When attempting to explain this anthology to people who don't know what fujoshi are, I often eschew trying to explain yaoi. This is partly because of shame; I am not immune to cringe. This is also part practicality; many people have no reference point for Japanese comics about men fucking (yaoi) ostensibly written by and for straight women (said fujoshi, or fujo for short), and the English-speaking online fan communities that they've influenced. But even more than that, while this anthology is about yaoi, it's also about learning queer desire through the hypervisible gay man. How does the figure of the gay man mediate how we encounter ourselves, in the earliest representations many of us encountered that can be said to be "like us"? What is it like to be on the outside of the inside? In this anthology, we argue, the fujo can tell us.
ON THE FUJO
The figure of the fujoshi looms large over any discussion of outsiders enjoying gay culture, especially online. Are you too interested in gay men? Are you fetishizing them? And, worst of all, are you cringe while you're doing it? The fujo disciplines our spectatorship, urging us to maintain the appropriate critical distance and manage any prurient interest we might have.
But how is "outsider" constructed? And what, descriptively, are the outsiders doing in gay spaces? The question of who a fujoshi is appears rather to be a question of who has been excluded from mainstream gay spaces. To many readers, this line of thinking may seem disingenuous, however. The reason, they might argue, that the fujoshi is unwelcome in gay community is because she is typically a cishet woman.
Setting aside the fag hag-fujoshi continuum, which orders those women and their welcomeness by their relationship to actual gay men and also going outside, we don't really care about that argument. Theorists like Akiko Mizoguchi have argued that the fujoshi can be a queer figure, or more specifically, a "virtual lesbian," who solely exists in all-women spaces where she engages in collective sexual fantasy with other women. By that token, fujoshism has little to do with straight women-or mainstream gay culture, for that matter.
Now, still other readers may be bristling at the thought that fujo spaces are all cishet women, or even women at all. This is a fair criticism. But it raises another, more interesting set of questions: why would someone rather be a fujo than an insider to gay culture? And why might they identify with the stereotype of the rotten girl? The group of people we have finally arrived at are doubly outsiders: they are excluded as subjects and excluded as observers.
Why the hell do we exist?
This anthology does not seek to comprehensively answer that question, or even try to prove its validity. In his essay "Fucking Fake Men: Yaoi Visual Novels, 'Invisible' Figures and 'Impossible' Practices," Rex goldenglitz writes: Under my methodology the question shifts from "are there trans men within this space?" A question that can only be answered "properly" through meticulous ethnography and archaeology, but instead a localized one: "trans men are in this space. What are they doing here? Why are they here? Why are they invested in these spaces, these practices, and these technologies?...
So this is our challenge to the traditional schema of fandom studies, which Jennifer Duggan explains assumes the average fan to not only be a woman, but also "implied to be adult, cisgender, straight, ‘middle-class, educated, liberal, English-speaking, white [,and] North American.'" This anthology does not escape all of those generalizations of fandom studies of yore. It is in English, and we did call it AMERICAN*. We wanted to embrace the contradictions inherent to the phrase "AMERICAN* FUJO*" from our positions as best we could. For that reason, it is not exhaustively inclusive. But with regard to traditional fandom studies, our project is not interested in convincing you that we're statistically significant. Or in painstakingly defining fujo, for the record. We're already here. What next?
You could see us as joining Duggan's "trans turn" to fandom studies, the movement to incorporate the study of "trans fans, transgender characters in fan fiction, and fans' transing practices." But we just see ourselves as doing fandom to fandom studies. We are transforming the discipline into a playground for our wish fulfillment, using our favorite headcanons (or "theory," as someone more academic might phrase it).
I once wrote, when introducing the original Yaoi Zine, "i wanted yaoi to become a way of saying ‘queer,' for people for whom saying queer became gay." AMERICAN* FUJO* was born out of that same irreverent impulse. We're for the people who are outsiders and rotten girls, even with respect to the communities to which we ostensibly belong. And we invite you to join us in the new fanon we're creating.
A BRIEF SIDEBAR ON THE AMERICAN FUJO
As I've alluded to, "AMERICAN FUJO" is a contradiction in terms. "Fujoshi" is a Japanese designation. And while ethnically Japanese Americans exist, as nationalities, they're mutually exclusive-at least, according to Japanese law on dual citizenship. Like, let's be honest here, I'm a half-Chinese guy from California. Why would we claim it? Why should we claim it?
Yaoi the word is derived from the phrase "yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi," or "no climax, no point, no meaning." It's derogatory; Japanese fans instead use BL, or Boys' Love, to denote the same comics that we might refer to as yaoi in the Anglosphere. Fujoshi the word means "rotten girl." It is, of course, also derogatory. As you may have guessed, we are interested in celebrating the rotten, the pointless, the meaningless-the queer, if you will. This would be sufficient, if we were not interested in talking about power in this anthology. So we need further justification beyond appropriation of Japanese terms.
There is the fact that these words have also been pejoratively assigned to us. This is an imported prejudice, but also the result of homegrown stereotypes about what we choose to call the fujoshi here. It's a borrowed name for the parallel development of contempt towards the phenomenon I describe above. And reclamation has happened in parallel as well, probably as soon or even earlier as the pejorative began, driven by the desire to claim some perceived Japanese cool.
But is it just parallel? What we might call American fujoshism is inspired by the tradition of Japanese fujos, but it is also the product of the reciprocal relationship between the two. Mari Kotani references, in a panel with Kunihiko Ikuhara, American slash fandom and Kirk/Spock to make a point about comparative BL analysis. To her, slash could be unproblematically American yaoi, and insights about it could inform one's thoughts on Japanese yaoi. More straightforwardly, the products and practices Japanese fujos created directly informed and influenced how we came of age, reading Japanese yaoi. And in turn, English-speaking fandom has influenced Japanese fujos back, with the import of tropes like omegaverse.
So we acknowledge this lineage. But also, mostly, we think the contradiction is funny.
ON THE ANTHOLOGY ITSELF
The following clusters and questions structure our anthology:
GENDER/SEXUALITY- How has being a fan affected your gender or sexuality?
- Who is a fujoshi, who wants to be one, and who doesn't get the choice?
- In America-centric fan spaces, what is necessarily suppressed?
- How can we trouble the category and dominance of "American" from within and without?
- Finally, what does it mean to be in a community that's overwhelmingly virtual, as reliant on digital social platforms as it is on fictional media, both owned by another party?
- And what affects or acts are uniquely enabled by these virtualized desires and sexuality?
Our contributors answered this question in the following ways, which we grouped into the following clusters.
The first cluster, "WHY YAOI?" surveys just that-what attracts queer people to yaoi. The essays in this section attempt to theorize the authors' own respective experiences and encounters with the art form and with gay male sexuality. The section opens with Max F.'s "don't you miss it yaoi girl: homosociality and butch (trans)womanhood," which catalogs her relationship with yaoi and interrogates the genre as a site of female masculinity. The next essay, by tshirt (me), "Oh Boy: Male Idols and Beating Fantasies" analyzes the appeal of yaoi for a variety of subjects, ultimately arriving at a nonbinary transmasculine fujoshi sensibility. CEL, in the essay "death in the chrysalis: asian/american fujoshi ft. akimi yoshida's banana fish," explores the racialization of fujoshi identity and the contradictions of Asian American womanhood through an irreverent and idiosyncratic look at Asian American abjection in gay manga. Finally, A.C. Esguerra's "The Prince" is a comic memoir on the author's sadomasochistic coming-of-age through Captive Prince fandom, offering one answer as to how we make sense of the darker desires and implications contained in yaoi.
The next cluster, YAOI BODIES, takes on how queer bodies are figured in and through yaoi and yaoi-inspired fandom. It opens with Elliott Asher's ""I've never known myself as well as I know myself when I'm with him," or, an Autotheoretical Account of Forcemasc Fantasy in Season One of Bryan Fuller's Hannibal," which uses psychoanalytic theory to theorize through the fantasy of forced transition, deconstructing what we might mean when we say or feel that "yaoi made me trans." It is followed by K. Lee's "Against Interpretation of the Body & Its Genders/Labors," which traces the contours of sexual ambivalence on the Asian American body as cast through the boundary shifting lenses of "fujo to faggot" and "otaku to mangaka" transition. angel's "SPECTRAL SAVAGES & SETTLER FETISHES : on fandom, fujoshis, & frontier psychosis" theorizes indigenous haunting in fandom-as-frontier fantasy, drawing on seminal yaoi texts like DRAMAtical Murder and complicating cannibalism references elsewhere in the anthology. Next, simk skolomorphic's "to have it when you have it not: fantastical possibility and the symbol of the anime girl" speculates on the construction of the anime girl's body as a vessel for gendered and racialized desires in a transnational digital context. The section concludes with Calliope Neurotoxins' "Dude, Is That an Alien?," a narrative Halo fan-comic and a companion essay which explores nonconsensual fantasy and its transformative power on the body.
YAOI SPACES contains analysis of both virtual and physical spaces in which we consume yaoi. It contains roland lennox's "Between Fujos," which sketches provocative connections between 20th and 21st public erotic cultures and practices, suggesting a continuum between the homosocial and the homosexual for fujoshi as well. Next is Max Banshees' "FRAGMENT EATERS," a comic essay on how and why fans socialize and participate in fandom through analysis of the evolving Pathologic fandom's first- and secondhand consumption of narrative fragments. Frank's "Just Give Them What They Want: Bilingualism, Performance and Power in KinnPorsche The Series" breaks down the usage of English within the Thai BL series KinnPorsche, analyzing linguistic transformations in BL media as a response to global English language hegemony. It is followed by Julia Norza's "The Eating of America," which attends to the true scope of America, beyond the United States, analyzing power, piracy, and what it means to be a consumer. Finally, Elle Shivers' "BOYS TOYS" takes on the afterlives of military homoeroticism, in both material consequence and fan cultures, in a three part comic.
Our final and most expansive section is THIS TOO IS YAOI, which takes unconventional perspectives on yaoi, or applies a yaoi framework to unconventional subject matter. It begins with [pigeon icon]'s "THE LESBIAN GAZE AND ITS VICTIMS: Reality TV and the Women That Watch, Star In, and Make It," which uses yaoi and fujoshi as a schema for understanding how lesbians might look at their objects of desire. Next is Trisha Low's "do not be deceived by his boba eyes: On literary trope, generic Asianness, and fanfiction," which analyzes yaoi on the level of trope and genre, exploring how a generic diasporic Asianness can function within East Asian media fandom, with all the pleasures and incommensurabilities that that entails. It is followed by Spicyyeti's "Y12000," a Homestuck fancomic which explores AMERICAN* FUJO*'s themes in narrative form, grappling with questions of trans masculinity, representation, and fandom response to both. Alexis Rippen's "Postproduction for the Fan" reflects on contemporary digital fan spaces and serves as a manifesto for a slow fandom, one which is grounded in care.
I am grateful to everyone who made this anthology possible, from its writers to those who applied to write to its backers to its promoters to its now readers to Alexis, my co-editor. I have been blown away by the love and excitement for the American fujo, even as the outsider she may be. I hope this anthology energizes you personally to engage in DIY scholarship, to transition, and/or to continue transitioning. Any's fine; I'm not picky. Go forth!