Gay intimacy - response piece (p.212) more

192 Queer and Subjugated Knowledges: Generating Subversive Imaginaries, 201 , 192-221 CHAPTER 8 GAY INTIMACY, YAOI AND THE ETHICS OF CARE Aleardo Zanghellini University of Reading Abstract: This chapter takes up Halberstam’s invitation to creatively engage with subjugated knowledges, and does so for the specific purpose of rethinking gay intimacy. Models of gay male intimacy appear to be largely polarized between a heteronormative quasi-marital paradigm and a counter-normative hedonistic one. Engaging with texts belonging to the yaoi subculture—a genre of Japanese comics and animation characterized by a thematic focus on male same sex desire, but produced by heterosexual women for a heterosexual female audience—may help us promote an intrinsically valuable diversity of practices of intimacy. The epistemological horizon provided by yaoi involves intriguing and significant differences from the marital and hedonistic models of mainstream gay culture across two main understandings of ‘intimacy’: intimacy as sex and intimacy as familiarity. Furthermore yaoi, being produced by women for women, is perhaps more likely to reflect an understanding of male same sex intimacy premised on an ethics of care when compared to the models of intimacy emerging from within gay male culture. If the marital and hedonistic models reflect, in different ways, a quintessentially male way of conceptualizing intimacy, then decentring their dominance and making space for alternative scripts such as those offered by yaoi may enrich our conceptualizations of intimacy and afford a more balanced (less gendered) range of options in the realm of relationality. Subjugated knowledges such as yaoi may offer normative and aesthetic horizons alternative to mainstream Gay, enabling the project of re-envisioning male same sex intimacy. Kane Race provides a response to this chapter. Keywords: Gay, intimacy, heteronormative, yaoi, Japanese comics, hedonism, counternormative, gay sex, desire, gay culture. With an increasing number of jurisdictions recognizing same sex marriage or marriage-like same sex civil partnerships or unions, the debate about whether or not lesbians and gay men should seek the right to marryi seems to have abated. In this paper I won’t discuss whether or not there is merit in the apparently counter-intuitive argument that the availability of same sex marriage or civil unions will actually contract, rather than expand, lesbians and gay men’s options by pushing many of them into conventional marriages or marriage-like relationships. My concern is that, even without the option of same sex marriage, the choice, at least for gay men, seems already largely restricted and polarized between heteronormative quasimarital relationships and counter(hetero)normative (but homonormative) hedonistic models of intimacy. As Edwards (2006, p. 84) puts it: [Many gay men express the] complaint that gay culture is often a shallow, youth-dominated, image-, sex-, and body-obsessed world… Kerry H. Robinson and Cristyn Davies (Eds) All rights reserved - © 201 Bentham Science Publishers Gay Intimacy, Yaoi and the Ethics of Care Queer and Subjugated Knowledges... 193 leaving profoundly little room for any alternative but to conform… Moreover, those who question or confront their dissatisfactions with this situation often opt out of commercial gay culture completely, retreating to coupledom… Adam (2006) similarly captures the binary organization of models of gay intimacy and their normative status when he remarks that “[r]omance scripts that prescribe a relationship trajectory of dating, falling in love, sexual exclusivity, and life-long commitment, often run up against male-gendered scripts of sex as adventure, pleasure, and exploration without commitment” (p. 9). He also reports from research describing young gay interviewees as feeling torn between a desire for casual sex and an aspiration towards monogamous relationships (p. 9). To be sure, Adam makes these observations in the context of a larger argument purporting to document the creative ways in which gay couples negotiate the terms of their relationships by drawing on these two dominant social scripts. Yet, while I acknowledge that there is much to be said for the honesty with which many gay couples address, for example, the question of sexual nonmonogamy, I would be hesitant to endorse the implication, quite pervasive in queer studies literature, that current models of gay intimacy are a paragon of pluralistic relationality. Bersani resisted this conclusion more than twenty years ago (Bersani, 1987, pp. 218–221), although the thrust of his argument was not so much that gay intimacy should be rethought, but rather that gay sex was being extolled by gay theorists for all the wrong reasons. For Bersani, the truly radical and progressive potential of gay sex is its uncompromising and unapologetic devaluation of subjectivity, a “radical humiliation and disintegration of the self” (1987, p. 217): gay sex can be seen as an ethical practice inasmuch as it dissolves the sense of self, which is a prerequisite for practices of violence and domination (pp. 218, 222). I am not interested in pursuing Bersani’s line of argument here. Indeed, I am not interested in judging gay sex or gay intimacy more broadly as either good or bad, or in asking questions about its ethical valence. Rather, my point is that the range of thinkable modes of gay relationality (including sexual relationality) remains too limited and essentially organized along binary lines or what I shall call the marital and hedonistic models of intimacy.ii Indeed, the fact that so many gay men tend to settle for open relationships— and not, for instance, for such alternative paradigms as polyamory (Adam, 2006, p. 24)—seems to me to confirm, rather than undermine, the prescriptive power of these two models. Adam’s arguments, largely focused precisely on various permutations of open relationships, are couched in 194 Queer and Subjugated Knowledges.... Aleardo Zanghellini terms of ‘relationship innovation,’ but the contours of the picture he paints change significantly if you read his text ‘against the grain.’ Does combining the primary emotional commitment to one partner typical of the marital model with the sexual nonmonogamy characteristic of the hedonistic model genuinely involve a shift away from the binary ‘hedonistic/marital’ organization of gay relationality? Here a disclaimer is in order: when I claim that dominant gay epistemology organizes intimacy largely on the basis of these two paradigms, my claim is not that mainstream gay identity—by which I mean gay identity, say, á la Queer as Folk—and the models of intimacy it generates exhaust the range of gay male identities and lifestyles taken up, created, or experienced in contemporary Western societies (let alone outside the West). Indeed, the fact that I speak of ‘mainstream’ gay identity and ‘dominant’ gay epistemology itself implies that there exists a degree of gay male ontological and epistemological pluralism. However, I do want to argue that the emergence and flourishing of alternative models of intimacy is significantly constrained, if not absolutely precluded or inhibited, by the dominance of mainstream gay (cf. Halberstam, 2005, p. 40). One strategy to decentre the dominance of mainstream gay would be to create an ‘archive’ of gay subcultures: to document them and attend to the alternative ontological and epistemological paradigms they offer. However, apparently alternative ontologies and epistemologies on closer inspection may prove not all that alternative. Thus, in his analysis of Bear masculinity, Hennen has persuasively argued that while Bear practices of intimacy challenge hegemonic masculinity by their re-evaluation of an ethics of care, that challenge may remain largely negligible because of Bear culture’s emphasis on a “radical similarity…to both heterosexual men and conventional masculinity” (Hennen, 2005, p. 41). In taking up, for the purpose of rethinking gay intimacy in this paper, Halberstam’s suggestion of creatively engaging with subjugated knowledges, I have become intrigued by the possibilities offered by non gay-initiated and non gay-produced alternative ways of being gay and knowing the world. In particular, I will discuss a Japanese subcultural genre of comics and animation known as yaoi or BL, whose distinguishing feature is a thematic focus on male same sex desire, but which is produced by heterosexual women for a heterosexual female audience. Not all of us may feel the need for alternative models of intimacy. Some queers who oppose same sex marriage may not necessarily be concerned with the chilling effect same sex marriage may have on the reinvention of intimacy. Rather, they may simply be bothered by the fact that same sex Gay Intimacy, Yaoi and the Ethics of Care Queer and Subjugated Knowledges... 195 marriage will steer some or many gays and lesbians away from what I called the counter (hetero) normative hedonistic model and towards the conventionality of marital familial models. However, some same sex attracted men simply can’t find a comfortable place within dominant gay epistemology, mainstream gay identity and the limited models of intimacy that these generate. Furthermore, although as announced before I am not interested here in evaluating current practices of gay intimacy as either good or bad, there is something problematic about a queer theory which, while taking it as axiomatic that there is something wrong or limited/limiting about the marital model, displays a tendency to wink at, or even celebrate, its correlative, and to assume it to represent a more valuable form of life for queers. Perhaps this form of life is more valuable, but its celebration doesn’t sit well with queer’s own stated goals: after all, the hedonistic model is, even more than the marital model, the dominant form of gay intimacy, but one of queer’s raisons d’être is precisely the need to decentre the dominance of gay within the world of sex and gender outsiders. More crucially, the hedonistic model of intimacy has all the trappings of a reverse discourse in Foucault’s sense (Halberstam, 2005, pp. 52–53), which subjectifies gay men by attaching them to their own identity (Foucault, 1982). And this is particularly problematic when the degree of commercial investment in the hedonistic model is taken into account. The so called ‘gay lifestyle’ has proved remarkably amenable to colonization by corporate interests (though no more so than the marital model), which raises serious questions about who is inciting whom to identify as what. We also need to ask whether the tendency to celebrate the hedonistic model may not be unwittingly ethnocentric. To the extent that the model may now resonate in many non-Western countries, might this not be largely (if not necessarily exclusively) an effect of the exportation of metropolitan gay identity to these cultures? Halberstam has rightly taken issue with scholarly analyses that fail to problematize the dominance and exportation of Western metropolitan gayness (Halberstam, 2005, pp. 36–38). This paper attempts to think of ways of re-envisioning gay intimacy which avoid both heteronormativity and the reverse discourse of counter(hetero)normativity. I use the word ‘intimacy’ because of its diverse connotations. According to the online Oxford Dictionary (2011) ‘intimacy,’ among its other usages, refers to the idea of ‘sexual intercourse’: the sort of intimacy brought to the fore by the hedonistic model. But the dictionary states that ‘intimacy’ also means “close familiarity or friendship” (the significance of the use of the word ‘familiarity’ should not be missed, as its 196 Queer and Subjugated Knowledges.... Aleardo Zanghellini root reveals that the family is culturally understood as the sphere where, par excellence, intimacy in its broader sense occurs). This is the sort of intimacy brought to the fore by the marital model.iii My claim that yaoi /BL can help us engage in the process of re-envisioning gay intimacy is based on the belief that the epistemology provided by this genre involves intriguing and significant differences from the marital and hedonistic models across these two main understandings of ‘intimacy.’ In developing my arguments, I will draw, among others’, on the scholarship of Judith Jack Halberstam. The yaoi/BL genre Japanese female artists started producing manga about love between beautiful boys (bishounen) in the early seventies. Even early instances of the genre depicted sex scenes, whose incidence progressively increased as artists witnessed the authorities’ relative lack of concern for their work (McLelland, 2006).iv ‘BL’ (standing for Boys’ Love, the English translation of shounen-ai, which was the original name for the genre) has now become the marketing identifier for both manga and anime about male same sex relationships produced by women for women. ‘Yaoi’ is more accurately used to refer to fan produced work. This may be wholly original or ‘slash.’ In slash work, popular male characters from non-BL comics (say, ‘x’ and ‘y’) are slashed together (x/y) by fans who like to think of them as same sex attracted. Unlike professionally produced BL manga or anime, in fan produced yaoi work, “the symbolic appearance of characters, and emotions attached to characters’ situations, has become far more important than the traditional plot” (Kinsella, 1998, p. 201).v This feature of yaoi may be significant, if Halberstam (2005) is right in arguing that narrative forms of art are less suited to sustaining the sort of aesthetics that challenges conventional understandings of social reality (pp. 105–108). On the other hand, the distinction between yaoi and BL manga on grounds that plot matters less in the former may be overstated if, as Delany (1994) argues, any successful comics will decentre the plot to a greater or lesser extent: “What the comics [sic] narrative has to do before it achieves [plot] coherence is push the action from one visually exciting situation to another” (p. 88). For this reason, it is not necessarily misguided to treat, as I do here, yaoi and BL as a single genre. This move also seems justifiable in light of such circumstances as a) the fan base being virtually the same for both yaoi and BL, and b) the reciprocal feedback process between the two being both constant and, arguably, definitional of the genre. Indeed, there are several instances of professionally produced BL work where the sex is as explicit and as prominent as in yaoi fan produced work. Furthermore, fan artists do Gay Intimacy, Yaoi and the Ethics of Care Queer and Subjugated Knowledges... 197 not content themselves with slashing non-BL characters or creating original yaoi work, but happily borrow characters from professional BL work; it is not uncommon for the most talented fan artists to be recruited by commercial publishers and hence become pros. Although my arguments below (focused on content and stylistic conventions) don’t distinguish between anime and manga, it is worth pointing out that reading manga might be more conducive than watching anime to generating the sort of agentic reflexivity required to re-envision the social and/or the personal. This is because, as Delany (1994) puts it, “[w]hat makes the comic gaze…privileged [in comparison to the TV or movie gaze] is that the gazer has the greatest control over the comic book gaze. The comics [sic] gaze is at once the most distanced and the least manipulated…The gazer is a “coproducer” of the comic at a [higher] level of involvement and intensity, through the nature of the medium itself” (p. 93). Yaoi/BL as a subjugated knowledge That yaoi/BL is not the dominant way of looking at gay male relationships is beyond doubt. This is true both of the broader society (where I take it as uncontested that same sex relationships still tend to be viewed ultimately as less valuable than heterosexual ones, both in Japan and in the West) and of gay epistemology itself which, in its dominant form, as we will see, differs significantly from yaoi/BL in its conceptualization and construction of same sex intimacy.vi But is the irreducibility of yaoi/BL epistemology to mainstream gay epistemology enough to make yaoi/BL count as a subjugated knowledge of the kind that can contribute something useful to the task of re-envisioning gay intimacy, of diversifying it beyond current paradigms? I think the answer to this question turns not only on whether or not it is a subjugated (as in marginalized) knowledge, but also on its moral and political credentials—a question complicated by the commercial aspects of yaoi/BL.vii Halberstam’s discussion of subcultural activity within postmodernity offers a useful starting point for deciding on the status of yaoi/BL as a subjugated knowledge, and one of the kind that has something useful to contribute to re-envisioning gay intimacy. As Halberstam (2005) argues, “[w]ithin postmodernism, subcultural activities are as likely to generate new forms of protest as they are to produce new commodities to be absorbed back into a logic of accumulation” (p. 98). Halberstam also argues that postmodern cultural production cannot be understood merely as a product of the economic relations of late capitalist societies that does nothing but 198 Queer and Subjugated Knowledges.... Aleardo Zanghellini legitimize those relations. In particular, Halberstam suggests that postmodern visual culture can challenge, for example, our sense of “history and futurity” in ways that defy the dominant understandings thereof (p. 104), and quotes Crow to the effect that commercial exploitation of subcultural production can act as an incentive for subcultures to engage in more (and more radical) subcultural production (p. 109): “some subcultures do not simply fade away as soon as they have been mined and plundered for material” (p. 127). All these observations imply that possibilities for resistance and transformation do not necessarily require wholesale externality to the capitalist matrix (assuming there is such an outside place for subcultural production to emerge and operate). In this sense, the fact that BL is a moneymaking phenomenon does not necessarily mean that it—or yaoi, with which it exists in a symbiotic relationship—is automatically wholly subsumed under or assimilated into dominant epistemology (ceasing to be a subculture) and hence deprived of its transformative potential. This seems especially so if one considers that, despite the popularity of the genre in Japan among young straight women, BL’s Western audience remains a niche, non-mainstream, market. In other words, even if BL is a moneymaking enterprise, there is little evidence that it makes money out of the mainstream, which seems to have yet to develop the “voyeuristic and predatory” interest in the genre that it has shown for other forms of queer subcultural production (Halberstam, 2005, p. 157). The moral and political credentials of yaoi/BL would be suspect if the heterosexuality of its creators and consumers made it similar to representations of transgender lives by non-transgender people, which Halberstam (2005) argues tend to result in projects of stabilization, rationalization and trivialization (pp. 54–55).viii But the motives animating the emergence of yaoi/BL are quite unlike those underlying such projects. Rather, shounen-ai was born “largely as a reaction against the contrived and formulaic heterosexual love stories marketed at a female audience at the time” (McLelland, 2005, p. 67). Generally, the focus on male same sex relationships has been explained on the ground that “[i]n the context…of restrictions on behaviour and development that women experience…, young female fans feel more able to imagine and depict idealized strong free characters if they are male” (Kinsella, 1998, p. 302). In other words, a rejection of heteronormativity (taking the form of opting out of the genre of heterosexual love stories and its conventions) and a creative engagement with the empowering possibilities afforded by same sex intimacy were foundational to the genre. Gay Intimacy, Yaoi and the Ethics of Care Queer and Subjugated Knowledges... 199 Gilligan’s (1993) ethics of care theory can help me elaborate on why yaoi/BL qualifies as a subjugated knowledge of the kind that may usefully challenge dominant models of gay intimacy. The ethics of care theory and queer may seem strange bedfellows. Yet there is nothing intrinsically essentialist in Gilligan’s basic insight that “some dimensions of moral experience, such as contextual decision making, special obligations, the moral motives of compassion and sympathy, and the relevance of considering one’s own integrity in making moral decisions” (Calhoun, 1988, p. 451) tend to figure more prominently in women’s rather than men’s modes of moral thought. Gilligan never argued either that all women reason morally in terms of the ethics of care, nor that such a mode of moral reasoning is hardwired in female anatomy, physiology, psychology, or anything of the sort. ix Her theory is perfectly compatible with social constructionism, with a nurture- rather than nature-based view of gender and even of sex. x Furthermore, Gilligan never said that the ethics of care was a superior mode of moral reasoning and never implied that all women should subscribe to it. Her point was simply that this mode of moral reasoning had been systematically undervalued and marginalized. In other words, Gilligan made a case for the proposition that the normative system embodied in the ethics of care was a form of subjugated knowledge that called for attention and re-evaluation. Thus restated, Gilligan’s point is eminently compatible with queer. Yaoi/BL, being produced by women for women, is more likely to reflect an understanding of gay intimacy premised on an ethics of care when compared to the models of gay intimacy emerging from within mainstream gay male culture. xi This suggests that yaoi/BL is the sort of subjugated knowledge that may have something valuable to contribute to the reenvisioning of gay intimacy, especially if coupled with the point, made above, that yaoi/BL was born as a reaction to the formulaic constraints of marital heteronormativity. To paraphrase Halberstam (2005), yaoi/BL “culture constitutes…a counterpublic space where white [heteronormative and metronormative gay] masculinities can be contested, and where minority [gay] masculinities can be produced, validated, fleshed out, and celebrated” (p. 128). In reading yaoi/BL through an ‘ethics of care’ lens, my aim is neither to imply that such an ethics provides a superior paradigm to the masculine ‘ethics of justice,’ nor to recommend that gay men should uncritically embrace it. Rather, my goal is to bring into relief the discontinuities between dominant gay epistemology and yaoi/BL in order to facilitate a project aimed less at reifying the ethics of care than at fostering the conditions for the flourishing of a Foucauldian ethics of the self. For Foucault (1997), individuals constitute themselves as ethical subjects in 200 Queer and Subjugated Knowledges.... Aleardo Zanghellini relation to moral codes, not by either automatically conforming with or rejecting their prescriptions, but through the adoption of a critical and reflective attitude towards them. To the extent that subjugated knowledges such as yaoi/BL offer normative (as well as aesthetic) horizons alternative to mainstream gay (for example in the extent to which they appear to be informed by an ethics of care), they enable the re-envisioning of gay intimacy intended as an ethical project in this specifically Foucauldian sense. Yaoi/BL intimacy: the genre Introduction So what is the picture of male same sex intimacy emerging from yaoi/BL? The typical yaoi/BL relationship involves a seme and an uke. The terminology is derived from martial arts and has been used in Japan for centuries in the context of intimate relationships: a seme is an attacker and an uke is a receiver (McLelland, 2006). Martial arts terminology, when applied to relationships depicted in yaoi/BL material, is likely to have a particular resonance for Japanese audiences, as the historical archetype of same sex male love in Japan was, beginning in the thirteenth century, the relationship between a samurai and his younger companion (MacDuff, 1996, p. 252). This historical archetype of homoeroticism may well be part of the explanation for the ‘hierarchical’ structure and age difference that predominantly informs yaoi/BL relationships, at least if one shares Altman’s (1996) belief in “the continuing importance of premodern forms of sexual organization” to an appropriate understanding of contemporary sexualities (p. 89). Yet, in the yaoi/BL context, ‘hierarchical’ should not necessarily be understood in the same way as one has come to think of it in the context of much Western sexually explicit material. In particular, associating seme with ‘top’ and uke with ‘bottom,’ as those terms are used in the context of Western gay male sex/ pornography, would not do justice to the distinctiveness of these roles in Japanese yaoi/BL culture. Drawing on antipornography feminist work (Dworkin, 1981; Dworkin and MacKinnon, 1988; MacKinnon, 1993; Leidholdt and Raymond, 1990), a number of commentators have criticized gay pornography as heteropatriarchal for its reliance on the top/bottom formula (Kendall, 1997; Stoltenberg, 1990a, 1990b). Others, including queer theorists, have argued that far from entrenching patriarchy, gay pornography or sex assists in destabilizing gender identity categories (Stychin, 1992, pp. 883–885) or the subject/object dialectic (Bersani, 1987). Even these arguments, however, if I read them correctly, do not deny that representations centred on dominance and submission are endemic in gay male pornography: indeed, if gay pornography/sex is the progressive force its apologists claim it is, it seems Gay Intimacy, Yaoi and the Ethics of Care Queer and Subjugated Knowledges... 201 to be so not only despite, but even through, the hierarchical organization of the relationships it enacts. Penetration tends to be key to this hierarchy, with the insertee assuming the subordinate role, following a pattern that dates at least as far back as Roman times (Cantarella, 1992). In the context of oral sex, to which I shall limit my observations in this paper for reasons of space, the bottom typically does the servicing. Contrast these conventions of gay male pornography with a typical seme– uke sexual encounter in yaoi/BL anime. For the uke to fellate the seme would be quite out of the question. Since the uke is at the receiving end of the ‘attack,’ it is the seme’s job to fellate the uke no less than it is his job to anally penetrate him, or, for that matter, to make the uke fall in love with him. A seme who knows what he is doing will also proceed to proclaim his enduring devotion by vowing to always protect the uke. For this, as for the age difference between participants, there are historical antecedents in Japanese culture—in particular, the seme’s proclaiming lifelong devotion echoes a literary tradition idealizing, and quite possibly codifying the etiquette of, homoerotic love between samurais and their companions (Eskridge, 1993, p. 1467; Schalow, 1993), and priests and their acolytes (MacDuff,1996, pp. 249–251; Schalow, 1993). These conventions of the yaoi/BL genre are as removed from those of standard Western gay male pornography/sex as they could be. Indeed, I would argue that ‘activity/passivity,’ rather than ‘dominance/submission,’ provides the most accurate conceptual framework for understanding much (if not all) yaoi/BL work. This does not necessarily contradict the observation that producers and consumers of the genre ultimately assert “the right to imagine sex which is not politically correct: that is sex which derives its interest from imagining power differentials, not equality” (McLelland, 2005, p. 74). The reason is clear: power asymmetries do not necessarily have to lead to relationships of dominance and submission. If the seme is the one who does (the pursuing, the romancing, the fellating, the penetrating), the uke predominantly is. He must, first of all, be a suitable object for the seme’s attentions. The first requirement, then, is for him to be a bishounen: a beautiful or pretty boy. He also needs to be the polar opposite of the seme, or he could not fall for him as hopelessly as he is supposed to. For example, since the uke needs the seme’s protection, he will have to be more vulnerable, innocent, and less experienced than the seme. This will generally mean that the uke will be smaller, shorter, younger and more feminine looking than the seme. Ultimately, it is also the reason why the uke’s eyes tend to be preposterously large. 202 Queer and Subjugated Knowledges.... Aleardo Zanghellini Intimacy as sex Two elements stand out for me in this model of intimacy when contrasted to the mainstream picture of sex emerging from much gay pornography and the hedonistic model (the marital model is by definition very much sanitized and desexualized, so the term of comparison, when examining sexual practices/interaction, must come from the hedonistic model). The first is that the sex going on in yaoi/BL lends itself to reinforcing heteropatriarchy less than the mainstream picture of gay sex promoted by pornography and the hedonistic model. With this, I am not implying that antipornography feminism is clearly correct in its understanding of gay sex (indeed I deliberately refrain from taking a position in that debate). I do mean to imply, however, that the antipornography reading of gay pornography/sex is not implausible. In contrast to pragmatist or poststructuralist views to the contrary, Eco (1990) argues that not every reading of a text is as good as any other reading. While he concedes that it may be impossible to say which is the best reading, he argues that it is often possible to identify the bad or implausible readings of a text, because they run counter to the text’s intention. By this, Eco means that they are not sustained by the text taken as a whole, and that they ignore the stylistic and other conventions that allow for the uniform (as opposed to fragmentary or arbitrary) reading of a text. If we treat the picture of sex emerging from gay porn and the hedonistic model as a text, the antipornography reading appears to be everything but an implausible interpretation of it, unless we are prepared to argue, as I am not, that the all male context in which it is enacted is somehow free of heteropatriarchal semantic conventions. Whereas much gay pornography, therefore, is eminently—albeit not exclusively—readable in heteropatriarchal terms, the picture of same sex desire emerging from yaoi/BL, even once it leaves the all female context of its production and fandom, remains less amenable to heteropatriarchal readings, and hence less likely to reinforce heteropatriarchy. In particular, when it is a seme—by all standards the masculine element in the pairxii— that does the servicing on an uke (who doesn’t merely suffer, but enjoys, the experience), there just isn’t the same scope that there is in gay porn/sex for reading/experiencing the act of oral intercourse as fetishization of male power and powerful masculinity. In the mainstream picture of gay male sex, even role reversal (where the top switches to bottom and vice versa) does not guarantee escaping heteropatriarchal signification. True, on a queer reading, role reversal (and indeed the very fact that in gay sex it is always a male that necessarily inhabits the bottom role) is at least partially disrupting of gender binarisms and Gay Intimacy, Yaoi and the Ethics of Care Queer and Subjugated Knowledges... 203 hierarchies. But there is always the response that role reversal is no more than just that, and does not actually undermine the integrity of signification of the masculine top role and feminized bottom role, no matter who inhabits them. In contrast, in yaoi/BL sex the seme does not fellate the uke as an effect of temporarily inhabiting a bottom role. His seme role is, rather, partly constituted and defined by his providing the servicing in oral intercourse. His (masculine) role is constructed at the outset in a way that does not consistently glorify and narcissistically re-enact male power and powerful masculinity. Performing oral sex is partly intelligible in terms of an ethics of care focused on concern for the other and positive obligations—at least to the extent that much of the thrill in performing oral sex is the pleasure of giving, of physically pleasing one’s partner more than oneself or even at the expense of one’s own sensorial pleasure.xiii For who will deny that, from the point of view of purely physical comfort, gagging—pardon the pun—sucks? Of course giving head may be pleasurable in a number of ways, some of which are no less sensorial in nature than the pleasure one gets from being fellated. But my point is that much of what makes fellatio distinctly pleasurable for the fellator—in a way in which, say, eating a banana just isn’t—is precisely that idea of giving and self-sacrifice. In a context, however, where that act of giving is represented or accepted as a tribute to the masculinity of a top—as his due—the significance of that idea is always liable to be elided by, or subsumed under, the fetishization of male power that the fellatio symbolizes. The unavailability of that context in yaoi/BL representations of oral sex (where, as already noted, it is the seme who fellates the uke) precludes the elision of fellatio’s valence as a sexual act informed by an ethics of care. Intimacy as familiarity The second element I wish to draw attention to is the seme professing his lifelong devotion for, and intention to protect, the uke. Comparable elements are absent from the hedonistic model of gay intimacy, which is largely centred on casual one-off encounters. Nor is the hedonistic model in this sense just an ideal type; rather, it operates like a normative reality: “in a…study of single men, many expressed a view that the commercial scene encouraged superficial sexual contact and had difficulty finding more enduring partnerships” (Adam, 2006, p. 7). It is striking how neatly the opposition ‘ethics of care’ versus ‘ethics of justice’ maps onto the opposition between the yaoi/BL (female produced) model of intimacy and the hedonistic (male defined) model. On the one hand, the seme’s vows make sense in terms of an ethics of care emphasizing 204 Queer and Subjugated Knowledges.... Aleardo Zanghellini relationships, interdependence, responsibility and positive obligations. On the other hand, the practice of consensual one night stands sits well with an ethics of justice and its focus on freedom from interference, individuals and their entitlements, including their (admittedly, sacrosanct) right to sexual autonomy and pleasure. But in standing opposed to hedonistic intimacy, yaoi/BL intimacy does not merely replicate marital intimacy—the other side of mainstream gay. On the one hand, yaoi/BL intimacy is not explicitly or implicitly desexualized in the same way as marital intimacy. On the other hand, yaoi and shounen-ai’s (BL’s precursor) very raison d’être was dissatisfaction with the stultifying constraints of marital heteronormativity and the storylines it generated. In this sense, the (implicit) permanence and caring dimensions of the seme–uke relationship cannot point in the direction of some idealized ‘happily ever after’ model of domestic bliss. It may not be clear where they do point, but it’s clear to me that at least they don’t point there. Take the temporal dimension. The logic of interdependent longevity and aging typical of heteronormative temporality (‘growing old together’) is very much unlike BL/yaoi’s temporality. This is significant, because it is against the frame of reference of BL/yaoi’s own temporality that the seme’s vows of endless devotion need to be read. To understand that frame of reference, consider that often we don’t know the age of yaoi/BL characters; when we do, they invariably look younger than they are, while at the same time not looking of any age at all. Most of them don’t age: by the end of the adventure, if they have not died young, they are still young. Thus, when they display signs of dementia, it is not of the senile type, but rather a mark of permanent youthful idiocy and even, occasionally, of their being kawaii (cute)—a quality typically, if by no means exclusively, associated with childhood and childishness in Japan. Crucially, the lives of yaoi/BL characters are generally extraordinary,xiv so it is quite inconceivable to think of them as ‘settling down’ or doing any of the things that ‘responsible’ adult citizenship is known for involving. Yaoi/BL temporality is then queer in Halberstam’s sense. Like the temporality of the hedonistic model that Halberstam (2005) discusses (and yet in a different way), it is not connoted by “temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance” (p. 6) which “form the base of nearly every definition of the human in nearly all of our modes of understanding…[including] our understandings of the affective and the aesthetic” (p. 152)—that is, among others, our understandings of intimacy. Gay Intimacy, Yaoi and the Ethics of Care Queer and Subjugated Knowledges... 205 Admittedly we don’t have the option of not growing physiologically old that manga characters do. But ‘physiology’ is itself a discursive domain that, while undoubtedly useful in, say, medical contexts, does not have to rigidly construct the trajectory and organization of intimate relationships, or at least not to the extent that I suspect it does in the marital model of intimacy. If Halberstam (2005) is right in saying that “[f]or queers the separation between youth and adulthood quite simply does not hold” (p. 174), yaoi/BL seems to usher in a queer conceptual economy in which the separation between adulthood and seniority matters less. Yaoi/BL intimacy: Loveless I will conclude with a reading of the 2005 BL anime Loveless, adapted from an original manga by artist Youn Kouga, to briefly illustrate my point about the influence of the ethics of care on yaoi/BL models of intimacy. While above I have argued that the conventions of the genre generate models of male same sex intimacy informed by an ethics of care, what is intriguing about Loveless is that its intelligibility as a text promoting an ‘ethics of care’ mode of relationality is dependent on the characters’ defying those conventions. Loveless is about twelve year old Ritsuka, who has trouble remembering what he used to be like before his elder brother Seimei’s death two years before, and is concerned that his current self may not reflect who he really is. Ritsuka is befriended by nineteen year old Soubi, who tells him that Seimei and he used to be a fighting couple, trained in the art of fighting by casting magical spells at the Seven Moons School. A fighting couple comprises a ‘Fighter,’ who inflicts damage on the couple’s opponents, and a ‘Sacrifice,’ who receives the damage during fights. Soubi also informs Ritsuka that Seimei wanted the two of them to fight together, declares his love for the boy and French-kisses him on their first encounter. Ritsuka is confused and irritated (including at Soubi’s protestations of love), but the two soon find themselves fighting side by side—Ritsuka as Sacrifice and Soubi as Fighter—against other couples determined to kill them and sent by the School. Defeating their opponents apparently will bring them closer to solving the riddle of Seimei’s death. The fights are erotically charged, as the more intense the bond between Fighter and Sacrifice, the more effective the couple will be in inflicting damage on the opponents and repelling their attacks, which gives Ritsuka and Soubi an excuse to kiss and embrace during fights. As more and more opponents appear, Soubi starts confronting them alone, taking on the damage that his Sacrifice should receive, which causes Ritsuka much frustration. Soubi has explained to him that a Sacrifice/ Fighter relationship is comparable to a master/slave one, encouraging Ritsuka to take charge, but when Ritsuka reluctantly does so to order Soubi 206 Queer and Subjugated Knowledges.... Aleardo Zanghellini not to fight alone, Soubi repeatedly disobeys, enduring severe physical pain. As Ritsuka becomes less and less shy in giving orders to Soubi, the conduct of the latter becomes increasingly less compulsive. His actions are no longer explainable in terms of Seimei’s instructions, Ritsuka’s orders, or being destined to act in a certain way. Soubi’s moving principle seems to be the love he has genuinely come to feel for Ritsuka. Sexual activity in the anime is never enacted, not even off screen: in Ritsuka’s world, virgins have cat ears that they shed only upon their ‘first time,’ yet Ritsuka sports his pair until the end of the anime. The erotic tension and romantic involvement between the main characters is not acted out, but sublimated into their Sacrifice/Fighter and master/slave relationship. Starting with the Fighter/Sacrifice relationship, Ritsuka as Sacrifice and Soubi as Fighter quite literally embody, respectively, feminine values and virile martial virtues—just as one may expect given the status of the former as uke and of the latter as seme. Indeed, not even Soubi’s refusal to allow Ritsuka to play his role as Sacrifice, albeit disturbing the Sacrifice/uke and Fighter/seme associations, seems to compromise this conventional gendered organization of meaning. This is because Soubi’s conduct here could be construed as the ultimate in heroic masculinity. However, on an even more compelling reading, I would argue that Soubi’s refusal makes him a defender of a feminine ethics of care. In particular, Soubi’s rejection of the abstract rules that define his and Ritsuka’s respective roles and prerogatives is reminiscent of Antigone’s defiant rejection of the ethics of (formal) justice embodied in the King’s law in order to give effect to the imperatives of care, compassion and contextual decision-making. The same privileging of an ethics of care over an ethics of justice is at work in Soubi’s refusal to obey Ritsuka’s orders. As master—a role thrust upon Ritsuka by the rules of the game, which appear to codify some sort of mysterious higher law—it is Ritsuka’s right to have Soubi obey him. However, as Soubi’s express acknowledgement of that right gives way to his unwillingness to honour it in practice out of concern for Ritsuka himself, a reorientation of his priorities occurs, readily intelligible in terms of an ethics of care. The reorientation here is particularly powerful because of its paradoxical trajectory: the initial enthusiasm with which Soubi encourages Ritsuka to take on his role as master may be motivated by a willingness to make up for the power imbalance that Ritsuka’s young age and emotional vulnerability inevitably impart to the relationship. Thus, in a sense, making an uke the master and a seme his willing slave already seems to carry to the extreme the distinctively ‘feminine’ and caring masculinity of the seme. Yet, as explained, it is Soubi’s eventual rejection of his slave status that Gay Intimacy, Yaoi and the Ethics of Care Queer and Subjugated Knowledges... 207 ends up accomplishing even more perfectly his alignment with feminine values of care. One of the most sexually tense moments in the anime is when Ritsuka, at Soubi’s request, pierces the ears of the latter so as for Soubi to bear a permanent physical reminder of their relationship. The hymenal imagery that the act of piercing conjures up seems to cast Ritsuka in a seme like role—a move patently against the conventions of the genre. Yet the exaggerated smallness of Ritsuka’s body compared to Soubi’s crouching lankiness, as well as the awkward hesitation, serious concentration, and physical effort with which the boy performs the task keep him firmly anchored to his uke identity. The scene is again fruitfully readable in terms of an ethics of care. In particular, the seme renounces the ethics of justice where he gives up his rights (to penetrate) and makes himself available for ‘penetration’ by the uke, subordinating and even sacrificing the integrity of his status to the overriding importance of their relationship—whose value, as explained above, is symbolized by the piercings themselves. (The sacrificial connotation of Soubi’s conduct is arguably reinforced by an imagery of crucifixion invisibly supplementing the much less gruesome images visible onscreen: that imagery is unconsciously activated through the idea of a man who willingly suffers, for the sake of a greater good, his flesh to be pierced by metal.) By the end of the anime, which leaves much unexplained, Ritsuka has established an intimate bond with Soubi and meaningful friendships with secondary characters in the story, and has become less preoccupied with his own individuality and the need to recapture his previous self. In this sense Ritsuka too experiences an ethical reorientation towards values of care. The relationship between Ritsuka (an emotionally vulnerable twelve year old) and Soubi (a seductive young adult) would almost necessarily be exploitative if organized on the basis of either a logic of heteronormative marital domesticity or hedonistic counter(hetero)normativity. As a yaoi/BL relationship oriented along the lines of an ethics of care, on the other hand, the intimate bond between the two main characters manages not only to be nonexploitative, but also to empower Ritsuka. Importantly, this is not accomplished at the cost of a sanitizing desexualization of the relationship. If anything, as a BL fan who disliked the anime put it while reviewing Loveless, “[t]he writers have done all they can to sexualize [the Soubi–Ritsuka relationship] without progressing them beyond a kiss” (Summer Queen, 2007). For example, Soubi’s gay male roommate misses no opportunity to call Soubi a ‘pervert’ and ‘rorikon,’xv and Soubi exudes so much seductive seme charm that it is a wonder how 208 Queer and Subjugated Knowledges.... Aleardo Zanghellini anybody could resist him for any length of time at all. Ultimately, the very fact of cat ears peeping out of Ritsuka’s hair is a constant reminder to the viewer of the sexual potential of the relationship—of an erotic tension always on the verge of eruption. Conclusions If the marital and hedonistic models reflect, in different ways, a quintessentially male way of conceptualizing intimacy, then decentring their dominance is not just a matter of promoting an intrinsically valuable diversity of (morally sound) sexual identity forms and practices, but also of trying to rethink intimacy in more symmetrical (less gendered) terms. This is not to say that the ethics of care is superior to the ethics of justice; rather it is to say that making the ethics of care play a greater role than it currently does in defining our conceptualizations and practices of intimacy may afford a more balanced range of options in the realm of relationality. And yaoi/BL may be just the sort of subjugated knowledge that could prove helpful in this enterprise. Manga and anime may look like an unlikely starting point to thinking through alternative models of intimacy, but Halberstam’s own work on “pixarvolt” (Halberstam, 2007) suggests that alternative visions may lie here and now in the most unpredictable places. The classical pro-marriage piece is Stoddard’s ‘Why Gay People Should Seek the Right to Marry’ (1989), while its anti-marriage counterpart is Ettelbrick’s ‘Since When is Marriage a Path to Liberation?’ (1989). ii This terminology is used both because I think it’s as descriptively as accurate as any, and because I want to be deliberately provocative. Whereas ‘marital’ will make many a queer reader cringe by conjuring up the spectre of heteronormativity, ‘hedonistic’ will make them feel uncomfortable to the extent that the word is commonly used to express disapproval. This suits my purpose, which is to encourage critical scrutiny of both these dominant models of gay intimacy. iii These two understandings of intimacy may be gendered in significant ways. In a North American study on what college men and women understand by intimacy “[w]omen tended to focus primarily on love and affection and the expression of warm feelings” whereas “[f]or men, a key feature of intimacy was sex and physical closeness” (Hatfield and Rapson, 1996, p. 161). iv The tolerance of Japanese authorities for this material is largely attributable to the convention (now no longer followed) of interpreting the Japanese criminal code’s obscenity provision as permitting the representations of all manner of erotic representations so long as they did not explicitly show adult genitalia and pubic hair (Schodt, 1996, pp. 135–136). v The decentring of the plot within yaoi is expressed in the very term that designates the genre—the word is an acronym for the Japanese ‘Yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi,’ which means ‘No build-up, no foreclosure, and no meaning’ (Kinsella, 1998, p. 301). vi In this connection, it is significant that some Japanese gay men dislike the genre (McLelland, 2000). i Gay Intimacy, Yaoi and the Ethics of Care Queer and Subjugated Knowledges... 209 While I refrain from openly discussing the goodness or badness of current forms of gay intimacy, an argument advocating the diversification of forms of intimacy beyond the current range cannot avoid the question of the moral soundness of that which is not currently part of that range and which we seek to include in it. This is because expanding that range must ultimately be with a view to promoting personal autonomy, seen as necessary for leading a valuable life; but while the availability of bad options does not detract from the value of personal autonomy, it is only when autonomy is oriented towards the good that it is valuable (Raz, 1986, p. 381). viii Essentially these representations employ different strategies in order to contain the threat that transgender poses to the gender system and heterodomesticity. ix “The different voice I describe is characterized not by gender but theme. Its association with women is an empirical observation, and it is primarily through women that I trace its development. But this association is not absolute…No claims are made about the origins of the differences described” (Gilligan, 1982, p. 2). x It is to Butler that we owe the insight that because sex itself, as ‘matter’, is only accessible through discourse, it too is discursively constructed like gender (Butler, 1993). xi If not as an effect of the specific gender of yaoi/BL’s producers and their Japanese audience, the proposition that yaoi/BL is more likely to reflect an ethics of care than Western gay models of intimacy arguably holds as a matter of cultural differences. As a Japanese cultural product, yaoi/BL is likely to be at least partially influenced by the worldview of Confucianism, whose ethical vision, it has been argued, displays remarkable similarities with Gilligan’s ethics of care (Li, 1994). xii Both seme and uke are normally extremely androgynous looking, but the greater ‘femininity’ of the uke (who has larger eyes, is smaller and shorter, has a rounder face and a small triangular chin, is younger and more vulnerable looking than the seme, and generally sports highly stylized hairstyles) make the seme look clearly masculine through the logic of “masculine supplementarity” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 131). xiii This is not to deny that there may be other illuminating lenses through which acts of oral sex can be construed and the pleasure they provide accounted for. xiv I mean this not in the Randian sense of ‘extraordinary’ that Halberstam criticizes, but in the more mundane sense that yaoi/BL characters inhabit, as often as not, magical worlds or tend to find themselves involved in unlikely situations. xv Rorikon is a Japanese abbreviated rendition of ‘Lolita Complex’; it refers to the sexualization of underage and even prepubescent girls. Rorikon is a particular theme of certain manga. For a discussion of rorikon as well as other erotic topoi in manga, see Shigematsu (1999). vii 210 Queer and Subjugated Knowledges.... Aleardo Zanghellini Adam, B. D. (2006). Relationship innovation in male couples. Sexualities, 9, 5-26. Altman, D. (1996). Rupture or continuity? The internationalization of gay identities. Social Text, 48, 77-94. Bersani, L. (1987). Is the rectum a grave? AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, 43, 197-222. Butler, J. P. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of ‘sex’. New York, NY: Routledge. Calhoun, C. (1988). Justice, care, gender bias. The Journal of Philosophy, 85, 451-63. Cantarella, E. (1992). Bisexuality in the ancient world. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Delany, S. R. (1994). Silent interviews: On language, race, sex, science fiction, and some comics. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Dworkin, A. (1981). Pornography: Men possessing women. London, England: Women’s Press. Dworkin, A., & Mackinnon, C. (1988). Pornography and civil rights: A new day for women's equality. Minneapolis, MN: Organizing Against Pornography. Eco, U. (1990). I limiti dell’interpretazione. Milano, Italy: Bompiani. Edwards, T. (2006). Cultures of masculinity. New York, NY: Routledge. Eskridge, W. N. Jr. (1993). A history of same-sex marriage. Virginia Law Review, 79, 1419-513. Ettelbrick, P. L. (1989). Since when is marriage a path to liberation? OUT/LOOK National Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, 9, 14-17. Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. In H. Dreyfus, & P. Rabinow (Eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics. Hertfordshire: Harvester Press. Foucault, M. (1997). Ethics: Subjectivity and truth: Essential works of Foucault 19541984. New York, NY: New Press. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theories and women’s development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Halberstam, J. (2005). In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York: New York University Press. Halberstam, J. (2007). Pixarvolt—animation and revolt. Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture, 6(6). Retrieved June 3, 2011 from http://flowtv.org/2007/08/pixarvolt-%e2%80%93-animation-and-revolt/ Hatfield, E., & Rapson, R. L. (1996). Love and sex: Cross-cultural perspectives. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Hennen, P. (2005). Bear bodies, bear masculinity: recuperation, resistance or retreat? Gender and Society, 19, 25-43. intimate. (2011). In Oxford Dictionaries. Retrieved June 3, 2011 from http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/intimacy Kendall, C. N. (1997). Gay male pornography after Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium: a call for gay male cooperation in the struggle for sex equality. Wisconsin Women’s Law Journal, 12, 21-82. Gay Intimacy, Yaoi and the Ethics of Care Queer and Subjugated Knowledges... 211 Kinsella, S. (1998). Japanese subculture in the 1990s: Otaku and the amateur manga movement. Journal of Japanese Studies, 24, 289-316. Leidholdt, D., & Raymond, J. G. (Eds.). (1990). The sexual liberals and the attack on feminism. New York, NY: Pergamon. Li, C. (1994). The Confucian concept of Jen and the feminist ethics of care: a comparative study. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 9, 70-89. MacDuff, W. (1996). Beautiful boys in No drama: the idealization of homoerotic desire. Asian Theatre Journal, 13, 248-58. MacKinnon, C. (1993). Only words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McLelland, M. (2000). Male homosexuality and popular culture in modern Japan. Intersections, 3. Retrieved June 3, 2011 from http://intersections.anu.edu.au/ issue3/mclelland2.html McLelland, M. (2005). The world of yaoi: the internet, censorship and the global ‘boys’ love fandom. Australian Feminist Law Journal, 23, 61-77. McLelland, M. (2006). Why are Japanese comics full of boys bonking? Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media, 10. Retrieved June 3, 2011 from http://blogs.arts.unimelb.edu.au/refractory/2006/12/04/why-are-japanesegirls%e2%80%99-comics-full-of-boys-bonking1-mark-mclelland/ Raz, J. (1986). The morality of freedom. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Schalow, P. G. (1993). The invention of a literary tradition of male love. Kitamura Kigin’s Iwatsutsuji. Monumenta Nipponica, 48, 1-31. Schodt, F. L. (1996). Dreamland Japan: Writings on modern manga. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press. Shigematsu, S. (1999). Dimensions of desire: sex, fantasy and fetish in Japanese comics. In J. A. Lent (Ed.), Themes and issues in Asian cartooning: Cute, cheap, mad and sexy. Bowling Green, KY: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Stoddard, T. (1989). Why gay people should seek the right to marry. OUT/LOOK National Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, 9, 8-12. Stoltenberg, J. (1990a). Gays and the propornography movements: having the hots for sex discrimination. In M. S. Kimmel (Ed.), Men confronting pornography. New York, NY: Crown Publishers. Stoltenberg, J. (1990b). Pornography and freedom. In M. S. Kimmel (Ed.), Men confronting pornography. New York, NY: Crown Publishers. Stychin, C. F. (1992). Exploring the limits: feminism and the legal regulation of gay male pornography. Vermont Law Review, 16, 857-900. Summer Queen (2007). Review: Loveless. Retrieved September 10, 2008 from http://www.boysonboysonfilm.com/anime/loveless3.html 212 Queer and Subjugated Knowledges.... Kane Race RESPONSE YAMETE, O-SHIRI GA ITAI! Kane Race The University of Sydney Ever since Foucault’s comments about the creative possibilities of gay life in his well-known interviews ‘Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity’ (1997a) and ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’ (1997b)—and no doubt before these—queer scholars have been turning to queer sexual subcultures to elaborate and archive alternative modes of intimacy, pleasure, knowledge, ethics, performance, affiliation and care. Zanghellini’s paper is unusual in this regard, in that it turns to a Japanese women’s comic genre to look for a more satisfactory model of gay male intimacy than the forms he finds at hand in gay culture. There is much that is interesting about this sexually graphic comic genre in which sex itself “does not seem to be the “point” but is used to underline the centrality of the characters’ feelings,” as Mark McLelland puts it (McLelland, 2003, p. 55). But when I first read Zanghellini’s initial essay into this area, I feared that he was burying gay culture a little too quickly in his enthusiasm to endorse a fantasy of gay life generated by differently embodied subjects. To be sure, I share Zanghellini’s sense of the problem of dividing gay life into marital and hedonistic alternatives. My contribution begins by querying whether such a dichotomy can adequately capture gay relations in their present configuration. The acronym yaoi stands for ‘yama nashi ochi nashi imi nashi,’ which translates as ‘no climax, no point, no meaning.’ The implicit detachment of sex from teleological development and psychological complexity is refreshing. But there is an alternative acronym offered playfully by Japanese fans of the genre: ‘yamete, o-shiri ga itai’ or ‘stop, my ass hurts!’ (McLelland, 2003, p. 277). And, since this phrase seems to capture so well some of the complex pleasures of—and objections to—charged relations like submission, subjugation and appropriation, I’ve adopted the phrase to stand as the title of my rejoinder. Shapes of intimacy Zanghellini introduces a study by Barry Adam to isolate two models of ‘Western’ gay life—the marital model and the hedonistic model (Adam, 2006). Gay men are depicted as caught between these two alternatives. It would be easy enough to believe that when gay men don’t opt for either one model or the other (which many don’t) it is because, effectively, they have opted for both. But ‘opting for both’ is not the same as opting for one or the Yamete, O-Shiri Ga Itai! Queer and Subjugated Knowledges... 213 other: the sexual order requires that these options be counterposed, such that one stands as the (im)moral alternative to the other. Recognizing this point allows us to appreciate the practical inventiveness and intimate labour of those who try to negotiate such relations. Adam’s study is entitled ‘Relationship Innovation in Gay Male Couples’ for this reason, and he goes to some length to identify the variety of practical strategies and understandings that people devise to make things work, largely in the absence of approved social scripts (Adam, 2006). Nor should we underestimate the potentially challenging work on the self that such negotiations may entail. It is not ‘nothing’ to decentre sex as the primary gauge of interpersonal trust and commitment in the context of contemporary romantic narratives, not to mention such deeply ingrained masculine traits as sexual possessiveness and territorialism. Moreover, since Adam’s is a study of gay male couples, he doesn’t try to catalog the huge variety of relations, connections, intimacies, and modes of belonging that may feature in more ‘casual’ male–male sexual cultures, or that do not revolve around the couple form. One rather obvious example travels, in the West, under the term ‘fuck-buddies,’ but this term doesn’t really begin to describe the multiple configurations of friendship, sex, affection, and relational play that queer people habitually improvise. Such relations are often demoted as commitment-free and unreliable, and it is true that only infrequently do they involve the forms of capital transfer and established duty and obligation that make the couple form such a deeply invested and fiercely guarded unit. But this difference should not detract from the way such relations can model ‘being sexual together’ in a way that affords each partner some degree of sexual autonomy, for example. And no doubt there are other modes of care, attention, interaction and affective relation that are worth noticing even in more anonymous encounters. These modes are difficult to recognize or sustain as legitimate because they lack the metacultural matrix that naturalizes heterosexuality and enshrines its modes of intimacy, sustenance and intelligibility (Berlant and Warner, 1998). But I think there is much to be accounted for in the shadowlands between normative domesticity and what appears to be ‘reckless hedonism.’ Indeed one might re-envision intimacy fairly radically with reference to what appear to be fairly mundane and widely accessible erotic scenes. For some homosexually-attracted men, for example, a biographical person is not the privileged locus of the term ‘sexual relationship.’ For some folks, the phrase ‘sexual relationship’ might better describe a relationship with a scene or a place—such as a park, a venue, or a beach—with more or less regular attendees and some level of transient participation. Take the old blokes down at Congwong Beach, a nudist spot south of Sydney. On a warm weekend, they’re engaged in various forms of erotic and semi-erotic display 214 Queer and Subjugated Knowledges.... Kane Race and appreciation. There’s a more or less regular crowd, and a few unfamiliar faces, young and old. Some of them have sexual contact there; some catch up with friends or recent acquaintances. Some of them just watch, or do both—or neither—depending on the mood that takes them. Some share local stories and conjecture with visitors and passers-by. Some stroll up and down the beach, building gradual networks of intermittent arousal. The significance of the sex that happens in these contexts for their participants may be something so ‘small’ as a sense of assurance in the possibility of encountering affection, good will, or just mutual interest from random strangers. At any rate, the details of romantic personhood simply do not best organize, nor necessarily describe, the nature of some people’s affectionate or erotic attachments. The sort of sustenance and pleasure these scenes provide for their participants—and the forms of friendship, belonging, sociability and diffuse eroticism they embody—are not easily accounted for in conventional taxonomies that dichotomize sex in terms of ‘regular’ or ‘casual’ partners. But to reduce them to one of two models is to miss important dimensions of queer pleasure, belonging, and even affective survival. Nor should we discount too quickly the ethical repertoires that may characterize some casual sex cultures. But if we want to appreciate these, it is probably worth dispensing with pre-established normative frames steeped in the language of heterosexual relations, and attend instead to the modes of conduct, imagination, interaction and commitment that may emerge from embodied participation in these scenes. In other words, rather than measuring sexual cultures against pre-given normative criteria, I wonder what can be learnt by remaining open to the cultural and practical frames and sensibilities that surface. Samuel Delany once found in the porn theatres of Times Square what he saw as one of the few remaining zones of pleasurable “interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will,” which prompted him to devise a highly original vision of urban relationality (Delany, 1999, p. 111). Christopher Castiglia has documented the associations some gay men make between venue participation and certain counter-memories of gay life, which are then claimed by some gay men to be politically motivating, inspiring commitment to a projected collectivity rather than a private unit (Castiglia, 2000). Gayle Rubin has documented the modes of affiliation and improvised kinship that took shape in North American S/M sexual subcultures, which were closely linked to the formation of new pleasures (Rubin, 2000). Michael Warner finds in queer public cultures a “special kind of sociability” and ethicopolitical sensibility based in the shared inhabitation of shame (Warner, 1999). And Halberstam, Rubin, Ann Cvetkovich, Jill Julius Matthews, Lauren Berlant, Ulrika Dahl and others have taken a similar approach to lesbian and transgender erotic cultures, including some that sexualize domination and submission (Berlant, Yamete, O-Shiri Ga Itai! Queer and Subjugated Knowledges... 215 1997; Cvetkovich, 2003; Halberstam, 1998, 2005; Matthews, 1997; Rubin 1992, 1984; Volcano & Dahl, 2008). My point is not to prescribe any particular sexual practice or mode of cultural participation. Nor do I want to deny that such cultures can be experienced in terms of loneliness, boredom or desperation (no less at least than marital relations). But I do want to remain attentive to the sensibilities, values, counter-intimacies, and material forms of pleasure that may characterize and/or be elaborated in these ‘normally degraded’ sexual scenes. In her article ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of Sexuality,’ Rubin importantly argued for a less presumptuous way of judging sexual acts than what usually passes (including within some feminisms) for sexual morality, based on “the ways partners treat one another, the level of mutual consideration, the presence or absence of coercion, and the quantity and qualities of the pleasures they provide” (Rubin, 1984, p. 283). Here ‘ethics’ can only be discerned by attending to lived practices of sex and intimacy, and denotes embodied codes of conduct and ways of life. i Attending to such ‘ethics’ is a long way from claiming that queer sexual scenes are some haven of egalitarian and communitarian values. It is merely to promote more open-ended—even ‘ethological’—inquiry into the affects, values, pleasures, and logics that such scenes and practices embody. The work of fantasy I want to turn now to a brief consideration of what yaoi does for its principal producers and consumers—Japanese women and schoolgirls. And considered from this perspective, there is certainly something fantastic about how yaoi responds to the social relations of sex and gender in which it is embedded. It would appear that yaoi enables an imaginative dispensation with gender norms for Japanese women and schoolgirls—one that is specifically sexually expressive. And it is useful to situate this genre in these terms, because it helps us even better to appreciate the potentially subversive social work of the erotic imagination. McLelland argues that the main attraction of boy-love stories for Japanese women is that they graphically represent love between relative equals in a highly statusconscious society (McLelland, 2000). He illustrates this point by comparing the depiction of homosexual sex in women’s comics and men’s comics. According to McLelland, Japanese men’s comics typically represent sex as an act of domination along established lines of power differential (such as gender and age). This is true not only of straight male comics, but gay ones, “where the female victims of mainstream men’s manga are replaced by junior men who are used and abused by their seniors (and shown loving it)” (McLelland, 2000, p. 279). Yaoi, by contrast, would appear to minimize the impact of these status differentials by equalizing the gender, relative age, 216 Queer and Subjugated Knowledges.... Kane Race and attractiveness of the parties. This enables an elaboration of feminine sexuality via the representation of beautiful young men having sex. There is some debate about whether yaoi as a genre can be considered pornographic. Some critics and authors say so, while others insist that the narratives are beautiful and pure, while still others qualify this claim by saying that the genre purifies love from “the tarnished male-female framework of heterosexual love” (Fujimoto cited in Welker, 2006, p. 857). Whatever the case, it would appear that the genre has some erotic value for its readers. But its stories are not necessarily as touchy-feely as one might be led to believe. McLelland mentions a yaoi website called ‘Sadistic’ which contains original stories about men in their twenties with an emphasis on SM and hard sex (McLelland, 2003). And yaoi isn’t the only sexually explicit genre of women’s comics : apparently there is a genre of ‘ladies’ comics,’ produced by and for women, whose scenes of women molesting men on subways and enjoying such activities as gang rape and sodomy would, in the words of one commentator, “make European and American feminist s wince” (Schodt cited in McLelland, 2000, p. 58). So it would seem that the gender of a genre’s primary producers and consumers actually gives few guarantees about the niceties of the sexual relations depicted. It’s not clear either that a Western feminist ‘ethics of care’ is the best framework by which to understand the relations depicted in yaoi. Another relevant concept is the concept of amae, which was coined by the scholar Doi Takeo to describe relations of dependence in Japanese society (Takeo, 1971). The verb amaeru does not translate well into English, but it is generally used to describe an individual’s behaviour aimed at inducing a person in a position of authority to take care of him/her. It can be translated as ‘to depend,’ ‘to be spoiled,’ ‘to let oneself be spoiled’ or ‘to take advantage,’ but does not carry the social stigma of weakness or childishness that is associated with it in Western society. According to Doi, amae behaviour is proactive and implies a greater degree of agency than simple dependence. The subject seeking amae is the one who initiates the superior/inferior relationship, by putting themselves in a position of dependency which they then turn to their own advantage to achieve specific goals. Interestingly, amae is not a gendered notion. It applies indifferently to male and female individuals and to sexual and nonsexual relations. In a way, amae appears to be the reverse of the ‘ethics of care’ discussed by Gilligan (1982): the male subject seeking amae finds his agency in acting defenseless and dependent in order to obtain his goals while reinstating the authority of the older party and the value of the relationship. These technicalities aside, one may be able to recognize general differences in the depiction of homosexual love in girls’ comics : more emotional build- Yamete, O-Shiri Ga Itai! Queer and Subjugated Knowledges... 217 up, less emphasis on penis size and the mechanics of penetration, less obvious power differentials between the parties. And it is interesting in this regard that, since the Japanese language is very sensitive to differences in status such as age, yaoi cannot entirely dispense with power differentials. But what is also interesting, according to my colleague Rebecca Suter who has done some work in this area (Suter, forthcoming), is that these power differentials become a source of negotiation, intrigue and speculation. So while Zanghellini is right to observe that the uke/seme roles are a concern of most yaoi manga, these roles are not necessarily fixed nor even easy to detect upon first reading. Within fan communities, when a new series appears, there are often heated debates about who has the uke and who has the seme role in the story. This in itself suggests a space in which such roles are more performative, and not straightforwardly associated with a stable identity. It is clear then that yaoi is doing something very interesting for its readers. If traditional girls’ manga led young female readers to interiorize conventional gender roles through identification with the girl protagonists and their heteronormative love stories, in yaoi the choice of an exoticized Western setting and the gay male protagonists suspends that kind of identification and allows the readers to experiment with different models. Yaoi would appear to dislodge sex from its overdetermination by established power differentials for readers for whom such overdetermination may be experienced as stifling. For some, this provides a temporary escape, while for others, it plays a more galvanizing role in sex and gender experimentation. James Welker even cites some Japanese lesbians who describe these tales of beautiful young boys having sex as central to their identity formation (Welker, 2006). There is much to marvel at here, in terms of how the erotic imagination negotiates and responds to specific historical and material constraints. But to prescribe its representations as erotic fodder for differently embodied subjects, on the basis that they are more ‘ethically appropriate’? Well, that’s another story. My point is that the subversive operations of this genre are best grasped by relating them to the embodied conditions with or upon which they work. In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler speaks of the political importance of fantasy. She canvases fantasy as that which exposes the “realities to which we thought we were confined as open to transformation” (Butler, 2004, p. 217). The labour of fantasy is situated labour, even as it has recourse to sometimes wild appropriations. It names that process through which we creatively but unpredictably grapple with given norms, in provisional attempts to “derive our agency from the field of their operation” (2004, p. 32). This is all the more reason, it seems to me, to honour a certain free play or ‘autonomy’ of fantasy,ii rather than require it to conform in advance to 218 Queer and Subjugated Knowledges.... Kane Race certain a priori political or moral credentials. The project of generating subversive imaginaries may require us first to work up from lived conditions of embodiment to see how certain fantasies and representational practices negotiate given material circumstances, rather than attempting to prescribe certain values or investments for already sexual bodies. As a way of opening new erotic positions for women, yaoi does something interesting with the idea of homosexuality. If fantasy is reconfigurative work, what are gay fantasies doing with masculinity? However politically or morally inappropriate a given fantasy is deemed to be, it could be read as the body’s provisional attempt to find alternative ways of imagining and relating to the specific conditions and historical constraints in which it is embedded. Zanghellini’s analysis seems to turn on a certain configuration of oral sex, and it is good that he finds some inspiration on this count. The erotic imagination has recourse to all sorts of unexpected and productive appropriations (as the genre of yaoi, with its frequent recourse to exoticized Western settings, amply demonstrates). I’d only like to invite him to be more attentive to the many embodied forms of gay practice which are not always straightforwardly gendered, and whose power differentials are not at any rate generally or necessarily fixed to established social roles. And there are many more nuanced, embodied tales to be told, even by experienced hedonists, about lived practices of oral sex, where a garden variety blow job might encompass an expanding variety of affective modes in which power is more subtly or ambiguously exchanged: tasting, hankering, withholding, devouring, refusing, exposing, connecting, suspending, sharing, offering, taunting, tending, surrendering, munching, spitting, plunging, pleasuring, suckling, savouring, dangling, gobbling—need I go on? Recognizing these relational modes has become possible using the alternative methodologies for approaching queer embodiment and culture and subjugated knowledge developed by queer scholars. Making them work calls for an expansive practical imagination that doesn’t superimpose one ethical frame onto diverse others. Zanghellini draws our attention to some intriguing aspects of yaoi, which I have attempted to develop and expand upon here. But I have also tried to suggest another approach. Like other forms of queer eroticism, yaoi is doing something specific for its principal readers and producers, and while we might take inspiration (erotic or otherwise) from its representation of same sex intimacy, and from the creativity of its achievements, to situate it as a more desirable form of gay intimacy than those already being elaborated among gay men—especially on the basis that it is more ‘ethically appropriate’—may well be to neglect, both at home and abroad, the ethical innovation and subversive operations of queer eroticism and of fantasy itself. Yamete, O-Shiri Ga Itai! Queer and Subjugated Knowledges... 219 I would like to thank Rebecca Suter for very generously discussing yaoi with me and contributing substantially to the relevant sections of this response. i For a cognate approach to ethics in the context of HIV prevention, see Race (2003, 2007, 2008, 2009). 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