This thesis discusses narrative texts by Japanese female writers and popular manga
artists* that deal with fantasies of male-male sex. It applies a variety of psychoanalytic
theories (Freudian, Kleinian, feminist and so forth) to demonstrate how fantasies about male
homosexuality may be analyzed in terms of the psychological orientations of the many
Japanese women who are the readers of this narrative genre. I also discuss a variety of
themes that often accompany and appear to support female fantasies of male homosexuality:
the concept of Thomme fatal' in Mori Mari's male homosexual trilogy; sadomasochism in
Kono Taeko's "Toddler-Hunting"; the decadent aestheticism of Okamoto Kanoko's "The
Bygone World'; postmodernism in Matsuura Rieko's The Reverse Version; and the concept of
. pornography as it relates to yaoi manga. * *
In attempting to analyze the discursive aspects of female fantasies of male
homosexuality, I begin with an examination of Sigmund Freud's article, "A Child is Being
Beaten," in which he refers to the female scoptophilic impulse. Several Japanese female
writers—Kono Taeko, in particular—provide clear examples of narratives that parallel
Freud's model of the beating fantasy. This female scoptophilic desire to watch a male
homoerotic 'show' is activated by a psychological orientation such as that defined by Klein's
model of projective identification: female characters and readers project their 'unbalanced
egos' onto male homosexual characters, and this enhances the processes of identification with
and (scoptophilic) dissociation from these characters—which in turn create the possibility of
regaining psychological 'balance.'
One of the main themes of my analysis is the development of subconscious female
desires to access the bisexual (simultaneously masculine and feminine) body. I discuss the
idealization of the shorten (boy) identity (in "Toddler-Hunting" and The Reverse Version) and
the image of the 'reversible couple' in yaoi manga as specific forms of a sexual discourse
that presents possibilities of escape from the arbitrary, socially-constructed, but
institutionalized concepts of the female body.
*manga: narrative comic books for readers of all ages
**yaoi manga: a subgenre of comic books by and for women that feature male-male
eroticism / Arts, Faculty of / Asian Studies, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/16962 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Nagaike, Kazumi |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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