Gender Representations of Young Female “Boy’s Love” Fans

<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Objective. </strong>To describe the relations between liking visual representations of male same-sex romance and gender young female fans BL. <strong>Background. </strong>Nowadays there is a globally spread interest in manga among teenagers. Manga has vast diversity styles, genres, followers. Nevertheless, some heterosexual girls quite often demonstrate stable sub-genre focusing on homoerotic relationships – frequently androgynous characters. This research addressed an issue whether girls’ for homosexuality Boy’s Love (BL) comics relates to their representations. <strong>Study design. </strong>The survey members Internet Social Media Publics included: description socio-psychological effects viewing BL pictures, scaling attitudes towards masculinity ideology, exploration role beliefs femininity concepts. Comparison data other being acquainted with Boys’ Love, but deliberately neglecting it. Mann–Whitney U test, Fisher F Pearson’s chi-squared test are used. <strong>Participants. </strong>Russian sample: 140 respondents 11-45 years old (M=17,95; SD=4,84). Main group consists 90 (M=18,88; SD=5,22). Control 50 12-27 (M=16,79; SD=3,10). <strong>Measurements. </strong>Questionnaire socio-demographic characteristics. Author’s scale Masculinity Ideology Relationships Scale by J.H. Pleck, F.L. Sonenstein, L.C. Ku. Gendered Personality Characteristics (I.S. Klyotsina). Femininity Questionnaire T.A. Bessonova psycho-semantic version N.V. Dvoryanchikov examining individual constructs. <strong>Results. </strong>Girls that fond drawn fictions prefer non-normative gendered traits combinations give specific interpretation femininity. followers significantly traditionally masculine traits. Gender polarization weak. identity comply non-orthogonal conceptualization. They believe core every human should consist gender-neutral Male emotionality, represented drawings, arrests attention all respondents. But less likely perceive men light normative (hegemonic) masculinity. <strong>Conclusions.</strong> Straight enthusiasm grounded possibility apprehending non-normativity/non-conformity within fictional realty, meta-genre capability display adequately significant aspects new practices ensure social affirmation.</p>