Archive for the LGBTQ Category


Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia

October 16th, 2022

I treated myself to a copy of Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia, edited by James Welker recently and I honestly found it to be really inspiring.  Obviously, Boys Love media as such is not terribly interesting to me, but the way fandom creates, interacts with and consumes it, is.  While I read the various essays in this book, I found myself having some of my questions answered and new ones forming. As a result, I will (eventually) be making a survey to do some primary research on Yuri fandom  and I hope you’ll help me out when it’s done by filling it out. ^_^

In the meantime, I found the various essays in this book really interesting in part for the history of how BL media made inroads in various Asian countries outside Japan (mostly through scanlations,) and how various local fandoms have absorbed and adapted BL concepts to fit their own ideals and circumstances. Additionally, a few of the essays discuss the response to BL from queer fandom (and in a few, the impact queer fandom has had on BL.)

Which is where my brain kind of stuck. There’s a lot of throwing the word “queering” around in regards to BL and this got me thinking. IMHO, there are a number of gaps between 1) media being queered by a straight audience and media being queered by a queer audience or; 2) between queer media and straight media being queered; or 3) by queer media being consumed by straight folks as opposed to queer folks. Fundamentally, it is hard for me to credit the “queering” of straight media by straight people as being “queer” in any meaningful sense. Nonetheless, this appeared to be a commonly held assumption about BL based on this selection of articles. (Of which some of the writers are, I know, to be queer themselves.) 

My thoughts as I read these essays often turn to the idea of replacing “BL” with “lesbian porn.” If a writer is making a statement about BL’s inherent queerness that might sound absurd if I replaced it with “lesbian porn,” I question if it could be true. Is straight people creating queerness out of mainstream media “queer?” Is a straight folks imagining lesbian sex between two female movie stars “queer?” Why might one be “queer” and the other not? I have no answers, but I do have a lot of questions. Some of which I will ask James when I interview him for Casa Con this December!

Also interesting for me was the several mentions of misogyny in BL and BL fandom and it’s impact on and relation to local feminisms. I have seen how BL empowered women…and also how some empowered by fandom, turn on other marginalized folks in their communities. Is that changing? Is it worse or better than it used to be? I can answer that a little for Yuri, but not for BL.

Lastly, there were some tidbits of research subjects talking about how BL helped them either empathize with gay issues, or find their own queer identities and that interested me a lot, so that’s probably where I’m going to be focusing my research. How has Yuri made an impact on fans’ identities and sympathies? Let’s find out!

Overall, I found this book to be a fun and interesting read. Few of the articles were bogged down in over-dense language. I was especially interested in the section on China as mostly everyone can see that danmei is already the next big cultural export from China…even as it’s not apparently acceptable by their own media laws.

Ratings:

Overall – 9

If you’d like to understand how fandom studies look from the inside, or are interested in BL and/or queer media studies, I highly recommend Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia. It got me thinking – I look forward to seeing what comes out of this thought and I hope you do, too. ^_^





A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys

September 11th, 2022

Today’s review was brought to you by the many people who suggested I read this book, beginning with Ada Palmer who suggested in it during our Yuri Studio chat about Tezuka, Revolutionary Girl Utena and her own amazing Terra Ignota Series, (of which I reviewed the first book, Too Like The Lightning and last book, Perhaps the Stars, here) to our own YNN Correspondent David M, some folks who worked on the book and many others.

Today we’re talking about A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys.

As a long-time science fiction fan, I have read and watched my share of first-contact stories, but rarely have I encountered one so fully thought through. It’s a joke among scifi fans that so many of the cultures we encounter are humanoidish, but from a visual media perspective, until computers caught up with human imagination, it was just..easier to represent. In good media, issues of language and  and culture are addressed. In many media sex and mating are addressed, good, bad and indifferent. In A Half-Built Garden, Emrys takes a look at not only the cultural differences and similarities between human and alien, but between humans and other humans, among individuals who represent different environmental and economic priorities, religions, gender and sexuality constructs, clothing, language, and desires for the future.

Like Rose of Versailles, in which Riyoko Ikeda-sensei attempts to make sense of the vast scope of the French Revolution, by having us experience it through one person’s perspective, Emrys too, takes on a First Contact situation from the perspective of one woman. Set in an immediate future where humanity has turned the tide of climate change by bonding in “watershed” polities, with limited central government and corporate influence significantly curtailed, to the point of physical exile, Judy Wallach-Stevens wakes to find an alien ship polluting her local watershed. With her wife and infant daughter, she heads out to make contact with the aliens.

What follows is an extraordinary story of negotiation, adventure, personal relationships and making new friends across all the possible gaps that can exist between cultures.

What drew to this story was that it was positioned by many people as aspirational science fiction. I know there are plenty of folks who prefer their scifi gritty, but personally, what draws me to science fiction has always been the ability to create new solutions for old problems then new solutions to the new problems that come from them. Because I am also a realist, I am a believer in change – and that unintended consequences are a reality of that change. Therefore reform needs to be updated over time. Emrys’ book is wholly grounded in this idea – that every change, every moment of progress needs to be constantly monitored and adjusted…and problems that develop are an inevitability and, possibly, an opportunity.

As readers of queer media we highlight here on Okazu, folks may also find this story interesting for what it does in terms of addressing gender and sexuality…and in certain cases, gender role. Where the watershed folks, known as the Dandelion Networks, have roughly the same level of nuance about gender and sexuality as you and I, the corporate folks have a far, far more elaborate and political series of genders, indicated by clothing, pronouns, roles and behavior. Because gender is presumed to be fluid, they have a gender for someone you haven’t seen in at least a few hours, and therefore may not know which gender they currently are. I found this fascinating…and felt the entire segment of corporate life was left open-ended for a book of it’s own.

Parenting is a major chunk of the cultural exchange here with the Ringers, the name the aliens give themselves in English. When they meet the head Ringer Glycosine, a  Mother (a kind of ship captain) with two children, Judy and Carol are co-parenting two children with another couple, both of whom are trans as we understand that concept. Judy herself is Jewish and keeps kosher, while other characters are vegan, pagan and ex-fundamentalist Christian. The Ringers’ ideas of religion, food, ritual, storytelling, sex, gender and sexuality are all addressed within the story in ways that feel utterly organic. At one of the first meetings between humans and Ringers, Judy’s family puts out gender ID pins and several of the Ringers choose pins for themselves…one, at odds with the gender the rest of the Ringers associate with them. It was a fantastic, small shake-up, one that portends many much larger questions that both humans and aliens had to ask of themselves.

Of the Ringers, it is almost impossible to dislike Rhamnetin, whose job it is to ask – and answer – awkward questions. Other Ringers are richly written, with fully fleshed-out personalities. One spent the book hoping that everyone could make this work. And whether they do is left to our imaginations, which is exactly where it should be.

Ratings:

Overall – 9

If you are looking for aspirational science fiction or what Ada Palmer terms Hopepunk, I can highly recommend this book to you. A Half-Built Garden leaves plenty of space for our own imagination to grow.





Flamecon 2022 Event Report

August 23rd, 2022

If you paid any attention to my social media this weekend, you knew that I was attending FlameCon 2022, back in New York City for the first time in a few years.

My FlameCon started with…a panel! And, in the tradition of this particular panel, technical difficulties!  ^_^  But being one of the first panels, meant that I had the rest of the con to enjoy myself. This year, that mean hanging out with Rica Takashima, selling her self-published mini-comics edition of Rica ‘tte Kanji!? and, of course, By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga!

The energy  at FlameCon was amazing. It took Rica and I 20 years, but there I was at a queer comics convention not explaining Yuri manga, so much as just telling everyone to go watch Birdie Wing. ^_^

It was great to see some folks who have been following Okazu for years! Thank you all for coming by and chatting. It was also really lovely to catch up with old friends.

Day one, I spoke with Jennifer Camper, who was in to do a retrospective of Howard Cruse with co-chair of Queers & Comics, Justin Hall, along with Rupert Kinnard, Carlo Quispe, Denis Kitchen and Karen Green. Howard is among those first-gen gay comix artists who we have only recently lost. The Queers & Comics conferences were designed to create an archive of their stories, so when they were no longer with us, we would have a record. (It was incredible for the years it was held and the information is and will be invaluable for years to come.) Jennifer said she’s working on a collected retrospective of her work. The world actually needs this. While it’s true that we’ll start losing first-gen gay comix folks, we still have second-generation folks like Jennifer and Alison Bechdel, whose recent success – I hope – signals interest in other queer comix artists. 

Jennifer noted that the one thing this con had very little of was queer comics. She wasn’t wrong. As I walked the floor, there were some comics by queer folks, but surprisingly few queer comics. I especially felt there was very little comics by/ about/for queer women. Most of the comics on sale were by/about/for queer guys, with a small showing of women doing fannish comics of queer guys.

I spoke with Justin Hall about that on Sunday. Justin is an amazing comic artist as well, and the editor in chief of No Straight Lines and QU33R anthologies. Justin noted that it’s relatively easy to create a print, and with digital tools, you can make it shiny and colorful and print off a bunch and sell them, in the time it takes to make one page of a comic. Then you have to do the next and the next and tell the story…. so folks are going for merch that is easier to make and sell over comix/comics which are much less so.

I also had a theory that maybe, with so much queer content out there these days, there isn’t the desperation to tell those stories there used to be. Sure folks want their story and art on the table , and I did see some lovely minicomics for sale, but fan art and merch (fannish and original) was primary.

That said I did meet a bunch of folks doing fun stuff!

I spent a moment admiring Shauna Grant’s new book, Mimi and the Cutie Catastrophe, which is out now from Scholastic Books (how exciting!) about Mimi, who wants to be valued for more than just her cuteness. I love her work. It is, actually, quite cute. ^_^ The one ‘zine I picked up was by Ruya Hopps, Mannish Women and Violet Decor:The Language of Lesbianism in Pre-Code Hollwood. Rica immediately pronounced this “precious” because of the level of work creative ‘zine work. To be very honest, I really felt that way about every comic there.

And I love Emily K’s, “off-brand Sailor Moon” (her quote) comics, Gothic Cosmos Child and Lunar Felines. She’s got some of these up on Twitter. Really funny stuff.

I was gifted a beautifully dark Sweeney Todd comic by Nakata “Knack” Whittle, when she dropped buy Rica’s table to get a signed copy of BYS. And I met a lot of great new friends there, plus I was able to see some old pals and just hang around with Rica for a couple of days which we have not been able to do in years. Put a pin in that, I want to get back to us.

But, very importantly, I was able to speak with the adorable and talented folks from Yuri soft Games! Their new game The Songbird Guild is going to be out by the end of this year, hopefully, but I told them I’d tell you and you’d make them get it out. ^_^ This Magical Girl story started life as a jam. You can wishlist this on Steam and follow them on itch.io.  Here’s the synopsis from their site:

“The Kotori Mori has always looked up to her father.  As one of her town’s only (competent) magical boys, he almost singlehandedly protected their community from the dark creatures that tried to tear it down.

Now, at the age of 21, Kotori is finally old enough to pursue her own magical girl dreams in the biggest city of them all: Larimar.  However, she finds the life of a big city magical girl more difficult than anticipated, and soon the decision will threaten her life.

Kaida Hikari, a slightly older magical girl, becomes inseparably close to her during this ordeal, but will their bond be enough to get them through it, or will they crack under the pressure of being the city’s guardians?”

It’s really cute and also kind of dark. ^_^ Emily, Kale and Tess introduced me to the spider lady villainess, Elledonna. I made a deal with them that if they gave her a wife who loves how evil she is, I’d actually read the VN. By Sunday they had a sketch. I’m doing this thing, I hope!

Overall Flamecon was exceptionally well-run and super welcoming and friendly. I was busy at the table so saw none of the other panels (and nothing short of being drugged insensate will get me over to the stage to see the performances, I am allergic to skits,) but I heard all sort of great things about them.

Justin and I agreed that we’d like to see more narrative work and, we’d like to see Flamecon if not require, then prioritize and feature folks making narrative content. The room we were in would have been perfect for the “mini-comics room.” But, then I am always wanting to recreate Comitia at every event. Probably why I like TCAF so much. ^_^

Lastly, I want to thank and celebrate Rica Takashima. In the 1990s, she wanted to see a comic about real queer life in Tokyo and so, she drew one. In 2003, Rica ‘tte Kanji!? became the first Yuri manga published in English. Since then, Yuri has blossomed around the world and as we signed copies of By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga  – and just about sold out for the weekend! – we high fived, because it took us 20 years, but we actually changed the world. It felt damned nice. ^_^

And check these out! Rica brought me a pair of the Family Mart Tokyo Rainbow Pride socks from Japan. She gets me. ^_^

So thank you, Rica, for a great weekend and thank you, FlameCon, for a lovely convention. I hope to see you again next year!
 





I’m in Love With the Villainess, Volume 5

August 4th, 2022

“What if you had the chance to remake the entire world in order to save the person you love…and learned that the world was never what it seemed?” is what I said when I reviewed Watashi no Oshi ha Akuyaku Reijou. Volume 5 (私の推しは悪役令嬢。) in Japanese. And, now, you have had the chance to read I’m in Love With the Villainess, Volume 5 and can, I hope, understand what I meant. ^_^ I’m still trying to avoid spoilers, as best I can. ^_^

The Nur arc comes to a crashing, sword-waving, magic-using, epic ending, that has shockingly little to do with Nur and Bauer at all. Because Volume 5 is about the Demon Queen and the truth of the world. Basically, if you primarily read isekai, you are probably mostly unprepared for just about anything here, until it all settles down.

As I re-read this volume I am fascinated by the scope of this story, which has implications far beyond this narrative. Will future volumes of the upcoming She’s So Cheeky For A Commoner (which I have reviewed in Japanese, as Heimin no Kuse ni Namaika, Volume 1)  – and any series will come after –  let these petals fall and be dispersed, or will they float around reminded us over and over of what, exactly, is going on? I look forward to finding out. There was a great deal of territory covered in this volume and repeated visits in future volumes might help to reify it.

Even more broadly, this series does all sorts of interesting things with the concept of “another world.” Like the Locked Tomb series, it is simultaneously both fantasy and science fiction and some new hybrid child of those genres and isekai. AND it contains that single important question that fills so much classic science fiction anime – what does it mean to be human?

Despite all this, this novel never pretends to be be meaningful in that pretentious literary way of very serious men writing about humanity. It is a human look at the power of community. Once again, I must quote myself here, when I wrote, “If you are familiar with Doctor Who, you will entirely understand how everything in this book works…and how it must work. ^_^ This leads to the only criticism, if you can even call it that, I have. Because of that specific narrative structure, there was no way to give it a punchy ending, which was perfectly okay. It ended as it had to…and then didn’t end for a few more post-epilogue shorts. When you like your characters, it’s hard to let go, I understand completely. ^_^ ”

What I mean to say here is that this ending was the right ending for this book. ^_^ This series ends where it must, with home and family. I have said this about a dozen times recently, but I’ll repeat it – this is what I am looking for these days in the books I read. Future-building with hope…hopepunk, as Ada Palmer calls, it. Stories in which communities come together to build a better tomorrow. The fact that the leaders of this particular community are queer women is delicious icing on this sweet and satisfying narrative cake.

Ratings:

Art – 9
Story – 9
Characters – 10
Service – Very little, for perfectly good reasons.
Yuri – 10
Queer – 10

Overall – 10

This…was a very good book. I hope you’ll all read it. If you have read it, do let me know what you think in the comments!

 





Plain Bad Heroines written by Emily M. Danforth, illustrated by Sara Lautman

July 17th, 2022

In 1902, at a boarding school for young women in Rhode Island., a book is making an indelible impact upon both the student body and the school headmistress, leading to a series of tragedies. In 2022, the same book – is having an equivalently huge impact on the stars of a movie about those tragedies. In Plain Bad Heroines, Emily M. Danforth creates a meta-novel about a meta-novel, full of gothic horror, women in love and the memeification of fear and desire.

Brookhants (pronounced, Brookhaunts, we are assured early on) is a school on the property of a man who was deeply, obsessively, interested in the occult. The grounds, the buildings, the flora and fauna of Brookhants are saturated with the occult. But  the occult is just the gold lame draped over this story. Under the turban and giant earrings, is a psychological thriller about social media in 1902 and 2022. The girls at Brookhants share their obsessions through songs and rhyme and images, and promises, the young women of the 21st century share Instagram photos and memes, images and promises. What ties these two threads together is a book that was a huge hit in 1901, The Story of Mary Maclane, one girls’ diary of desire for other girls and desire to be released from a boring life. Both this book – which is a real book – and the “author” of the novel are ever present in the narrative. They will be there with us, every step.

This story begins with a tragic sapphic love; two young women who die a horrible death together instead of living horrible lives apart. These deaths bring about more deaths, and the separation of an adult lesbian couple who had, until this tragedy, managed to find joy together….they hoped.  A hundred years later, a movie about these stories is being filmed as a kind of true-horror story, with real, imagined and staged mysteries that keep the two leads – a famous up-comingstar and the daughter of a B-movie has been – and the woman who is credited with writing the book about the book, in a state of high anxiety, until they find each other and redeem both the film, themselves and each other. The several levels of meta-novel lean heavily on one another. If you were, for instance, to pretend that memes don’t have power, this book probably would have no power over you. But…you’d have to pretend, because we know for a fact that memes do have power. ^_^

What this book does right is the slow-burn of the obsessive thoughts and behaviors that creep in and out of the pages until, unbidden, they come to your own mind in a similar situation….the perfect meme, even if that meme is a bit destructive, like invoking Bloody Mary on Halloween.  Even though the book is not entirely happy, if you’re fond of gothic romance – the penny dreadfuls of the turn of last century – you’ll probably enjoy this. Certainly, Sara Lautman’s illustrations remind us exactly how we should be reading this story – late at night, with a candle or lamp for atmospheric lighting, maybe on a stormy, cold, dank day.  Whether from the cold or the fear, or the quiet longings of our own history, doesn’t matter – we should be shivering.

Despite the many tragedies of the story, it does have what I consider to be a happy ending. The happy ending is tied up in the existence of a three-person relationship that exists in a space that isn’t one thing or another, yet.  Where the girls and women of 1902 were not given the space to determine what they might be to one another, the happy ending is that the three of 2022 will have time and freedom to figure it out for themselves…

Ratings:

Art – Atmospheric
Story – A LOT of story
Characters – Fascinating and deeply flawed, like people
Service – Yes, actually. But I can’t tell you what it is or I’d ruin it
Lesbian – Several different kinds of sapphic relationships, spanning a century.

Overall – Complex, overwrought, a very good read that will stick with me for a long while

Listening to the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast over the past several months I find I do not actually enjoy that much historical fiction. As I mentioned when LHMP interviewed me last month, I do tend to prefer contemporary fiction that becomes historical over time. The historical part being just one layer of this novel gave it depth, rather than being a lesson on “the time period I researched” as so much historical fiction feels to me. And the contemporary side of the story is cemented in it’s time and place with any number of cultural touchpoints that will disappear and become historical footnotes, for a doubly historical piece any day now. ^_^