Boys' Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre

Antonia Levi · Mark McHarry · Dru Pagliassotti

Jan 2014 · McFarland

About this ebook

"Boys' love," a male-male homoerotic genre written primarily by women for women, enjoys global popularity and is one of the most rapidly growing publishing niches in the United States. It is found in manga, anime, novels, movies, electronic games, and fan-created fiction, artwork, and video. This collection of 14 essays addresses boys' love as it has been received and modified by fans outside Japan as a commodity, controversy, and culture.

Ratings and reviews

This book is one of the few English-language academic resources available on BL manga/yaoi, so it's definitely an invaluable resource for anyone doing research on that particular cultural artifact. If you are into yaoi and are involved in humanities research, this is a must read. That being said, my biggest complaint with this book would be the lack of unity among the various essays. They vary in both rigor and specific subject matter throughout the text, and while the editors try to put the essays into different parts, the unity seems falsified. This is probably just a product of the small attention yaoi has garnered from academia rather than a reflection on the editors' conscious decisions, however.

I can't buy the book but I've heard it's an amazing story I can't wait to read it

Must have book!!!

About the author

Antonia Levi is a retired professor of Japanese history and popular culture. She is the author of one previous book and numerous articles on Japanese anime and manga. Mark McHarry is an independent scholar of both contemporary and Edo-period Japanese culture. His essays have been published in Queer Popular Culture: Literature, Media, Film, and Television and LGBT Identity and Online New Media, as well as other journals. Dru Pagliassotti is a professor of communication at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks and the author of several books.