Yaoi/BL Novels as Feminism in Contemporary Japan

Kazuko Suzuki, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Texas A&M University
Recorded on April 6, 2023.
Yaoi / Boys’ Love (BL) is a literary genre of male-male erotic romance, originally invented by and for heterosexual Japanese women around the end of the 1970s, which has now become popular globally. This talk analyzes methodologies employed in Japanese Yaoi/BL novels and explores their potential as post-binary feminism.
Kazuko Suzuki is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University and the author of the award-winning book, Divided Fates: The State, Race, and Korean Immigrants’ Adaptation in Japan and the United States, which compares adaptation patterns of three Korean diasporic groups in Japan and the United States. She also co-edited a book, Reconsidering Race: Social Science Perspectives on Racial Categories in the Age of Genomics. Her research interests include modes of incorporation and immigrant adaptation from an international comparative perspective; historical and regional analysis of “race” beyond the Western paradigm, as well as global diffusion of “race” and racisms; and gender and sexuality in Japanese popular culture media, in particular Yaoi/BL. She is currently on the Advisory Board of the “Studies in Comparative Political Theory” Series of Oxford University Press.
This lecture is made possible with the generous support of the U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant.