto Hagio published a short story title "The November Gymnasium," which explored the love-hate relationship of two beautiful young boys, Eric and Thoma. The narrative tension is sustained at the level of the suppressed homoerotic desire of the two boys. They are like two sides of a coin; where Eric is strong willed and violent, Thoma is gentle and loving. It is eventually revealed that they are indeed twins. At the end of the story, Thoma dies. The only moment of physical contact Moto allows the two is a brief embrace. However, in 1974 Moto reworked the story of Eric into a much longer serialized comic titled "The Heart of Thoma." In the later work Moto developed the theme of homoerotic love more openly, as she continued the story of Eric and his relationship of love and rivalry with three other youths after the death of Thoma. Ikeda's story opened the way for a whole new genre of bishonen (beautiful young boy) comic stories of homosexual love. These stories of homosexual lovers pursuing one another across an exotic and fantastic landscape of mountains, forests, chalets, and palaces are a far cry from the comic books read by American teenage girls in the 1960s. (end mid-page 173)

(apologies for typos and whatnot!!)

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much!

[oyceter]

(cont.)

(this brought to you by the department of mild asthma attacks and the general inability to do things like climb up the stairs without getting out of breath and being bored to death! So no bother at all for me!)

It was the bishonen comics that first broke the public taboo on the representation of sex in the manga in the late 1960s and the 1970s. This trend saw the emergence of the magazine June, which specializes in bishonen stories. In 1990 the target readership of June remains teenage girls, but there is little doubt that it now has an extensive crossover readership that includes a significant gay male following. For a period in the 1970s the comics-for-girls were a major testing ground for the censorship laws. In addition to the homoerotic bishonen stories, the popular and influential comic artists branched out into stories of lesbian love and increasingly explicit representations of heterosexual sex. What made it possible for the comics-for-girls to go as far as they did was the so-called bed scene. As long as the characters did not roll over or come out from under the covers completely, there was no technical breach of the law, which specifically concerned itself only with the display of pubic hair and penis. The bed sheets crept further and further off the body, and occasionally an artist would risk a standing embrace or full-body profile. Buttocks survived the scrutiny of the censors and became a permanent feature by the early 1970s.

The bishonen genre continues to be extremely popular among the comics-for-girls on the market today. Sales of popular biweekly and monthly titles remain in the millions. June continues to be one of the major selling comics-for-girls as the industry moves into the 1990s. Its sales figures are undoubtedly boosted by the number of gay and crossover readers. The June layout is now standardized and relatively predictable. Each month's edition includes a mixture of serialized comic stories, still shots from recent movies with either a homosexual story line or a popular androgynous actor (the July 1989 issue included stills of Rupert Everett in Another Country, Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers, assorted stills of Hugh Grant, and Prince's Batman video), reproductions of advertisements featuring male bodies (the same issue included Hugh Grant for L'Uomo, a French anti-AIDS campaign poster, and a French advertisement for Nike running shoes showing a group of male marathon runners standing exhausted in the rain), reviews of new record and video releases, listings of popular back issues (under the title "June, the Discrimination-Free Comic Magazine"), advice columns (including letters from teenage girls about their own heterosexual problems and inquiring about homosexual love, and also letters from gay males seeking advice on issues from safe sex to new gay clubs), advertisements for gay and transvestitte clubs, and the regular feature of a sealed comic story. The sealed story is billed as the "Secret Series" and presented as the "hottest" of the stories in each issue. (tbc...)

[oyceter]

The "Secret Series" is sealed on the outer edge and bound into the sine of the comic so that it cannot be read unless one purchases the comic and tears it out. This is an innovative technique on the part of the publishers to deal with the problem known as tachi-yomi (literally standing and reading--browsing). Bookstores are always filled with browsers flipping through the pages of the new releases in the comic book section. The images in the "Secret Series" are actually only marginally "hotter" than those in the rest of the magazine. The "Secret Series" does tend to have more violent images than is true for the rest of June, and some scenes represent sexual contact in a more sinister or threatening way than the usually highly stylized romanticism of homosexual love that has become the magazine's standard fare. The July 1989 issue's "Secret Series" includes the threat of cannibalism and the suggestion of fellatio, but neither is shown explicitly, only hinted at. The most "shocking" image of this image/text is that of two men kissing mouth to mouth. In the bishonen comics androgynous figures appear wrapped in each other's arms, naked in bed, passionately making love, gazing longingly into each other's eyes, and kissing each other on the cheek. However, images of the young lovers mouth kissing are rare within the bishonen genre to the present. (and now we have reached page 175!)

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Having only seen the anime and not having read any of the manga:

Andre never seemed to see Oscar as anything BUT a girl. A girl who wore pants and fought better than him, but a girl. (Actually, I seem to recall that a lot of their conflict was that he saw her as female before she was fully able to differentiate what she felt/wanted for herself and what her father had conditioned her to be, and there was no safe degree of separation for him in her feelings since they were so close, as there was with Marie Antoinette and Von Fersen.) Marie Antoinette crushed on her thinking she was a boy, found out otherwise, and kept crushing on her anyway.

Actually, I...think that may have been the only exception to people having an interest in Oscar before learning her biological gender? I'm not even sure "If she were a man, I'd hit that" is too much of an exageration for the court ladies.