Here is your friendly neighboorhood librarian letting you know what young adult queerlit you simply must read.
Much of queer young adult literature is stuck in the coming out swamp. We want none of that. Here are a two wonderful books that approach being young and queer from a completely different perspective.
Boy meets boy by David Levithan
Boy meets boy takes place in queertopia. No, seriously. No one cares if the person you are taking to the prom has a penis, vagina, boobs or some kind of combination of all these. In fact, the star quarterback and the homecoming queen are The Same Person. Boy meets boy is a little gem and it takes me to my happy place. It’s not only gay friendly, but trans friendly as well. I’VE BEEN WAITING SO LONG FOR THIS BOOK.
It has the same effect on me as my favorite manga Yotsuba!%. It makes me happy.
The rest of this post will be brought to you in my mother tongue, swedish!
Pojkarna av Jessica Schiefauer
Det här är en bok om att inte känna sig hemma i sin egen kropp, att vilja krypa ur sitt eget skinn. Kanske handlar det om ett feministiskt uppror, om pojkarna i skolan och hur de tar sig rätten att röra vid unga tjejers kroppar. Eller så handlar det om att inte hör hemma i kropp. Det här är en bok som lämnar dörren vidöppen för olika tolkningar. Dessutom berör den längtan efter homoerotik ganska fantastiskt sätt. Pojkarna beskriver känslor som litteraturen sällan vågat närma sig och den gör det med ett unikt språk.
Det här är en av de bästa böcker jag någonsin läst. Jo, på riktigt.
Räkna med att jag kommer att återkomma till den här boken här på Robots. Den kräver Analys. Här ska navelskådas!
We are putting together a bibliography that will cover shojo manga, yuri, BL and basically anything else we find interesting. It’s not going to cover everything ever, but simply the things we find useful, sparkly or relevant to our interests.
The bibliography doesn’t contain all our favorites yet. We’ll come back and update this post with more stuff later.
Aoyama, Tomoko. & Hartley, Barbara. (Ed.) (2010). Girl reading girl in Japan. New York: RoutledgeIto, Kinko (2008). Manga in Japanese History. In: Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime. NY: M.E. Sharpe, p 26-47Kotani, Mari (2007). Ranma ½ Fan Fiction Writers: New Narrative Themes or the Same Old Story. In: Lunning, F. (Ed.) Mechademia 2: Networks of Desire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. 34-48
Levi, Antonia, McHarry, Mark & Pagliassotti, Dru (red.) (2010). Boys’ love manga: essays on the sexual ambiguity and cross-cultural fandom of the genre. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., Publishers
McLelland, Mark J. (2000). Male homosexuality in modern Japan: cultural myths and social realities. Richmond: Curzon
Matsui, Midori (1993). Little Girls Were Little Boys: Displaced Femininity in the Representation of Homosexuality in Japanese Girls’ Comics. In: Gunew, S. & Yeatman, Anna (Ed.) Feminism and the Politics of Difference. New South Wales, Austrailia: Allen and Unwin, p. 177-196
Ogi, Fusami (2001). Gender Insubordination in Japanese Comics (Manga) for Girls. In: Lenton, J. (Ed.) Illustrating Asia: Comics, Humor Magazines, and Picture Books. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. p. 171-186
Ogi, Fusami (2009). Beyond Shojo, Blending Gender. In: Heer, Jeet & Worcester, Kent (Ed.) A comics studies reader. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi
Shamoon, Deborah (2008). Situating the Shojo in Shojo Manga: Teenage Girls, Romance Comics, and Contemporary Japanese Culture. In: MacWilliams, M (Ed.) Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime. NY: M.E. Sharpe, 137 -154
Shamoon, Deborah (2007). Revolutionary Romance: The Rose of Versailles and the Transformation of Shojo Manga. In: Lunning, F. (Ed.) Mechademia 2: Networks of Desire.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. 3-18
Stevens Abbit, Erica, 2001. Androgyny and Otherness: Exploring the West through the Japanese Performative Body. Asian Theater Journal , Vol 18, p. 249-256.
Takahashi, Mizuki (2008). Opening the Closed World of Shojo Manga. In: MacWilliams, M (Ed.) Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime. NY: M.E. Sharpe, p 114-136
Toku, Masami (2007). Shojo Manga! Girls’ Comics! A Mirror of Girls’ Dreams. In: Lunning, F. (Ed.) Mechademia 2: Networks of Desire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. 19-33
Vincent, Keith (2007).A Japanese Electra and Her Queer Progeny. In: Lunning, F. (Ed.) Mechademia 2: Networks of Desire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Did you know that already with Rose of Versailles, manga came equipped with high school AUs? I KNOW RIGHT. (Well, OK. Only kind of.)
I’m referring, of course, to another Ikeda Riyoko series – Oniisama e.
Bear with me here.
Oniisama e and Rose of Versailles are not actually the same thing. The focus is different, the character interactions are different, and, uh, one of them is about the French Revolution and one is about bullying. And rampant lesbianism. But at the same time they’re ridiculously easy to parallel with each other, and I feel like a whole bunch of the base ingredients are the same, just combined a bit differently. As I talked about before, Ikeda Riyoko sure did have some super-specific interests, so this is maybe not utterly shocking.
Let’s take a look!
The Primary Suspects
Both Rose of Versailles and Oniisama e have a whole bunch of characters but there are four in each that I guess I’d consider the main personalities (though number 4 on the list is a bit different from the other three, as we’ll see). They’re also the ones who I can line up against each other with very little effort.
1. The Queen: Marie Antoinette / Ichinomiya “Miya-sama” Fukiko
Left: Marie Antoinette, a sparkly-eyed blonde with hair in ringlets. Right: Miya-sama, a sparkly-eyed blonde with hair in ringlets
The Marie Antoinette of Rose of Versailles is often more clueless and naive than malicious, which is more than can be said of Fukiko, who has a really major cruel streak – where Marie Antoinette has a friendly relationship with Oscar for at least a chunk of the series, their alter-egos are pretty much twisted up beyond repair and Fukiko spends a good deal of time sticking the knife in (occasionally literally). But they both represent a version of the ultra-feminine and graceful, and their respective self-worth seems to depend a lot on social status. They’re not just top of the social pile, they use it to define themselves. They need to be loved, if possibly for different reasons.
They are also both the figureheads of institutions that their respective series drive towards overthrowing (nobility/monarchy, sorority).
2. The Bloody-Minded Obsessive: Oscar / Asaka Rei
Left: Oscar from Rose of Versailles sits holding a knife. Right: Rei from Oniisama e sits holding a knife.
I’ve already talked about Oscar and Rei as variations of each other in terms of gender, but it goes further! I can appreciate how this one could be harder to see, because Oscar is one of the most badass characters known to manga and Rei is a depressed, suicidal drug addict who spends too much time reading dead French poets and not enough time eating or sleeping. But my theory is this: both of them have super, super one-track minds. It’s just that Oscar managed to land on JUSTICE!!!!! while Rei landed on DEATH!!!!!
Admittedly Oscar has a much more supportive family background, which I guess could do it.
It’s also worth noting that they get similar fangirl reactions from all the ladies (Oniisama e does not really feature men, so can’t comment on that aspect); the whole Takarazuka thing is strong here.
When Rei is in a good mood the resemblance to Oscar also gets a lot more striking; she’s charismatic, a little dramatic, and really, really enjoys teasing people she likes.
3. The Budding Revolutionary: Andre / Orihara Kaoru
Left: Andre stares into space. Right: Kaoru stares into space.
This pair are probably the most grounded characters so far. They both serve as an important counter-balance to their respective obsessives, doing their best to remind them to eat properly when they’re having an episode of particularly extreme focus. I suspect they are both the kind of people who would do the laundry in secret just to make sure there was clean underwear around, except Oscar has servants for that sort of thing.
Andre is desperately in love with Oscar, who spends ages being too focused to notice, and Kaoru is desperately in love with Rei extremely invested in Rei’s wellbeing while Rei is too full of drugs to notice. It is not easy being these guys, basically.
They’re also the ones with Ideas about the proper order of things as opposed to their current order. This is more developed with Kaoru, who is basically the one who takes the initiative when it comes to any overthrowing there is to be done; Andre is more the one who sneaks in the ideas and lets Oscar do something about them. But they both have that little fire of revolution. Bless.
4. The Normal One: Rosalie / Misonoo Nanako
Left: Rosalie with an expression of shock. Right: Nanko with an expression of shock.
These are the sweet innocent ones. Nanako is the viewpoint character of Oniisama e and really the only one who doesn’t have any major issues of her own at the start of the story; Rosalie starts off in a worse position (i.e. without any food) and is not so central to the perspective of the story she’s in, but they’re both outsiders who land in the world of the three characters above and are basically pretty stunned by the whole experience. They’re probably meant to have a much higher identification factor for readers than the others.
They’re also both madly in love with the manly manly ladies of their respective stories. Nanako does develop some kind of romantic relationship with Rei, and as I understand it Ikeda Riyoko did consider developing Rosalie’s relationship with Oscar, though she never actually went there, leaving only Rosalie’s crush.
These two are also both little helper-elves, greasing the wheels of the revolution. I’m not sure they have quite the same burning passion for the whole thing as certain other characters, but they’re definitely on board, having been completely weirded out by the social institutions being attacked in their respective stories.
Revolution
Revolution is a big theme of Ikeda Riyoko’s work in general (she also has a series set during the Russian Revolution – Orpheus no Mado / The Window of Orpheus, on which more in another post), and both of these stories get their dramatic peaks from a revolutionary event.
Rose of Versailles has the French Revolution. Oniisama e’s revolution is the student body rising up against the school’s very exclusive sorority, of which Miya-sama is the head. These differ mostly in scale; the sorority is a clear stand-in for nobility, with a lot of the same social ritual and extravagance seen in Rose of Versailles’ depiction of the French court. Not to mention the same jockeying for power, with people in the in crowd doing whatever it takes to stay there and people on the fringes trying to force their way in, and the second-class status of anyone who isn’t a member.
One of the things that I think is made more explicit in Oniisama e than in Rose of Versailles (though it’s there in both) is that all the women we see suffer from the status quo, whether they’re at the top or the bottom of the pile. Rigid social strata & gender roles: they are basically crap for everyone, to varying degrees. Oniisama e is basically about girls being terrible to each other, but not because of this whole Women Can’t Be Friends crap one sees so much of – instead it’s because they’re caught in social structures that fuck up their lives and their expectations, and in the end the series has a massive display of solidarity and friendship between girls too. Kaoru’s revolutionary drive comes specifically from seeing how many of the school’s girls are getting completely screwed up by the system.
Although Rose of Versailles has its gender-focus more closely zoomed in on Oscar and her identity-under-construction there’s still a lot of this stuff, where it’s really hard to make a choice as a woman that’ll work out for you – again, in a social critique way, not a “wow ladies sure suck” way. But Rose of Versailles’ revolution is not a womens’ revolution, and any solutions that are reached for women are personal ones.
Basically, I think my point here is that it’s remarkably easy to read Oniisama e as a lesbian feminist remix of Rose of Versailles.
This was a section of our talk which we went through at high speed, so it seems worth expanding and clarifying now. It’s basically the most theoretical and complicated bit, and we were short on time!
Queerness, feminism, motherhood
But motherhood, you may be thinking. Really. Doesn’t that sound kind of… necessarily heterosexual?
To which I have to say, HAH! And also, you have no idea.
I could get really deep into this, but basically, the western queer movement is keen on all possible different family constelations (as am I, for that matter), which means that the ‘mother’ role may not be performed by:
a) a child’s biological mother
b) a woman
c) any one person specifically
& that rather than needing a ‘mother’ a child needs to be cared for.
A feminist perspective, meanwhile, is that the social construction of ‘mother’ as it currently exists is damaging for women, patronising to men and probably not in the best interests of many peoples’ family units, actually; that even if individual women enjoy being capital-M-Mother and taking care of everyone and everything then it’s still a damaging ideal, since it results in one parent doing all the actual parenting and one not being expected to be emotionally invested at all. OK, did I say a feminist perspective? I meant my feminist perspective, but I’m not alone.
So what does one do about all this? Yeah. One imagines alternatives.
OR one highlights the weirdness and artificiallity of the idea of motherhood.
Which is where we get back to manga.
To Terra
In To Terra, people having sex for the purpose of making a woman pregnant and producing a child is not a thing. It is weird! And kind of creepy! Goddamn it, can’t you use a vat like everyone else? Everyone in human society is raised by foster parents, although they’re remarkably traditional in their gender presentation and as far as we’re shown strictly het. After childhood one forgets most of one’s background as a kid, and the role of Mother is taken on by a network of computers who nurture and regulate society and are generally creepy. CREEPY. One’s foster parents bugger off and get assigned a new kid to programme raise. This is not a positive alternative, although it is an alternative.
While a lot of To Terra is about a return to a more natural state and a reclamation of freedom, I should also point out that the examples we see of people giving birth to children the good old-fashioned way are not overwhelmingly positive. Namely, the Mu decide to make babies, inspired by their leader’s memory of his human foster mother – and the result is, well… Tony.
Right side first, then left (click to read):
Random redshirt humans with expressions of horror: the nearest nine blips are descending on us. They're not ships - they're living beings. Each with intense energy.
Tony and other mu children: *pose in space with flaming auras*
I don’t remember how old Tony actually is at the stage of the manga I lifted this picture from, but I’m pretty sure he can’t be over ten. He may well be five or something terrible like that. He blows things up a lot. His mother goes mad and dies when his life is threatened, so yeah, that went well, and he describes himself as “not human in the true sense”. So though he is one of the most “naturally” produced characters in the whole series he presents himself (and is viewed as) furthest from being a proper human. Other mu are pretty scared of him.
Tony: Artella, we're no longer human in the true sense. We're a different species - and that's fine. Unlike Jomy I don't think we need to be human... I don't think we even need a form. Artella, don't you feel that you are but one mass of the boundless energy that permeats the universe?
This scene takes place shortly after Tony has made a foetus out of thin air to show Artella that they can make life however they want. And then exploded it when he was done with his little demonstration. We have complex thoughts about this little episode generally, but for now let’s just say that I don’t think Tony is really a traditional mum.
ANYWAY, As Val points out, it’s possible-to-probable that Tony is intended as a positive figure, though he does in practice give me the creeps (which isn’t to say that I don’t like him as a character). With reference back to my Mu = coded gay theory, it’s completely possible that Tony and the other children produced by the Mu are meant to represent a positive possibility: something new is needed, and when Mu make children they get it, with the powerful potential seen above. If the Mu are gay, then we’re talking about gay people raising children leading to a better future for everyone. That is to say, they raise children who are less constrained by the rules everyone else follows. In this case physically, but you can read it socially too.
But still. They came out creepy. Oh well. (I do think that To Terra was probably aiming for some things that it missed, and the representation of Tony & co. may well be part of that.) In any case, positive outcome or not, To Terra definitely plays with different ways of creating life and raising children.
Marginal
“our generation had to break down the brick wall that was paternal society. Marginal was an experiment; I wanted to recreate a maternal society and re-examine it”
- Hagio Moto
O Marginal. I really don’t know what to make of this series, to be perfectly honest. It’s a mid-80s sci-fi series by Hagio Moto featuring a world without women, who have all disappeared because of a plot disease. Babies are made by SCIENCE!!!, everyone is gay, and there is once again one capital-M-Mother who is not a woman and does not bear children, but who has a kind of religious role. Unlike To Terra, which has these issues as a kind of side-line that isn’t completely explored, Marginal is all about motherhood. And walls of text. But mostly motherhood.
From Marginal. Text: The womb, that mysterious black box which captures a foreign body and becomes a room for it. Because a baby is still a foreign body.
I haven’t read all of Marginal, so in this case I can’t actually comment on the overall message, but it seems significant that it opens with the current ‘Mother’ (as mentioned above, basically a young man who has been surgically altered) being murdered for apparently idealogical reasons. So here we are, trying to kill the mother who has already been rendered visibly artificial. If this isn’t symbolism then I don’t know what it is.
The key character is Kira, who is a hermaphrodite (with a magical disappearing penis, as far as I have understood) born as a result of what seems to be further SCIENCE!!!; they can become pregnant, and I’m not sure exactly where this is going, but it’s another way of complicating the relationship between motherhood and womanhood.
You can find more information about what’s going on with Marginal by sifting through this article, which has a lot of plot information and a lot of analysis. I can’t judge the analysis until I get the opportunity to read the rest of the manga for myself, though.
Some things, right, some things are just so extremely girly that they are completely manly. Likewise, some things are so extremely manly that they come around into girly again.
This is possibly because gender has rules that We Just Made Up. Or because extremes have a certain obviousness of performativity in common. Or because they are actually the same thing and not opposite extremes at all.
Who said “man” had to be the opposite of “woman”, anyway?
Wait, what was my point?
Oh, right.
Here you go:
[Video: Sailor Moon uses her Moon Spiral Heart Attack. An elaborate dance is performed and then enemies are crushed by a GIANT PINK HEART.]
In prewar shojo magazines it was considered innapropriate to depict heterosexual romance. But it was common to idealise romantic friendships between girls, so called s-relationships were the s stands for sister. S-relationships were associated with same-sex environments such as all girl schools. At the time there was also an acceptance for real life relationships of this kind. These intense friendships were considered perfectly innocent and a part of the process of growing up. (Similar ideas have been around in western Europe and North America.)
The 1957 pre-yuri manga The Rows of Cherry Trees by Sakura Namiki centers around three girls in the tennis club at an all girls school.
However there were limits to the acceptance. A relationship between a more masculine and a more feminine girl was completely unacceptable. So same sex was ok, but it also had to be homogendered (my favorite word at the moment, woot!). The girls had to perform the same gender. In shojo magazines and illustrated novels girls were often drawn in the same school uniforms, looking almost exactly the same.
As long as the principle of sameness was followed S-relationships were not associated with any kind of lesbian behaviour or identity, and the girls could later go on to heterosexual marriages.
Yaneura no Nishojo by Yoshiya Nobuko
One of the greats in the genre was Yoshiya Nobuko who wrote many of the classic novels. She is perhaps most famous for Hana monogatari (Flower Tales), a collection of stories about romantic friendships which was very popular with school girls at the time.
In 1919 Yoshiya’s Yaneura no Nishojo (Two Virgins in the Attic) created controversy because the girls in the book not only adopted a feminist attitude but also decided to continue their relationship into adulthood: Not the Done Thing.
In The Poe Clan by the legendary Hagio Moto the romantic pair of boys look almost the same. One has curly hair and one straight.
When the 70s came around with more explicit depictions of same-sex love the ideal of sameness was carried on in male/male relationships. The similarity with S-relationships is ever more obvious when one notes that early stories about male/male relationships in shojo manga were almost always set in boys schools and that Hagio Moto (or was it Takemiya Keiko?), one of the creators of the genre, has said that she considered making her gay school boys into girls instead.
In Rose of Versailles Ikeda struggled to find an adult heterosexual relationship for female-bodied Oscar. It wasn’t enough that her relationship with Andre was homogendered. Before they could get together Ikeda altered Andres appearance to look exactly like Oscar.
When they get it on Oscar describes Andre as her shadow, and uses Castor and Pollux, the twins, as a metaphor for their relationship. Perhaps this was a continuation of the sameness ideal too.
Mara-sama ga Miteru by Konno Oyuki
The yuri classic Maria-sama ga Miteru (The virgin Mary is Watching, is that a creepy title or what?) is a great example of the S-relationship. Innocent school girls in cute uniforms is form close bonds. The S-relationship is still a romantic ideal!
We had a lovely time at BLYG, but as mentioned, had an awful lot more material than we could conceivably have used, ranging from manga we hopped over to pet theories that would’ve taken too long to explain. But since we love to share, we’re going to give you some of that material now! Starting with:
Ikeda Riyoko’s Kinks Very Specific Interests: An examination
We did spend a bit of time at BLYG talking about patterns, but we have more.
For example, answer me this:
As hermaphrodites are to Hagio Moto, so are __________ to Ikeda Riyoko.
Accompanying material, to assist you in your answer:
Claudine from Claudine...! - A blond female-bodied person in men's clothes is studious
Oscar from Rose of Versailles - A blond female-bodied person in men's clothes holds a sword.
Julius from Orpheus no Mado - A blond female-bodied person in men's clothes tells people where to get off.
Rei from Oniisama e... - A blond female-bodied person in (excessively 70s) men's clothes smokes and twirls a knife.
These are all Ikeda Riyoko characters. They are, in order,
1. a trans man
2. a woman who lives as a man and partially identifies as one; maybe genderqueer, if we’re going to be anachronistic about it (which of course we are).
3. a woman forced to live as a man for Plot Purposes but whose relationship to their gender is pretty unstable
4. a femme butch lesbian …erm. OK, no, no-one knows how Rei feels about Rei’s gender identity. But everyone sure does think she’s manly.
…are we getting something here?
I kind of like to think of them as variations on a theme. Some are more badass. Some are more tortured. They have a whole spectrum of gender identities but none of them perform femininity, at least not consistently (and generally not very successfully if they try), and with the possible exception of Rei (who has too many other issues to work through for any kind of gender crisis to make it to the surface) all have some kind of process they go through in figuring out their gender, their relationship to their bodies and what the hell it is they want, actually.
And therefore, it feels like Ikeda Riyoko going through a process re: gender, if not with regard to herself personally then certainly as a part of this general movement towards opening up possibilities for girls and women which was going on in the 70s.
Note that while they’re fascinating they’re not all positively portrayed characters – there’s a lot of angst and a lot of death to go around amongst this bunch. But on the other hand, I like them a lot better than the more jokey trans characters and crossdressers of current mainstream manga… but that’s a complaint for another time.
Tomorrow we’re packing up and heading for Skogås, where we’ll be giving a talk at this year’s BLYG (a Swedish yaoi/slash convention). We’re talking about 70s shojo and queerness, and I’m quite sure it’ll be fabulous.
Today we’re going to talk about To Terra, Takemiya Keiko’s iconic (and actually kind of genre-crossing) shonen sci-fi manga. This is one of my perenial favourites and we’ll probably come back to it a few more times to talk about other aspects, but my mission today is to tell you all about my pet theory, that is to say: Mu Are So Gay.
Let’s back up a bit.
To Terra is set in a future where society is controlled by computers as a kind of emergency measure against everyone fucking up the damn planet. Children are raised on other planets and only allowed to go to earth when they’ve passed a maturity check and gone through training. “Mother” is a system of computers. Everything is very carefully regulated.
AND THEN there are the Mu. They are psychic pretty people IN SPACE.
To Terra: jomy and soldier blue float IN SPACE
They’re born from humans but hated/feared by them, so they live their own little lives and try not to get killed. The main plot of To Terra is about their quest for acceptance and the right to live on Earth. Failing that the right to live would be nice. They are fighting the system and they want their rights, man.
Hang on, is this already sounding familiar?
New Zealand gay rights march; black and white photo of a group holding a Gay Rights banner
…oh! Right!
To compound matters, I have a really hard time reading the descriptions of the Mu without drifting back towards gay sterotypes. They are artistic, emotional, brilliant but also seen has having a big “flaw” – in the case of the Mu, most of them are physically disabled and have some kind of Fragile Consitution. This is not unproblematic. But then again, neither is seeing being gay as a flaw. Obvious as this might be.
To continue: the Mu are possibly another species! (A feature of early gay rights activism – i.e. from the 1800s or so and through into the 20th century – is the emphasis of difference, sometimes to the point of describing gay people as a different species or, more commonly, as a different sex.)
But they’re another species that is out to recruit, of course.
Keith: But our answer is NO!
Keith: The reason is clear: they're not human. We all know that even making contact with them is risky.
Keith: See the results of this experiment: our government forced a captured mu and a healthy human to live together for a week.
Audience: With a Mu?! MADNESS!
Keith: The Mu always tries to connect with the human subconscious to lead it to a mu-like state. An ESP check conducted after that one week detected ESP responses in the human child.
…hang on, is this also sounding familiar?
Oh my god! Yes!
It’s… THE MU GAY AGENDA.
You know, the one that various governments have spent so much time taking steps to hinder by, for example, refusing to let schools admit that homosexuality exists. Oh, sorry, I mean refusing to let them “promote” it. (I’m a product of the British school system, and attended during the period when Section 28 was in force. Am I bitter? Oh, you bet.)
To Terra is told both from the persepctive of the Mu (fronted by Jomy, who is like that straight guy who can totally turn and discover his deep and abiding love for cock) and of the humans (fronted by Keith, who was in fact born aged 14 and with the mentality of a conservative middle aged man), so you get a pretty good view of the panic inspired in human society vs. the we-are-so-misunderstood sentiments of the Mu. To be honest, it really does all feel very familiar. Different Mu have different strategies for coping, with some coming out and joining Mu society (in spaaaaaaaaace) and some staying firmly closeted and trying their best to pass. Possibly without having a clue what they are since, you know, the Mu Agenda is not discussed.
Matsuka: Mu? What? What are mu?
Matsuka: I s-simply fooled mother, acting like a quiet student who got bad grades. Here I was, thinking I'd graduated from the system.
Matsuka: I never thought I'd be found in such a remote sector. I just hoped no-one would realise I'm like this.
Keith: *is silently disapproving and armed*
Notably there’s also a lot of talk about repression, and the way society forcefully represses Mu. Another closet case, Shiroe, puts it like this:
Shiroe: When I was too young to know anything, sleeping in artificial amniotic fluid, they chose me, sent me to an artificial planet, and brutally repressed me with the maturity check. I will never forget the humiliation the computer caused me. I will never forget!!
Society is also described as a cage, and the history of the Mu as told to Jomy when he arrives on their space ship is mostly one of children getting murdered and/or experimented on. It’s… look, it’s really easy to parallel, I don’t feel like I’m having to do very much work here. When I read To Terra I was especially struck by the paranoia the approach of the Mu towards Earth caused. We must, you know, give EVERYONE a gay test! Oh god! They are not just Out There! They are among us as well!
And there are kind of a lot of them.
OOPS.
Anyway, you can parallel this with whichever governmental or military burst of anti-gay paranoia you like. Free choice! FOR EXAMPLE the McCarthy era saw homosexual hunts which were pretty much as enthusiastic as the communist hunts since, you know, communism and homosexuality: they are almost the same thing. And this example is waaaaaaaaay down the list in terms of severity. Rounding up & doing terrible things to suspected gay people is and has long been a popular hobby across the world! So you have plenty of options.
I’m reasonably sure, for the record, that Takemiya Keiko didn’t think out the story in these terms – but I also don’t think that matters, because wow, the result sure is queer. I’m probably extra attached to this reading since in some ways To Terra seems so straight – like, women don’t bear children and are supposedly equal with men, represented all the way up to the top in the human power structure, but that’s what we get told is going on, while what we see going on is women largely only involved in romance plots or as mothers. The Mu also tend in this direction, with the most prominent female character attached firmly to a pedestal. But I really love To Terra anyway. And so I go looking for the queer…
(I found more, by the way. This is just the beginning!)
Inseparable: Desire between Women in Literature by Emma Donoghue is the best book ever.
[Image: Front cover of Inseparable]
It’s literary history, charting relationships between women in western literature. As Emma Donoghue puts it in her introduction,
[...] Inseparable could [...] be called a family tree, because it lays out certain motifs that have been repeated over the centuries, hybridizing and mutating in every generation. Or you could think of it as a field guide to the flora and fauna of lesbian-themed literature. It calls attention to what is there, but generally goes unnoticed, and reveals how the rare is related to the common or garden variety.
& it does this very well. I think about women in literature a lot, and have something of a vested interest in women who have the hots for/write eloquent love poems to other women. And I was still surprised more than once by a neat and well-justified revelation of queer desire in a book I’d read but never thought twice about. Hmmmmm, all those ‘spinsters’ and their secluded lives together…
And the thing is, the things that people have written about women and their relationships with other women are all over the place, whether it’s sexual relations or passionate friendships. There’s so much to cover, and much of it, when summarised, is hilarious (if also in many cases rather tragic). There are vampires! Monstrous decadents! Angelic victims, tragically seduced by some evil temptress! Convoluted plots worthy of any soap opera you’d care to name! Nuns! So this was always going to be good material, basically.
Yesterday I pulled my copy down from the shelves to take a look through it and refresh my memory for this post; I discovered that pretty much any page I opened it on would have a paragraph that pulled me in. I’ve since accidentally re-read half the book.
Which is probably a good sign, just like all the pencil-marks scribbled in the margins.
It contains such gems as, in the discussion of different ways of making same-sex love between a woman & a woman in disguise as a man palatable to the contemporary audience,
The substitute-brother ending of the Fiordispina episode in Orlando Furioso was perhaps its most influential aspect. Often, as in the case of the anonymous Sienese play Gl’Ingannati, it is the sister rather than the brother who arranges the swap. In fact, at times the brother has all the agency of a dildo [...]
…yup! Well, you know, there has to be a penis or there’s no possibility of sex, right? O European phallocentric culture, you really never tire.
(Obviously, a lot of the stories under discussion are not overly concerned with psychological realism.)
The author describes her (and now my) favourite crossdressing story, the Travels and Adventures of Mademoiselle de Richelieu, at considerable length, so I won’t quote the whole thing here, but the key point is that when this crossdresser is revealed the woman who she is revealed to decides to take up crossdressing as well, and come along for some quality seduction of other ladies. They live happily ever after. (The story is anonymous, published in 1744.) Take that!
[Image: an image of Viola and Olivia by Walter H. Deverell, created in 1850 to accompany a femslash poem by John Lucas Tupper, enthusing about how these particular shakespeare characters were "lovers" and "married souls". They sure look it.]
Then there’s monsters, possibly epitomised by the explicit excesses of de Sade’s Juliette,
The Sadeian tribade is a woman who seeks out pleasure in all its forms [...]. She is a beautiful, aristocratic, intelligent serial killer. She is also unnervingly protean: she plays any role she chooses. After all, in the marquis’s equal-opportunity, nightmarish universe, all a woman has to do is pick up a few tools and she can rape and slaughter [...] as easily as a man can.
which was something of an innovation, apparently, but since we’re talking about de Sade, no-one could really play one-up with this line of thinking. Still, there are plenty of other examples of these kinds of monsters in the book, mostly more tortured than the stunningly amoral characters of Juliette.
Some people seem to have gone for a way more “discreet” approach (well, everything is relative), like the “unsubtly named Mrs. Harriot Freke, a brash, crass feminist and occasional crossdresser, who flirts with every girl in sight and persuades one to run away with her” in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801). Even Dickens was at this kind of heavy hinting!
The later chapters of the book deal with detective fiction (which I’d always kind of mentally associated more with coded gay men, but of course that’s the detectives. The lesbians/inappropriately romantically attached ladies get to be the victims. Or the criminals.) and then finally with openly lesbian literature. The chapter on detective fiction is pretty interesting, because a lot of the stories seem to make literal the invisibility of female relationships, with the police completely baffled – often by their assumption that they must be dealing with heterosexuality.
Oops!
In summary: If you’ve ever wondered where the hell they’ve been hiding all the lesbians, this is the book for you.
Sex, gender and sexuality in pop culture. A blog in English & Swedish. / Kön, genus och sexualitet i populärkulturen. En blogg på svenska och engelska.
