Girls and Women Getting Out of Hand: The Pleasure and Politics of Japan's Amateur Comics Communi

I'm often asked about this paper I wrote in 2003, because a lot of people are interested in what we used to call yaoi and now mostly call "Boys' Love" or just "BL." I've had it uploaded to Academia.edu for a while, but there's something sketchy about that site, and I don't like that people need to make an account and log in just to download my work, so I'm putting a copy here. I was hoping to embed a PDF reader on this page, but I haven't figured out how to do that in a blog post, so all I can offer is an inelegant download link to the PDF. (I thought about posting it as HTML, but I've had trouble in the past with people copying and pasting whole essays of mine into their own websites and presenting it as original material.)

This paper--based on field work, interviews, and library research--is fifteen years old, and if I were to revise it, there are some things I would tweak, but I think my central arguments stand up pretty well today. I hope you enjoy it.

Girls and Women Getting Out of Hand: The Pleasure and Politics of Japan's Amateur Comics Community