Boys’ Love, Transmedia Storytelling, and LGBT Awareness in Contemporary Japan

Abstract

AbstractWith the recent “LGBT Boom,” the media coverage of individuals, activism, the news, and films and dramas related to LGBT people is increasing in Japan. There are several hit movies and TV dramas about so-called LGBT people, where male-male romantic relationships are often depicted, and some are based on Boys’ Love manga (BL). BL is a distinct genre involving the intense descriptions of male-male intimate relations, where both authors and readers are predominantly heterosexual ciswomen. With the market success of these films and TV dramas, BL representations are becoming available to large audiences and are sometimes regarded as a source for the public to learn about LGBT issues, although many authors acknowledge that the representations in BL do not necessarily reflect the actuality of gay people. Some scholars and gay commentators have claimed that the dissemination of unrealistic descriptions by heterosexual female writers is discriminative, which would further marginalize and rhetorically appropriate sexual minorities. This chapter analyzes how BL is located in Japanese society amid the rise of LGBT awareness. It examines the representations of same-sex relationships in BL manga, the recent growth of the genre into forms of transmedia storytelling, and the debates on the representations of same-sex relations. Drawing on these analyses, I will argue that BL transmedia storytelling is a valuable space for creators from diverse media to collaboratively explore new forms of narratives and interpretations; but it could simultaneously disseminate distorted representations of same-sex relationships if they failed to adequately understand the nature of BL.