one of your favorite fantasies
Gallimard: No! I was about to say, it’s the first time I’ve
seen the beauty of the story.
Song: Really?
Gallimard: Of her death. It’s a … pure sacrifice. He’s unworthy, but what can she do? She loves him … so much. It’s a very beautiful story.”
Gallimard: Excuse me?
Song: It’s one of your favorite fantasies, isn’t it? The submissive Oriental woman and the cruel white man.
Yaoi allows the female reader to be the submissive oriental, but to retain some male privilege.
The seme and the uke are often considered to be stand-ins for, or rather an alternative to, a heterosexual couple. A double vision is going on in which the seme is seen as the “man” and the “uke” as a woman, but that they are both still men. The female viewer is both submissive/feminine and privileged/male. The filter of Japan allows readers to see the uke’s submission as a function of Japanese hierarchy and thus continue to see both characters as men. This maintains the juggling act going on that sees the uke as submissive and equal, feminine and male. Brenner and Wildsmith argue that this “belies the assertion that yaoi portrays romances between equals. The characters may be perceived by society as having the same worth, both being men, but inside the relationship strict masculine/feminine roles are maintained” (97).
Is this reluctance to be female an internalized misogyny? Or an understandable reluctance to be the inferior? Is this a case of having your (uke) cake and eating it too for the female reader?
Many yaoi plots involve a considerable amount of nonconsensual sex and critics have questioned whether this is a form of masochism if the female is “inhabiting” the uke, a form of homophobia in seeing gay sex as inherently unpleasant, or as misandric schadenfreude in seeing a male suffer. Others argue that women (especially in Japan) are reluctant or fearful to have sex or to resign themselves to a female role in life, and this allows them to role play fears and imagine sex. “The seme pursues the uke, and plots including nonconsensual sexual encounters and rape are frequently part of the seme confessing and proving his love for the uke. The uke is inexperienced and reluctant in participating in sex while the seme uses sex to persuade, at the very least, the uke into submission” (Brenner and Wildsmith, 97).
“Tomoko Aoyama suggests that sex that takes place in ‘a violent context’ becomes ‘an act of revenge’ on the part of women readers who now ‘become a spectator rather than a prey.’ Yet this reading depends upon a supposed polarity between the
male characters and the female readership. Yet the bishōnen are not really men but androgynous figures, not simply in the way they look but in their sensibilities. When subjected to abuse they are portrayed as innocent victims, and when they instigate sex themselves they enjoy it in the way women are supposed to: as a reciprocal and emotional encounter” (McLelland, 85).
Yaoi is, like genderfuck fiction or some slash fictions, a way of imagining men suffering the indignities of female life. Busse and Lothian argue that genderfuck allows“a consciousness of the experiences of women in a sexist society” and that far from being retrograde the texts’ “manipulations of gendered embodiement frequently lead to the exploration of feminist concerns” (108). They further posit that “Reading genderfuck and fucking with gender, writers and readers may come to wonder, like Butler, how and whether biology results in a subject ‘becoming its gender.’…Theoretically, these crossgendered writings connect to an understanding of gender as performance: the woman writing can show the disjuncture between womanliness and act women by writing femininity and its discontents onto the bodies of favoured male characters” (110).
However, the seme and uke are rarely critical of the roles they fill. The uke may have an awareness that being mistaken for “womanly” is an insult or wonder if he is reduced to the feminine, but most yaoi takes place in a homosocial world with little acknowledgment of external gender roles or homophobic possibilities. It is left for individual readers to offer critique and, as Busse and Lothian observe “it can be difficult to see where texts criticize patriarchal structures and where they reinscribe them” (111).
The manga may be a site of gender play. But they are perhaps more likely to be a wish fulfillment or fantasy. “It seems clear that women readers do not just vicariously participate in these homosexual love scenes but identify with the androgynous figures, not just as ideal lovers or partners but, in a sense, as their ideal selves. The boys are not only represented as feminine but as also inscribed in typically female situations because the primarily female readership sees itself depicted in these stories. Within patriarchy, which assigns very strict roles to women according to their supposed capacities, the androgynous youth is one way in which the female reader can picture herself as separate from the reproductive role assigned to her by the family system which ties female sexuality to child rearing. It is no surprise then, as Aoyama mentions, that in these stories female characters often ‘wish to be a male homosexual in order to love a beautiful boy’ because it is only a male who can love another male as an equal.” McLelland, 87).