I'm not being even a little facetious when I say that this is more thoughtful, thorough, and compassionate than any other videos, posts, or non-academic articles I've seen on the subject of slash/yaoi and the people who enjoy it.
And look!! Someone besides me and the authors of a handful of academic papers said it!!!!
The criticism that yaoi and slash are exoticizing gayness is also reliant on multiple broad assumptions. The novelty of both mediums is that they are stories about gay men produced by and for straight women, and much of the criticism relies on the clean separation between the consumers of slash and yaoi, and the real life queer community. While the literalness of these gay men has been questioned, I would also challenge the assumption that slashers and fujoshis are, strictly speaking, women or, strictly speaking, straight.
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I almost yelled when I got to that part, and then had to go back ad listen to it again. THANK YOU SIR.
The video discusses much more than the sexuality and gender exploration that has been part of slash/yaoi communities, but those were some of the aspects I was the most pleasantly surprised to see addressed. I grabbed some more highlights from the transcript, but you should go watch the video!
In this sense, yaoi is not a feminist escape from the oppressive reality of being a woman, but a queer escape from the rigid framework of gender entirely.
In her essay, The Politics of Utopia, Rio Otomo frames yaoi as a utopian, genderless space. She pushes back against the accusations of the medium's apparent homophobia, not by arguing that yaoi boys are not a representative of real life gay men, but by arguing against the rigid categories of straight, woman, gay, and man—arguing that yaoi boys are genderless, and, at least while they read yaoi, so are fujoshis.
While this is simply my own personal experience, as a teenager, I had a lot of straight female friends who were fans of both yaoi and slash fiction. ….. At this present moment, none of those friends are both straight and female. Every girl I knew who was drawn to male/male pairings has subsequently come out as gay, some kind of transmasc, or both.
Same, buddy. Same 🤝
In Identity, Community and Sexuality in Slash Fanfiction, Anne Kustritz argues that the assumption of slash fandom's straightness is similarly erroneous. Most surveys of slashers sexuality and gender forced a binary choice between gay or straight, and male or female, and resulted in what seemed to be a majority straight fandom. However, a survey that allowed participants to describe their sexuality in their own words without any imposed structure or prompting resulted in a fandom that was 60% queer with only 40% of participants describing themselves as explicitly straight.
I'm delighted that I discovered this channel a couple of weeks ago! So, seriously, if you have some time and the subject interests you, give the video a watch :)
