Girls Who Love Boys’ Love
Girls Who Love Boys’ Love
BL as Goods to Think with in Taiwan (with a Revised and Updated Coda)
Based on interviews with 30 female readers of BL (Boys’ Love) manga in Taipei, this chapter analyzes the BL scene in Taiwan from the perspective of its social utility as a discursive arena enabling women collectively to think through transforming social ideologies around gender and sexuality. This form of participatory pop culture is most interesting, the author argues, not because of any unilateral subversiveness vis-à-vis culturally dominant understandings of (feminine) gender or (homo)sexuality. Rather, it is important in providing a space for the collective articulation of young women’s in-process thinking on these questions. The chapter also engages with the Japaneseness of the genre as consumed in Taiwan in order to consider the imaginative function that its perceived cultural “otherness” performs.
Keywords: BL, Boys’ Love Manga, Gender, Japaneseness, Sexuality, Taiwan
Hong Kong Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
