Annotated Bib #3

For my third Annotated Bibliography I would like to start of with my side reading about "Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan" by Mark J McLelland, especially on the topic of "Beautiful Boys in Women's Comic". I have to admit that I have a hard time reading this article, not that it is very shakespear-ish but I have hard time thinking about what is being brought up.

He start of by mentioning about women's sexuality, that women in Japan are taught that their gender destines them for motherhood and women who reject this association are not considered respectable. Besides he also mentioned that the Japanese media are on the offensive against young women's expression of sexuality. Even though there was movement of women's liberation which happens in early 1970-s but nothing much was gained from such movement until today. He argues that this is due to the manipulation of the media, that when male discourse attempts to contain feminist challenge, of reducing the argument of 'sexual' or dismissing the women activists as overly emotional and hysterical. Furthermore she also mentioned that a Japanese feminist have brought up that women in Japan still lacked a language or a discourse in which they could articulate their own sexual needs and desires publicly. He also mentioned about the heterosexual manga, the erotic manga, whereby women is usually victimized and the men are usually the aggressive sexual animal. And this is very much different from the shonen'ai fiction which is the homosexual manga whereby men are portrayed to be effeminate, long limbs, long hair and beautiful. Besides, the ending of shonen'ai is different from their heterosexual manga where by the ending is usually tragic because of the cruel and intrusive demands of an uncompromising outside world, the norm.

He started to dig into the shonen'ai fiction by bringing up the fact that the genre is usually characterizes by its anto-reaism whereby the stories are usually set in an ill-defined 'other' places like Europe or America. In addition the story also take place in a pre-political, existing in a world untouched by sexual or gender politics, whereby the men who are in the comic does not have to search for their identity of whom they love. But while I was reading this I felt weird about the phenomenon as it seems like the creation of the homoerotic fiction is for the pleasure of the heterosexual desire, like the shonen'ai fiction is targeting the women reader while the rezubian fiction which is describing women who had sex with women for the gratification of male gaze. It's like heteronormative lens being pun through a homonormative lense. The reverse of what we usually talked about. I am also interested and confused by how queer the society of Japan is when she brought up the practice of rezupurei (lesbian play) which refers not to two women but to a biological women and a cross-dressed man, or to two cross-dressed men engaged in a sexual interaction. It is interesting to see how gender and sexuality is queered in the Japanese society in terms of their sexual practice and manga whereby the society is so constrict with the definition of sex and gender.

It Gets Better in Malaysia
I have come across a recent launch of it gets better campaign or making of short films.
She is the first to make the video and inspired the "It Gets Better in Malaysia" project. And of course her making of the video is also inspired by Dan Savage's It Gets Better Project.