Japanese Homoerotic Manga in Taiwan: Same-Sex Love and Utopian Imagination

Abstract

This chapter focuses on young female consumers of ‘boys’ love’ (BL) (and some ‘girls’ love’ [GL]) manga in Taiwan to consider how these genres contribute to girls’ and women’s participatory pop culture outside Japan. BL and GL become indigenized cultural resources in Taiwan, speaking to the local social experience of readers while also fitting into the gendered transnational history of Chinese cultural modernities. Based on interviews with readers, the chapter shows how BL and GL narratives allow them to engage in a critical project of utopian imagination on same-sex love. The manga enable the imagination of individual authenticity, in conflict with a conformist education system and familial pressures; the imagination of pure love, in conflict with cross-sex marriage; and the imagination of the plasticity of selfhood, in conflict with the rigidity of adult social roles.