New on the Yuricon Essays page, we have Beautiful and Innocent: Female Same-Sex Intimacy in the Japanese Yuri Genre, a PhD thesis by Verena Maser, examining the relationship between media content, its production, and its reception in Japanese popular culture in regards to Yuri. (Full text article available at linked page.)
Yuri scholarship is really starting to build up. If you know of or have written an article on Yuri, Yuri fandom or anything to do with Yuri, let us know, we’d love to link to your work!
Looks interesting. Definitely will take a look. I used to read PhD theses back in College.
While I appreciate the vast effort that went into the paper, I feel it’s an overstatement that it’s any kind of surprise or an uncovering of a new point that the Japanese do not think of yuri the same way as everyone else think it should.
This would not have been so, if people were to look into it’s point of origin, instead of making the genre try to conform to their worldview.
The research contains the valuable elaboration of details, but personally, quite a few of the fanbase findings were already known to me, out of spending a length of time in the genre, also because I could perhaps relate as well in a similar fashion and spending time too between the different fanbases itself.
I agree on most counts. It was, IMHO, a dead giveaway that she starts by saying she’s not using “lesbianism” in discussing Yuri because of her own discomfort with the framing of female sexuality in English – a totally typical evasion for people who don’t want to have to deal with lesbian identity (or lack thereof) in Yuri. Exactly like BL fans who love BL narrative but refuse to see homosexuality in it. Well, duh, that means you’re not talking about Yuri, you’re giving your opinion of what it ought to be, or how you filter it. Particularly vexing, as I believe she is correct in the use of “intimacy” as opposed to “lesbian” but has a completely invalid reason for doing so.