Why are Japanese girls' comics full of boys bonking?

Abstract

When I casually mention that the most frequent representations of male homosexuality in Japan (outside the pages of the gay press) appear in manga (comics) written by and for women, I am usually met with an incredulous ‘Why?’ This always strikes me as odd, for few people react with surprise to the fact that male pornography is full of ‘lesbian’ sex. If heterosexual men enjoy the idea of two women getting it on, why should heterosexual women not enjoy the idea of two men bonking? In English-speaking societies, many women do just this, and what’s more they write about it and illustrate it in ‘slash fiction’ (Penley 1992; Cicioni 1998). This almost exclusively female genre takes the male leads from popular television dramas and ‘slashes’ them, making the series’ homosocial and at times homoerotic subplots explicitly homosexual. Beginning in the Star Trek fandom subculture of the mid 70s where sexually explicit Kirk/Spock (or K/S) stories were first written, the genre has expanded to include almost any TV series where the bond between male characters is sufficiently intense to permit sexual readings. Starsky/Hutch stories were popular for a time in the late 70s, the male members of the cast of British sci-fi series Blakes 7 were slashed throughout the 80s, and, more recently, The X-Files’ Mulder has found himself slashed with both his boss Skinner and his nemesis, Krycek. These stores are written, collected, edited and circulated by women fans in print-version zines and, increasingly, on the Internet. (For an introduction to slash fandom on the Net click here).

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