Fujoshi

Yaoi fandom refers to readers of yaoi
Yaoi
In careful Japanese enunciation, all three vowels are pronounced separately, for a three-mora word, . The English equivalent is . also known as Boys' Love, is a Japanese popular term for female-oriented fictional media that focus on homoerotic or homoromantic male relationships, usually created by...

(also called Boys' Love, BL), a genre of male-male romance narratives aimed at a female audience, and more specifically those who participate in communal activities organized around yaoi, such as attending conventions, maintaining or posting to fansite

Fansite

A fansite, fan site, or fanpage is a website created and maintained by a fan or devotee interested in a celebrity, thing, or a particular cultural phenomenon...

s, creating fanfiction or fanart, etc. Most fans are teenage girls or young women. In the mid-1990s, estimates of the size of the Japanese yaoi fandom were at 100,000-500,000 people, but in 2008, despite increased knowledge of the genre among the general public, readership remains limited. In Japan, female fans are called fujoshi, a pun which denotes their way of seeing homosexual relationships in media as being "rotten". English-language fan translations of From Eroica with Love
From Eroica with Love
is a long-running shōjo manga by Yasuko Aoike which originally began publication in 1976 by Akita Shoten. The series ran irregularly in the Japanese anthology magazine Viva Princess from December 1976 to April 1979, then moved to the sister publication Princess beginning in September 1979...

circulated through the slash fiction

Slash fiction

Slash fiction is a genre of fan fiction that focuses on the depiction of romantic or sexual relationships between fictional characters of the same sex...

community in the 1980s, forging a link between slash fiction fandom and yaoi fandom.

Yaoi fans have been characters in manga aimed at both female otaku and larger audiences (such as the seinen

Seinen

is a subset of manga that is generally targeted at a 20–30 year old male audience, but the audience can be older with some manga aimed at businessmen well into their 40s. In Japanese, the word Seinen means "young man" or "young men" and is not suggestive of sexual matters...

manga Fujoshi Rumi), and in a TV series.
At least one butler cafe has opened with a schoolboy theme in order to appeal to the Boy's Love aesthetic.
In one study on visual kei

Visual Kei

is a movement among Japanese musicians, that is characterized by the use of make-up, elaborate hair styles and flamboyant costumes, often, but not always, coupled with androgynous aesthetics. Some sources state that visual kei refers to a music genre, or to a sub-genre of Japanese rock, with its...

, 37% of Japanese fan respondents reported having "yaoi or sexual fantasies" about the visual kei stars.

Demographics

Most yaoi

Yaoi

In careful Japanese enunciation, all three vowels are pronounced separately, for a three-mora word, . The English equivalent is . also known as Boys' Love, is a Japanese popular term for female-oriented fictional media that focus on homoerotic or homoromantic male relationships, usually created by...

fans are either teenage girls or young women. The female readership in Thailand is estimated at 80%, and the membership of Yaoi-Con, a yaoi convention

Anime convention

An anime convention is an event or gathering with a primary focus on anime, manga and Japanese culture. Commonly, anime conventions are multi-day events hosted at convention centers, hotels or college campuses. They feature a wide variety of activities and panels...

in San Francisco, is 85% female. It is usually assumed that all female fans are heterosexual, but in Japan there is a presence of lesbian manga authors and lesbian, bisexual or questioning

Questioning (sexuality and gender)

The questioning of one's gender, sexual identity, sexual orientation, or all three is a process of exploration by people who may be unsure, still exploring, and concerned about applying a social label to themselves for various reasons...

female readers. Recent online surveys of English-speaking readers of yaoi indicate that 50-60% of female readers self-identify as heterosexual. It has been suggested that Western fans may be more diverse in their sexual orientation

Sexual orientation

Sexual orientation describes a pattern of emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to the opposite sex, the same sex, both, or neither, and the genders that accompany them. By the convention of organized researchers, these attractions are subsumed under heterosexuality, homosexuality,...

than Japanese fans and that Western fans are "more likely to link" BL ("Boy's Love") to supporting gay rights

LGBT social movements

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender social movements share inter-related goals of social acceptance of sexual and gender minorities. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and their allies have a long history of campaigning for what is generally called LGBT rights, also called gay...

.

Although the genre is marketed at women and girls, gay

Gay

Gay is a word that refers to a homosexual person, especially a homosexual male. For homosexual women the specific term is "lesbian"....

, bisexual and straight males also form part of the readership. In one library-based survey of U.S. yaoi fans, about one quarter of respondents were male; online surveys of Anglophone readers place this percentage at about 10%. Lunsing suggests that younger Japanese gay men who are offended by gay men's magazines' "pornographic" content may prefer to read yaoi instead.
That is not to say that the majority of homosexual men are fans of the genre, as some are put off by the feminine art style or unrealistic depictions of homosexual life and instead seek "Gei comi

Bara (genre)

, also known as the wasei-eigo construction or ML, is a Japanese jargon term for a genre of art and fictional media that focuses on male same-sex love and desire, usually created by and for gay men. The bara genre began in the 1960s with fetish magazines featuring gay art and content...

" (Gay comics), manga written by and for homosexual men, as gei comi is perceived to be more realistic. Lunsing notes that some of the narrative annoyances that homosexual men express about yaoi manga, such as rape, misogyny, and an absence of a Western-style gay identity, are also present in gei comi. Some male manga artists have produced yaoi works, using their successes in yaoi to then go on to publish gei comi.

Authors of BL present themselves as "fellow fans" by using dust jacket notes and postscripts to chat to the readers "as if they were her girlfriends" and talk about the creative process in making the manga, and what she discovered she liked about the story she wrote.

Numbers

In the mid-1990s, estimates of the size of the Japanese yaoi fandom were at 100,000-500,000 people; at around that time, the long-running yaoi anthology June
June (manga magazine)
was the earliest yaoi magazine, which began in 1978 as a response to the success of commercially published manga such as the works of female artists Keiko Takemiya, Moto Hagio and Yumiko Ōshima. Other factors that influenced the founding of June were the rising popularity of depictions of...

had a circulation of between 80,000 and 100,000, twice the circulation of the "best-selling" gay lifestyle magazine Badi
Badi (magazine)
Badi is a monthly Japanese magazine for gay men. The title comes from the Japanese pronunciation of "buddy." Badi is published by Terra Publications....

. Most Western yaoi fansites "appeared some years later than pages and lists devoted to mainstream anime and manga". As of 1995, they "revolved around the most famous series", such as Ai no Kusabi
Ai no Kusabi
is a Japanese novel written by Rieko Yoshihara. Originally serialized in the yaoi magazine Shousetsu June between December 1986 and October 1987, the story was collected into a hardbound novel that was released in Japan in 1990. This futuristic tale is set in a world where men are assigned various...

and Zetsuai 1989
Zetsuai 1989
is a Japanese yaoi manga known for its melo-dramatic, almost operatic plot, its "semi-insane characters", and for the controversial style of its artwork. The word "Zetsu-ai" is a compound created by Minami Ozaki which has been translated as "desperate love". Ozaki's preferred English translation is...

; and by the late 1990s, English-speaking websites mentioning yaoi "reached the hundreds". As of 2003, on Japanese-language internet sites, there were roughly equal proportions of sites dedicated to yaoi as there were sites by and for gay men about homosexuality. On 16 November 2003 there were 770,000 yaoi websites. As of April 2005, a search for non-Japanese sites resulted in 785,000 English, 49,000 Spanish, 22,400 Korean, 11,900 Italian and 6,900 Chinese sites. In January 2007, there were approximately five million hits for 'yaoi'. Hisako Miyoshi, the Vice Editor-in-Chief for Libre Publishing

Libre Publishing

Libre Publishing is a Japanese boys love manga publishing company. It was founded on May 8, 2006, and is the successor to Biblos , which folded due to the failure of its parent company....

's manga division, said in a 2008 interview that although Boys Love is more well known to the general public, the numbers of readers remains limited, which she attributes to the codified nature of the genre.

Fan preferences

Thorn noted that fans tend to prefer BL to non-BL shōjo manga, and Suzuki noted a preference for BL over other forms of pornography, for example heterosexual love stories in ladies' comics. Jessica Bawens-Sugimoto feels that in general, "slash and yaoi fans are dismissive of mainstream hetero-sexual romance", such as "the notorious pulp Harlequin romances". Deborah Shamoon said that "the borders between yaoi, shōjo manga and ladies' comics are quite permeable", suggesting that fans of BL probably enjoyed both homosexual and heterosexual tales. Kazuma Kodaka

Kazuma Kodaka

is a Japanese manga artist. Kodaka made her debut in 1989 in the magazine Weekly Shōnen Champion with Sessa Takuma!. She mainly writes manga in the Boys Love genre, featuring homosexual relationships between men for women, and has been described as "a pioneer and top-ranked artist" in the genre...

, in an interview with Giant Robot
Giant Robot (magazine)
Giant Robot is a bi-monthly magazine of Asian and Asian American popular culture founded in 1994. It was initially created as a small, punk-minded magazine that featured Asian pop culture and Asian American alternative culture, including such varied subject matter as history, art, music, film,...

suggested that the Japanese yaoi fandom includes married women who had been her fans since they were in college. Dru Pagliassotti's survey indicates that loyalty to an author is a common factor in readers' purchase decisions. Yōka Nitta has noted a split in what her readers want - her younger readers prefer seeing explicit material, and her older readers prefer seeing romance. There is a perception that the English-speaking yaoi fandom is demanding increasingly explicit content, but that this poses problems for retailers. In 2004, ICv2 noted that fans seemed to prefer buying yaoi online. Andrea Wood suggests that due to restrictions placed on the sale of yaoi, many Western teenage fans seek more explicit titles via scanlation

Scanlation

Scanlation is the scanning, translation and editing of a graphic novel from a foreign language into a different language. Scanlation is done as an amateur work and is nearly always done without express permission from the copyright holder. The word scanlation is a portmanteau of scan and translation...

s. Dru Pagliassotti

Dru Pagliassotti

Dru Pagliassotti is an author of fantasy literature and the editor of The Harrow online magazine.Her first published novel was Clockwork Heart, a steampunk fantasy novel about an Icarus-winged heroine, Taya, who stumbles into a murder mystery when she rescues a high caste official of the layered...

notes that the majority of respondents to her survey say that they first encountered BL online, which she links to half of her respondents reporting that they get most of their BL from scanlations. In 2003, there were at least five BL scanlation groups. Japanese fan practices in the mid to late 2000s included the concept of the feeling of moe, which was typically used by male otaku about young female characters prior to this.

Robin Brenner and Snow Wildsmith noted in their survey of American fans that gay and bisexual male fans of yaoi preferred more realistic tales than female fans did.

Shihomi Sakakibara (1998) argued that yaoi fans, including himself, were homosexually oriented female-to-male transsexuals. Akiko Mizoguchi believes there is a "shikou" (translated as taste or orientation), both towards BL/yaoi as a whole, and towards particular patterns within the genre, such as a "feisty bottom (yancha uke)" character type. Her study shows that fans believe that in order to be a "serious" fan, one should know their own preferences, and "consider themselves a sort of sexual minority". She argues that the exchange of sexual fantasies between the predominantly female yaoi fandom can be interpreted that although the participants may be heterosexual in real life, they can also and compatibly be considered "virtual lesbians".

is a pejorative Japanese term for female fans of manga

Manga

Manga is the Japanese word for "comics" and consists of comics and print cartoons . In the West, the term "manga" has been appropriated to refer specifically to comics created in Japan, or by Japanese authors, in the Japanese language and conforming to the style developed in Japan in the late 19th...

and novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

s that feature romantic relationships between men. Fujoshi enjoy imagining what it would be like if male characters from manga and anime

Anime

is the Japanese abbreviated pronunciation of "animation". The definition sometimes changes depending on the context. In English-speaking countries, the term most commonly refers to Japanese animated cartoons....

, and occasionally real-life male performers as well, loved each other. The label encompasses fans of the boys love

Yaoi

genre itself, as well as the related manga, anime, and video game properties that have appeared as the market for such works has developed. The term "fujoshi" is a homophonous

Homophone

A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning. The words may be spelled the same, such as rose and rose , or differently, such as carat, caret, and carrot, or to, two, and too. Homophones that are spelled the same are also both homographs and homonyms...

pun on , a term for respectable women, created by replacing the character , meaning married woman or lady, with the character (also pronounced fu), meaning fermented or rotten. The name was coined by mass media, but was reclaimed by yaoi fans. Fans self-deprecatingly refer to their way of thinking, which perceives homosexual relationships between male characters in stories that do not include homosexual themes, as being "rotten". "Fujoshi" carries a connotation of being a "fallen woman".

Older fujoshi use various terms to refer to themselves, including as , a pun on a homophonous word meaning "fine lady", and , which sounds similar to a phrase meaning "Madame Butterfly", possibly taken from a character nicknamed in the 1972 manga series Ace o Nerae!
Ace o Nerae!
is a sports shōjo manga by Sumika Yamamoto begun in 1972 and serialized in Margaret. Hugely successful, it was adapted into a TV anime series in 1973 by Tokyo Movie Shinsha with the Madhouse animation studio , and was originally aired on MBS.Another TV anime, a movie retelling of the first series,...

by Sumika Yamamoto. These labels were coined in the same self-deprecating spirit as fujoshi.

According to a 2005 issue of Eureka, in recent times fujoshi can refer to female otaku

Otaku

is a Japanese term used to refer to people with obsessive interests, particularly anime, manga or video games.- Etymology :Otaku is derived from a Japanese term for another's house or family , which is also used as an honorific second-person pronoun...

in general, although it cautions that not all yaoi fans are otaku, as there are some more casual readers. As fujoshi is the best-known term, it is often used by the Japanese media and by people outside of the otaku subculture to refer to female otaku as a group, regardless of whether they are fans of BL. This usage may be considered offensive by female otaku who are not fans of BL.

Men who, like fujoshi, enjoy imagining relationships between characters in fictional works when that relationship is not part of the author's intent may be called or , both of which are puns of similar construction to fujoshi. Be warned that fudanshi and fukei are not necessarily fans of BL, although the terms are most often used in that sense, and if a male himself claims to be a fudanshi or fukei, it's almost certainly the case.

Yaoi and slash

Besides commercially-published original material, Japanese yaoi also encompasses fan-made doujinshi, fanart, computer games, etc.; a large percentage of the doujinshi offered at Comiket

Comiket

, otherwise known as the , is the world's largest self-published comic book fair, held twice a year in Tokyo, Japan. The first Comiket was held on December 21, 1975, with only about 32 participating circles and an estimated 600 attendees. Attendance has since swelled to over a half million people....

are yaoi stories based on popular anime

Anime

and manga

Manga

series. This may be seen as a parallel development to slash fiction

Slash fiction

Slash fiction is a genre of fan fiction that focuses on the depiction of romantic or sexual relationships between fictional characters of the same sex...

in the West. Although shōjo manga stories featuring romances between boys or young men were commercially published in Japan from the mid-1970s, and soon became a genre in their own right, the spread of yaoi though the Western fan community is generally linked to the pre-existing Western slash fiction community. In the mid-1980s, fan translations of the shōjo manga series From Eroica with Love
From Eroica with Love
is a long-running shōjo manga by Yasuko Aoike which originally began publication in 1976 by Akita Shoten. The series ran irregularly in the Japanese anthology magazine Viva Princess from December 1976 to April 1979, then moved to the sister publication Princess beginning in September 1979...

began to circulate through the slash community via amateur press association

Amateur press association

An amateur press association is a group of people who produce individual pages or magazines that are sent to a Central Mailer for collation and distribution to all members of the group.-Organisation:...

s, creating a "tenuous link" between slash and yaoi. Although the English-speaking online yaoi fandom is observed to increasingly overlap with online slash fandom, slash fiction has portrayed adult males, whereas yaoi follows the aesthetic of the beautiful boy, often highlighting their youth. Mark McLelland describes this aesthetic as having become problematic in recent Western society

Western world

The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...

. Yaoi fans tend to be younger than slash fans, and so are less shocked about depictions of underage sexuality. Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto detects a tendency in both yaoi and slash fandoms to disparage the others' heteronormativity

Heteronormativity

Heteronormativity is a term invented in 1991 to describe any of a set of lifestyle norms that hold that people fall into distinct and complementary genders with natural roles in life. It also holds that heterosexuality is the normal sexual orientation, and states that sexual and marital relations...

, potential for subversiveness or even the potential for enjoyment.

Demographics

Numbers

Fan preferences

Fujoshi

Yaoi and slash

See also

Further reading