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

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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."

Content notes: Some frank language and abstracted discussions of rape; thorny passive verbs.

If you have strong feelings about yaoi objectifying or fetishizing actual gay people... this may read as a defense of that objectification from a position of privilege. I'll admit that I'm hugely wishy-washy on this point.

When Fujimoto talks about "shounen ai," she's talking very specifically about a genre of manga, mostly from the 70s, that is things like Hagio Moto's "Thomas's Heart" and Takemiya Keiko's "Song of the Wind and Trees," these really ethereal and otherworldly manga of intense tragic love. "Shounen ai" is often used in the US to mean something like "G-rated slash based on anime and manga," but it's not used that way in Japanese fandom.

( Shounen-ai and women's sexuality )
( Rejected Love: What Shounen Ai Has Achieved )

I'm smiling.

The last couple of months have just been hard. Tired, and anxious, and to where the good things kind of bounce off and the bad things leave a mark. I won't say that's all gone and vanished -- I let myself get unreasonably upset yesterday because the security guard in Kinokuniya told me not to take pictures, and I have been coming there for three years spending way too much money, most of the cashiers know my face, and I know not to take pictures, I was just checking my e-mail on my phone! -- But, seriously, I was like, "My mouth feels weird. What's going on?" and then -- "Oh. Right. Smiling."

So, things that are making me happy:

I have been watching Otome Youkai Zakuro. I tried out a few episodes, and loved the 1920s aesthetics (SO MUCH!) but found the humor slightly too broad for my tastes at first. I feel like as it goes on it's getting better at integrating the silliness and the seriousness, and the gender dynamics are interesting. I mean, it's typical for a magical girl show that the women are the powerful ones -- that's kind of what a magical girl show means -- but this one seems to go to a particular effort to underline how it's the 1920s and the men are in the army and the women wear kimonos and yet it's the women who are capable of doing anything about big giant gory monsters.

I thought that I should finish reading Marginal in case I get put on a particular panel at WisCon, and I think I'm wrong about that -- but, nevertheless, I haven't finished Marginal! Here is why: when Hagio Moto writes science fiction, it's science fiction. This is not space opera, this is mad scientists discoursing on genetic memory and the adrenal medulla. My Japanese isn't particularly better than it was when I bought the manga, but it's a little better, thank goodness.

There's something almost Tiptree-esque about it -- the pessimism about humanity's flaws being written into our biology, and the horror around sex and reproduction, and the ways those things intersect. I also kind of want to compare it to Oooku, since they both depict worlds with a severe gender imbalance, but they're doing very different things.

I find 70s shoujo manga to be incredibly wordy and dense compared to modern ones. I don't want to make any overgeneralizations like older manga being more interested in telling intricately plotted stories, or newer manga shifting the focus from storytelling-in-dialogue to visual storytelling. I just find it interesting. It does make Hagio's manga kind of hard to read, though.

Finally, a piano cover of Blitzkrieg Bop.

I just finished reading the first volume of Taishou Yakyuu Musume, about girls playing baseball in 1920s Japan.

I think it won me over at a moment I never would have expected a seinen manga to get right: Akiko is talking with the boy she's being set up with by her parents and his, and the boy starts talking about baseball. Girls don't need to bother with sweaty things like pain and hardship! Those are the things that boys are supposed to PROTECT girls from! And therefore girls are supposed to be pretty and take care of their husbands and walk three steps behind them BUT NOT IN A BAD WAY!!!! And Akiko is very pleasant and mostly quiet through this whole encounter, but when Koume sees her the next day, she's like, "Hey, there are FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF YOUR FACE."

LOVE.

Hey, I didn't know this was novels originally. I didn't know they were still coming out. Do I need to buy more Japanese novels to read very very slowly? No. I do not. But I'm going to watch the anime for sure.

WHY DID YOU ALL NOT TELL ME ABOUT HIGH SCHOOL NIGHTMARE.

...Wait. You did all tell me about High School Nightmare.

It's just that next time, could you maybe use a gun and some rope? Because sometimes it takes me a while to get the message, and sometimes I really need to get the message.