Yaoi Con 2014 was held at the Hyatt Regency SFO from September 12-14, 2014.
Just FYI, in case you’re here for cosplay photos, I took no cosplay photos and few photos of anything else. Not as many people cosplayed as usual and it was a pretty low-key convention this year in many respects.
I didn’t attend the opening or closing ceremonies, and found the panel offerings this year to be fairly predictable. I did see a shift to more panels about cosplay and about webcomics, especially how to make and publish your own.
On Saturday, I spent most of the afternoon with friends that I don’t get to see often, and after lunch we attended a panel presented by four female webcomics creators.
All were smart young women who talked about being working artists, starting your own website, the Bechdel test and other issues. As Wikipedia explains, "The Bechdel test asks if a work of fiction features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The requirement that the two women must be named is sometimes added. Many contemporary works fail this test of gender bias." More comics, particularly indie comics, are meeting that standard these days, but obviously many more traditionally haven’t and don’t.
Later, I watched the live action movie
Ooku in the viewing room.
Ooku is the alternate-history story based on Fumi Yoshinaga’s manga in which a plague has killed most of the men in Edo-era Japan, and women are in control of government and society.
The Ooku is the royal stable of beautiful men that serves as the female Shogun’s own to draw her mate from. The protagonist is a young samurai from a penniless family, played by Kazunari Ninomiya.
Ninomiya played the Tokyo baker drafted into the Emperor’s Imperial Army in
Letters from Iwo Jima. He’s also a former boy band star. Cute rather than handsome, Ninomiya is fascinating to watch. He has an open face; all his emotions are transparent. You can almost read his thoughts. It’s very effective. Whatever he feels, you’re feeling it too.
The role reversal in
Ooku made you think, and resonated deeply, as particularly shown by the audience's response to the Yoshiwara scene in which women gather at windows to watch scantily-clad men display themselves for their viewing pleasure. The women customers laugh, point at and make comments about the men, who are forced to take it with a smile.
The audience reaction to this scene was hearty laughter. Since Yaoi Con is attended mainly by women, gay and bi men and trans people, this audience quite understood the power reversal and how the men were marginalized and humiliated by this treatment.
I suspect that if straight men were to watch this scene, they’d feel uncomfortable and any laughter would be of the nervous variety. ;-)
The Ooku stable of men made a similar statement. Women are frequently criticized for being petty and unable to work together, but the scenes set in the Ooku clearly showed that men in the same circumstances (
i.e., gender-oppressed and disempowered) would react in exactly the same way, with the added horror of gang rape thrown in just because they can.
Ooku is well worth watching and I highly recommend it.
The Bishonen Auction is Yaoi Con’s big event. Most years I stick my head in the ballroom door and watch for a few minutes, then leave. It’s a long event, with an MC and skits and musical acts in between each “bishonen” (usually attractive but decidedly non-exotic American guys with not much air of mystery, btw =D) doing his singing/dancing/stripping thing to the screams of several thousand women.
I had a bit of an epiphany during the Bishonen Auction. Men might criticize this harmless and entirely voluntary three-hour role-reversal event for objectifying men—as if women aren’t objectified every second of every day of their lives. It occurred to me that we were participating in a female gaze event on a large enough scale that it could be termed tribal in nature. And yet we were only a few thousand, in a single hotel ballroom, on one night out of an entire year.
The person who received the greatest cheers at the auction was Reika, the Japanese cosplayer guest of honor. Reika sang and had a long line of fans follow her out of the ballroom at the end of her act.
I’ve always informally gauged Yaoi Con attendance by the Bishonen Auction audience, since it’s the main event of the con and virtually everyone attends. By that standard, it looked like the attendance was about the same as it was in Long Beach in 2012,
i.e., good but not the largest attendance ever.
Sunday morning, I hosted a panel on
Kuroko’s Basketball, just a fan get-together thing. I gave out a lot of prizes and a good time was had by all. =D
I was thinking about the female webcomics panel and the Bishonen Auction when I made my final go-round of the dealer’s room and artist’s alley on Sunday afternoon and talked to the women who presented the webcomics panel the day before, as well as to other small publishers. I also chatted with Fred Lui, who has been my editor/point person at Digital Manga Inc. for the six years I’ve freelanced there.
It’s my impression—not based on anything Fred said, just based on my observations—that DMI is moving away from yaoi and toward hentai. If hentai is doing well for them, I can’t argue with that. But Digital Manga pioneered the yaoi genre in America, and if they’re letting go of what built their business I think it would be a shame.
I remember the days of Rachel and Erica at Digital Manga. These two young women, one Asian-American and one African-American, were the panel presenters for DMI at cons in the mid-2000s, and they were live-wire enthusiastic promoters of yaoi before most people even knew what yaoi was. The first DMI panel I attended was at Anime Expo 2006 in Anaheim and I’ll never forget the new experience of sitting in a room full of yaoi fans who screamed at each license announcement.
This year, the small publishers in the dealer’s room that I spoke with were selling a variety of stories mostly in the fantasy or erotica genres, with the only common denominator being the m/m pairing. Dreamspinner Press, one of my m/m romance publishers, was also there. It made me think about what yaoi is these days exactly. If you say that what you write is yaoi, does that make it yaoi?
I’ve never felt like my own m/m writing fit easily into any of the standard categories. It’s not slash because it’s original characters in an original universe. It’s not Jim and Bob meet and fall in love as in contemporary m/m romance. The closest definition my work falls into is probably yaoi, as I often have an Asian main character in a fantasy setting and much of my inner artistic landscape is inspired by anime.
And yet, what I write isn’t yaoi, not really. I think what I write can more accurately be called “female gaze fiction.”
The term “female gaze” means seeing the story and characters through a female lens, and creating stories that show what women want to see. It might be easier described as everything mainstream entertainment
doesn’t offer. Movies and TV are designed for the male gaze: action movies, buddy movies, war movies, scenes where the woman is nude but the man is not, stories where the woman is only a love or sex interest, and on and on. Nearly everything we view is male gaze.
Which makes slash, yaoi and m/m romance all the more important, because they’re all female gaze works.
My m/m story
Aftermarket Lover is about a sex robot who was built without sex organs—he could be a servicing partner but not experience sexual pleasure himself. It may sound odd, but when I wrote that story I was thinking of female circumcision, where women in severely male-dominated societies are circumcised so that males can satisfy their own desires without having to deal with a woman’s desires.
And
Rebellion, the first novel in the trilogy I’m writing, is set in a post-apocalyptic rural queendom where women dominate government and society. The idea came to me partly as a response to my own discomfort at writing m/m romance where women are never the main characters. The society is also post-racial, meaning there is no racial discrimination at all anymore.
I only realized in the middle of writing
Rebellion that I had constructed this female-dominated post-racial world because I wanted a fantasy setting where someone like me—a middle-aged Asian female—could walk into this society in the next moment and play an important role in that world. And I was tired of stories where men were the main characters and women were again on the periphery, even if I was the one writing them. ;-) In
Rebellion, the female characters are very important, even if they’re not involved in the main romance, which is male/male.
My point is that I think “female gaze fiction” is what describes my work, as well as the work of many female writers and artists today. So I don’t have to wonder if my stories are yaoi or m/m romance or any other category. It’s female gaze fiction, period. And something this older feminist is proud to write.
