Uses for Yaoi

This is the second in a series of pieces looking at the intersection of queer genders and sexualities with comics and related media, including in my personal life; the first addressed my construction of Ghost in the Shell’s Major Kusanagi into an icon of queerly-gendered strength as a teenager. For this essay, I’d like to take a more narrative approach to the story of my adolescent search for images of queer identity, and address the need for emotional shelter.

I suppose I was a fairly unoriginal child, in that alienation and loneliness were major features of my daily life. Still, I can’t help but think that the level of my isolation was a bit extreme; by sophomore year of high school, I had spent significant chunks of my childhood in homeschooling – some of it functionally schooling-less – and had spent the rest of my time utterly outcast from the social hierarchies at middle school, junior high school, and both elementary schools I had attended. I was in a new town and a new state, living with new parents – my aunt and uncle, who rescued me from an awkward family situation – and had managed in my utter social cluelessness to accidentally out the first and only queer kid I had ever dated. Starting a new school year, the linoleum-clad hallways and enormous picture windows of the new high school seemed only to make the little daily traumas of schooling larger and more awkward.

The building was still somewhat new at the time, and it had the look of an enormous and extremely complicated barn, off-white- and beige-washed and skylit in ways that only managed to make it feel more intimidating to my pubescent “boy” self. The high school shared its hilltop with one of the town’s four prisons, but I’m sure it would’ve done a fine job of overwhelming me all on its own. Not wanting to spend my lunchtime in awkward silence across from someone I couldn’t stand, I noticed that a couple of people had the habit of lunching on a horseshoe-shaped seating area outside the cafeteria – a place that was, aside from a few over-groomed saplings half-heartedly attempting to be trees, otherwise empty. The two girls eating out there were reading manga, which was all the social signaling I needed; I joined them, first once, twice, then every day, pestering them and attempting to start up conversations in my clumsy way. One of them, I’ll call her Hallie, I found particularly fascinating. She came to school every day loaded with cheap, Japantown-bought drawing paper, bags of coveted Japanese illustration markers, and her ever-present obsession with the anime/manga series Fushigi Yuugi. All of her clothes had to be white and purple, in honor of her love for the purple-haired crossdressing character Nuriko; the one exception was an item of cosplay clothing, the shirt worn by Lina Inverse in Slayers. She drew comics – published comics! – and went to conventions, and was one of the only people worth talking to in the school, although she didn’t say much. I had been staying up nights, printing out sheet after sheet of yaoi fan illustrations; she understood what I was on about. She did it too! I was hooked.

I only ever saw her at school, but we grew affectionate – and my friendship with Hallie gave me some sort of filter with which to make sense of my own frustratingly slippery sexuality and gender ambiguity, and the refusal of my body to break itself into the obvious patterns of budding manhood – or budding womanhood, or budding something – which everyone around me seemed to be experiencing. I had already decided that I was a gay boy, and an effeminate one at that, but I knew from the beginning that the label didn’t quite fit. Yaoi, and the fascination with visual kei bands that accompanied it, allowed me to value myself precisely because it glorified all the traits that its straight female readership wanted gay men to embody, gender breakage, submissiveness and effeminacy among them. When our relationship started to become more affectionate, we framed it in the terms of yaoi, and decided that both of us were uke (bottoms).

Hallie’s art itself reflected a sort of genderqueer mental space. Rather than encoding her art with the usual binary-gendered language code of line and colors, she sculpted every body out of the same luminous, plastic stuff. Gary Panter, describing his first encounter with the art of Jack Kirby, says that his figures seemed “blobby like candlewax;” Hallie’s handling of the wax was smoother, curvier, but her underlying forms just as chunky and solid. No character could escape this glowing treatment, no matter their assigned gender. She built these bodies free of any particularly strong schematic sense of anatomy, and they flowed, enormous thighs and breasts and great shining chunks of hair jutting everywhere. She drew fingers so that they melted together, and great big eyes that drooped and quavered like jello. Though I was certainly experiencing things in my struggle to eventual consciousness as a transgender person that she was not, I can’t help but think that she was using her art, and the fascination with yaoi – and the character of Nuriko in particular – that she exercised through it, to carve out a comfortably gendered space of her own.

In his essay Girls And Women Getting Out Of Hand: The Pleasure And Politics Of Japan’s Amateur Comics Community, Matt Thorn writes about yaoi dojinshi as a space in which young female-assigned-at-birth (FAAB) people are able to build queer conceptions of gender and inhabit them viscerally: “There can be little doubt that both the artists and readers who are drawn to boys’ love and yaoi are unhappy with mainstream norms of gender and sexuality. And while they speak fondly of otoko no sekai, (world of and for men), and seem to prefer masculinity over femininity, yaoi artists and writers show contempt for ‘straight’ masculinity, just as they scorn standardized femininity.”

He notes that one well-known yaoi-themed novelist, Sakakibara Shihomi, “describes herself as a gay man in a woman’s body (a ‘female-to-male gay’ transsexual). S/he suggests that this condition may be quite common among fans of this genre and may in fact be the reason for its existence.” He goes on to suggest that while Sakakibara’s notion may be rough-hewn, it is likely hinting at a sort of queer gendering that may be very widespread within yaoi fandom. Disrespectful pronoun usage aside, he may be right.

Throughout Thorn’s essay runs the theme of FAAB people taking emotional shelter in gender and sexuality spaces of their own creation. The genre conventions and tropes of yaoi are not above criticism; some yaoi dojinshi manage to explicitly or implicitly condone patriarchy, misogyny, ageism, lookism, homophobia, rape and gender binarism, all in a few pages. The model of queerness yaoi provides resembles nothing so much as the old sexological concept of “inversion,” in which the masculine top is “straight” while the effeminate bottom is a “sexual invert” having the “soul of a woman.” In this model, straightness must ultimately be universal, as any man willing to take the supposedly “natural” role assigned to all women – the “receptive” position in sex – must necessarily be a woman, or something similar to one. It is this same conflation of binary, patriarchal prescriptions of gender with normative, cissexist and heterosexist constructions of physical sex and sexuality that leads to the vast bulk of transphobic (not to mention homophobic) mythology and stereotype in the first place.

On the other hand, if inversion is itself inverted, everything becomes queer: once those false conflations and the essentialism that underlies them are thrown out the door, the radical queerness they cover can be given space to breathe. Sexual inversion narratives, to my mind, give off hints of this suppressed queerness everywhere; they are a first step on a journey which ends in the explosion of conventional notions of sexuality, gender and physical sex. This journey, and the shifting self-definitions that go along with it, are a common feature in the lives and cultures of queer people.

I was never an invert. The journeying that I was able to do within the inversion-esque narratives of yaoi, however, provided me with a powerfully useful transitional identity. My shared dorkiness with Hallie was the first taste of queerness I had outside of myself; as genre and cheap and even oppressive as yaoi can be, the queerness running through it has a magnetic power that I still think is invaluable. I think it would kick some ass to see the radically queer kids of today engage in some intense detournement of the oppressive and suppressive tropes of yaoi culture, to release the electric power buried underneath. I’d like to be part of that – and with any luck, in 50 years my work is going to be ripped to shreds by powerful young queers who’ve moved on from the queer identity I’ve carved out and built more effective shelter for their own queerness to inhabit.