Yaoi & otaku culture
Iain Sinclair
Like other observers of the manga industry, I find the yaoi phenomenon
"omoshiroi". But I don't think the reasons for its popularity are all
that mysterious. The growth of yaoi in Japan more or less mirrors the
growth of slash fan fiction in the West, and the causes are pretty much
the same, IMO. Yaoi is bigger in Japan, almost mainstream now, but mainly
because Japan is much better at delivering to niche markets.
Otakus are well-known for assimilating popular culture and transforming
it for their own ends. They manipulate cultural product and come up with
something more to their own liking. (Yaoi began as a meta-genre of
this type.) It can be a sign of appreciation, or a reaction against
mediocrity. In the eyes of their peers, they are elevated to the status
of commentators, or critics, or artists. In short, creating and
enjoying meta-genres like yaoi gives otakus a sense of power and
satisfaction which is usually lacking in their own lives.
The existence of yaoi is evidence of dissatisfaction with existing
romance genres. Otakus have long since exhausted conventional romance
fiction and need new "highs". The idea of two males falling for each
other implies a high level of romantic intensity, since it's virtually
unheard of in real life. So a genre where every story has this implied
intensity attracts many romance junkies.
The other night I was going through a few thousand pages of xeroxes
I made while an undergrad (couldn't afford books then), and found a
paper on slash fiction (Constance Penley, 1988 - I can supply a
reference to anyone who's interested). The following passages seemed
relevant to yaoi:
"I think there's another reason why the slash characters have to be
male, and this has to do with the fans' rejection of the female body.
The fans do indeed reject the female body as a terrain of fantasy or
utopian thinking, but the female body they are rejecting is the body
of the woman as it has been constituted in this [Western] culture:
a body that is a legal, moral, and religious battleground; [...]
a body held to painfully higher standards of beauty than the male body."
"[I] was reminded of the way which, in romance, aggressive brutal
men are suddenly transformed into moody, intense, emotional men. [...]
The intense scrutiny of masculinity is central to the romance
formula. [...] They have to be male because the project is to
remodel masculinity. First you start with a man from the future
[slash more than yaoi], because the ones now are fairly hopeless,
then you try to come up with a man who is senisitive and nurturing
without being wimpy, decisive and intelligent without being macho...
And then, by putting the two men together, you add the ability to
acknowledge and act upon sexual desires even when they are not the
socially normative ones."
"What we have here is a [...] leveling of the biological playing
field."
--
Iain S.