Anyway, the word fujoshi has no business being thrown around in discourse that isn’t about BL anime and manga. It is not a sexuality or a gender identity. It does not mean ‘transtrenders’ or mlm trans men or afab people who use mogai identities. It means a female (or female-aligned) fan of BL anime and manga, which is a specific subgenre of romance that focuses on m/m relationships, typically highlighting the emotions between characters and often using a heavily shoujo-inspired art style.
So a girl that fetishises gay people.
Nope. A female or female-aligned fan of BL. It doesn’t describe how someone treats real life gay people.
Lmao mate, I used to be a fujo. I know the community
I interact with fujoshi every day. I identify as a fujin (gender neutral BL fan). I get my information on BL history from gay men who speak Japanese and I’m learning the language myself to better interact with the Japanese BL community on sites like Pixiv. I’m active in two BL servers. You know what I see there? Fans being positive and kind to one another, and respectful of other people’s identities. There are gay men, gay women, and nonbinary people of all orientations brought together by a common interest in BL, not some kind of shared objectification. I’m not an expert on the subgenre or its fans, but do you really want to claim that you have more experience with fujoshi than me? Do you know what a Japanese word means better than my Japanese-speaking friends?
I probably shouldn’t be wasting my time arguing with someone who has terf in their url, but it’s just such a simple point to make. That’s the definition of the word. It doesn’t belong in discourse that has nothing to do with BL anime and manga.
Yeah yeah
Keep being delusional
“Fujin”
I don’t think gender effects whether something is or isn’t fetishization?
> Fujin
> Gender neutral
OP probably won’t even understand why that’s so funny. You know fujoshi is a derogatory term that means “rotten woman” right?
The reason why people continue to use it in a derogatory manner for heterosexual women who call themselves “gay trans boys” is because most of them are obsessively into BL and yaoi and take their cues from it. Which is absolutely unrealistic fetishization of gay male relationships written by women for women. In a very conservative country that still isn’t very progressive about gay people. And has zero to do with gay culture. The stuff actually aimed at gay men in Japan is quite different.
So to illustrate my point:
Aimed at, and typically authored by, straight women:
Aimed at, and typically authored by, gay men:
Can you spot the difference?
Written by a man:
I’d list female geicomi mangaka, but that information is very difficult to find in English, along with really anything about geicomi. You picked Gengoroh Tagame, who is pretty much the one name that gets thrown around on English language sites. @rottenboysclub if you’re not too busy, can you help out please? I really don’t know much about geicomi.
Geicomi (what the west calls bara) is mostly pornography, plain and simple. It very commonly involves BDSM and other kinks. Tagame’s work in particular has been described as “S&M theatre” by a gay Japanese media critic. His manga almost exclusively feature stories about rape and assault. So not the perfect representation you were looking for.
And yeah, I know what fujoshi means. There’s also fudanshi, which means a male BL fan or ‘rotten boy’. It’s a reclaimed insult originally used by misogynists to condemn women for enjoying sexually explicit media. Also, it’s a pun.
I’d say more, but I have a plane to catch. Suffice to say, there are plenty of queer female, nonbinary, and queer male BL mangaka, although many mangaka choose not to discuss stuff like that publicly.
The funniest thing to me about the whole TERFs trying to co-opt the
word fujoshi and use it against gay trans men with a ‘fetishization’
slant is that it doesn’t make any sense in Japan.
‘Gender-critical’
thinking doesn’t exist in Japanese feminism because this type of
radical feminism just doesn’t mesh with Japanese culture at all, and is
considered anti-gay. ((There are some ‘sex-critical’ Japanese feminists,
but the vast majority aren’t because there’s already severe censorship
over female sexuality so most, like artist Megumi Igarashi, are fighting
for freedom of expression – seriously, just look it up about her arrest
over “obscene materials”.))
Because gender identity and sexuality are
so linked in Japanese culture, and there was never a wide-scale
seperatist movement in Japan like there was in the west (because why
would there be? Japan is a collectivist society, it doesn’t make sense)
セクマイ stick together. The slurs that exist to degrade gay men and women
in Japan? They’re actually slurs referring to people with traits
associated with gender dysphoria. So if you’re a trans man (of any
sexuality) or a cis lesbian? You’re called オナベ, therefore you’re セクマイ.
If you’re a cis gay man or a trans woman (of any sexuality)? Called オカマ,
therefore セクマイ. Nonbinary? well, Xジェンダー is セクマイ of course, same with
intersex/間性. And セクマイ can’t be おコゲ, because of course オナベ and オカマ hang out together, they’re all pots and pans! So this cannot be “fetishization.”
And
if that’s not enough, many fujoshi are lesbians. The original term for fujoshi was “yurizoku”
(lily tribe), which came
from a gay men’s magazine column (“yurizoku no heya” / “Lily Tribe’s
room”) in the 70s/80s and referred to their female readers. (originally
published in the November 1976 edition of “Barazoku”) Because so many of
these female readers were lesbian or bisexual, the shortened term
“yuri” eventually came to mean fxf relationships in manga and novels.
Even today, many Japanese people will associate fujoshi with lesbians
(see: My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness, or the many characters, like Chizuru Honshou from Bleach who is an out and proud lesbian and fujoshi).
That’s why the Japanese arguments against fujoshi you see are either misogynistic or lesbophobic, and mostly from straight men.
Also, speaking of Barazoku (Japanese’s oldest and longest running gay men’s magazine), the editor and chief of the magazine and author of the book Men Who Fall in Love with Men, Ryuu Susumu, is actually a big fan of BL, having a paid subscription to the very first BL magazine, June, all the way through its publication (1978-2004), starting from the very first issue, and is very pro-fujoshi.
In addition
to wlw, there are also many gay men that work in and contribute to the
BL industry, and it’s actually closely linked to the male-marketed geicomi (gay
manga) industry, with many artists doing both. You posted work from Gengoroh Tagame, who has done work like Virtus, which he wrote for a mostly female-assumed audience (published in BL-leaning magazines and crossover magazines like Nikutaiha) and he’s not the only gay man that does this. Tsukasa Matsuzaki is another geicomi artist that writes for BL magazines and anthologies. So does Shoutaroh Kojima, Takeshi Matsu, Gai Mizuki, Kansuke Yoshida and D-Raw2.
There are also many women that draw exclusively geicomi, and Tagame has talked about enjoying working with them in various interviews.
Drawn by female artist Inaki Matsumoto
Some men that write primarily BL (and not geicomi) include Yukio Yanagisawa, Hirotaka Kisaragi, Aoi Kujou, Tohru Kousaka, Kazuki Minamoto, Hitoyo Shinozaki and Mito Togo.
And yes, as explained above, Okane ga Nai is written / illustrated by two men.
Really the only difference between BL and geicomi is that geicomi tends to be
more hardcore and pornographic, whereas BL tends to be more softcore and
romantic. BL and geicomi are simply marketing groups for mxm comics. The entire reason why BL is
marketed to women in the first place is because romance of any kind –
mxm, mxf or fxf – was traditionally only considered appealing to women, and
pornography and erotica was traditionally only considered appealing to men. So mxm with more story was marketed as BL, and mxm with more sex and hardcore situations was marketed as geicomi. And the two markets tend to overlap more and more nowadays, that it’s probably time we made a new term to describe all the different kinds of mxm comics.
((Also Midori Suzukino has only ever drawn one BL manga from what I can see, and their gender isn’t listed, so they could actually be male for all we know))
TLDR; The “fetishization” that supposedly comes from ‘straight women’ (very often neither straight nor women) writing these comics is a complete non-issue in Japan, and the entire idea of “We’re trying to protect the Japanese gays from the evil fujoshis” reeks of western savior complex to me ƪ(˘⌣˘)ʃ
Your newest reminder that most of the howling against ‘fujoshi’ / policing of what erotic content women are allowed to consume is spearheaded and spread like a bad smell by radfems. All of the supposedly well-meaning allies of gay men are actively participating in the spread of radfem nonsense and the furthering of radfem goals.
sky's stuff 