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Finding the power of the erotic in Japanese yuri manga

University of British Columbia

Yuri is the genre of Japanese manga and anime that focuses on romantic and sexual relationships between girls and women. Although what is perceived to be its counterpart, yaoi or BL, has received a great amount of scholarly attention in the past years, yuri, however, is still a nascent topic in academic discourse. Upon briefly delineating Japanese prewar girls’ culture and its influence on the romantic and erotic spaces found in female-authored manga made for a female audience, several female-authored narratives from the erotic yuri manga anthology Yuri hime wildrose are analyzed in regards to their depiction of relationship dynamics, the female body, and the space in which both are explored. These yuri narratives are considered in relation to Audre Lorde’s ideas of the erotic to show that despite their lack of explicit lesbian identity and social realism, they manage to carve out a positive erotic space that is ultimately empowering for female readers.

Text

2015-08-24

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/54589

Asian Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/