PhD Student, EALC
Staying Awhile on BL Planet: Genre, Fantasy, and Role-Play in Asahara Naoto’s Kanojo ga suki na mono wa homo de atte boku de wa nai
Time: Friday, February 23, 3-5pm CT
Location: Room 319, Center for East Asian Studies (1155 E. 60th St)
Abstract: This dissertation chapter draft is about the discursive function of Boys’ Love with and in other forms of queer fiction. Over the past decade, BL has been ascending from marginalized, subcultural form to a dominant mass cultural genre of LGBT media. One product of this ongoing transformation is that the generic norms of BL, such as character types and narrative tropes, appear alongside other fictions of queerness, creating friction and presenting alternative ways of representing “queer.” My presentation will take up this issue through a discussion of Asahara Naoto’s coming-of-age novel Kanojo ga suki na mono wa homo de atte boku de wa nai [She Likes Homos, Not Me] (2018). The novel concerns the relationship between two high school classmates, the closeted gay boy who narrates the novel (and whose prickly self-loathing is signaled by slur in its title) and a sensitive BL fangirl, as they move from friendship to ill-advised romance and back to friendship rebuilt on a foundation of mutual recognition. By charting the growing recognition between a gay character and a BL fan character – the sense that they share some experience of marginalization, and the solidarity which is subsequently established – the novel stages an encounter between BL and other forms of queer fiction and identification, remediating previous debates about the social implications of BL’s representations of gay men as a narrative of reconciliation. In this way, I argue that the novel performs an intervention into the problematics posed by BL as mass cultural genre to emergent queer-feminist solidarities by speculating about what reconciliation would feel like for the people involved.
Presenter: Nick Ogonek is a PhD Student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His in-progress dissertation takes up contemporary literature from Japan to explore the relation between queer literary and cultural production and queer political meaning-making, with particular attention to form and genre.
Discussant: Jiarui Sun is a PhD student from the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Working at the intersection of media theories and anthropology, her research is concerned with how media and mediation figure into the everyday experiences of sociality and creativity on digital platforms.
