"Intersections: Rethinking Yaoi on the Regional and Global Scale"

1. Yaoi is a genre of storytelling featuring male-male eroticism and romance whose primary audience is girls and women. The genre began in amateur manga (comics), or dōjinshi, culture in 1970s Japan. Today, yaoi has grown into a global phenomenon that is particularly popular in East Asia where, since the late 1990s, it has garnered millions of fans. In Sinophone contexts, yaoi is called danmei (耽美), which is the Mandarin reading of what in Japanese is read as tanbi[1] or aesthetic indulgence/intoxication by beauty. In China, danmei currently takes the form of chiefly online fan fiction on nomadic websites whose creators outwit regulators' abilities to censor them.[2] Yanrui Xu and Ling Yang trace the origin of mainland danmei to the year 1998, its continued growth drawing heavily on bootleg Japanese yaoi.[3] Danmei in Taiwan and Hong Kong, as well as yaoi in Japan, South Korea and beyond have, since the 1990s, expanded from comics into films, novels, online serials and a swath of other media forms and commodities. In this essay, I will stick with the terms yaoi and danmei rather than use the more universal and commercial term 'boys' love' or 'BL'[4] so as to maintain an historical throughline between the 1970s and 80s Japanese dōjinshi predecessors and the post-1990s glocal media.