Fujoshi, Fantasy, and the Body without Organs
So, this week’s “Hey, Answerman” column on the Anime News Network website has a write-in section about the “moe” trend in anime, which emphasizes cute characters meant to evoke tender feelings of protectiveness. In the course of the postings, someone linked to this article by Patrick Galbraith called Moe: Exploring Virtual Potential in Post-Millennial Japan. I’m generally interested in anything related to otaku culture, but this one particularly caught my eye because besides the usual male otaku point of view, it also has a part on fujoshi, or, female yaoi fans. His basic idea:
"Fujoshi fantasy is based on playfully reading the virtual potential of characters. If, for example, someone is in reality gay, then he cannot be a yaoi character because the transgressive potential, the basis of a separate fantasy attraction, is erased. Fantasy and reality are independent fields, and fujoshi can fluidly access both."
I think Galbraith has a start here. At least, he bases his ideas on open-minded conversations with actual people instead of psychoanalytic bullcrap. But there’s still a problem, and that’s the nature of “transgression.”
So, if you haven’t read Galbraith’s article, the main point of it is that moe-loving male otaku and female fujoshi insist on dividing fantasy and reality. Their fantasy comes from the highly consumerist social realities of 1980’s Japan, and runs alongside society in tandem, but it’s also beyond all that. It’s transgressive, opening up limitless imaginary potential. For otaku and fujoshi, the moe character, the key figure of the fantasy, is what philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call a “Body without Organs” (BwO), which is “the ‘virtual’ dimension of the body that is a collection of potential traits, connections and affects.” Galbraith says this moe BwO “engenders virtual possibilities without limits or control.” Fujoshi fantasies, especially, appear to him to be beyond the limits of gender and even humanity: he points to women who parodically pair things like pepper and salt, and shows like Axis Powers Hetalia that slash countries to indicate the scope of the fujoshi’s “transgressive intimacy.”
It sounds great, doesn’t it? I’d love to think that when I read yaoi doujin or watch Hetalia, I’m being all subversive and experiencing something purer than your average consumer. I’ve even read Deleuze&Guattari before and thought of my own peculiar “2D complex” as a BwO. But here’s where I start running into problems with Galbraith. Because what I like the most about D&G is that for them, “transgression” isn’t just about getting beyond restrictions to some state of purity outside the world. It’s not about reaching transcendence. “You never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit” (A Thousand Plateaus 150). The BwO is process of desire, but it’s not desire as a pure, transcendent, ideal fantasy. Neither is it desire as unsatistfiable Lack, or as hedonistic pleasure. It’s desire as an “immanent limit” (154). Let’s put it this way: their main example of a BwO is masochistic bondage. The point is not that you have to break out of the restrictions on pleasure to fulfill your desire, but that you can play desire through restrictions. Likewise, in the end they say that you still have to “respond to the dominant reality” and mimic the “stratifications” that organize it (160). You explore the strata of “social formations” to find their potentials, the places where things can change, and where they connect (161). That’s how you make yourself a BwO: through the “connection of desires” (161), not the separation of ideal fantasy from commercial reality.
That’s why I don’t believe it when Galbraith says that “The further away from reality and limitations on form the greater the virtual potential and affect.” And I don’t think fujoshi fantasies are “without limit” as he says. I mean, just look at the content of the fantasies he cites. He describes how a group of women coming back from a con started making up a story about the road they were walking on, figuring it as a “loser (hetare) in love with one particular car, the top, who is an insensitive pleasure seeker (kichiku).” Eventually the cruel car turns the road into a “sex slave” for all the other passing cars that are bearing down on it and breaking it. (Now that’s trafficking!) Sure, it’s weirdly inventive in that it’s about a road and cars, but the narrative form and characters are typed according very familiar dom/sub dynamics. It’s about masochistic and sadistic machines. What’s more “transgressive,” and yet more entrenched in power structures, than that?
Some scholars claim that m/m fan works let women imagine attaining equality in a relationship by replacing socially unequal men and women with fantastic depictions of equal men. They tend to downplay the dom/sub angle as a “minor” genre within fanfic. (I’m thinking of Mirna Cicioni’s article “Male Pair-Bonds and Female Desire in Fan Slash Writing” here. I’m sure I read something similar about yaoi too). I say, let’s not kid ourselves here. I read the non-con stuff. I admit it. So I want to take this “minor” aspect (that’s another D&G term) seriously, looking into where fujoshi replicate dominant power structures, and how you can play out desire even within the most limited, conventional forms of storytelling. I want to refigure “transgression” as something less than limitless freedom, but more than mindless conformity. In fact, that’s how I want to think of fandom in general.
That’s not what I’ll do in my thesis, btw. I haven’t the courage yet to defend even a chapter on yaoi in public, and thesis defenses are open to the public here. Maybe someday!
Edit: Hmmm, snazzy in-text links are not working for some reason. Well, Galbraith's article is here: http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/articles/2009/Galbraith.html
"Fujoshi fantasy is based on playfully reading the virtual potential of characters. If, for example, someone is in reality gay, then he cannot be a yaoi character because the transgressive potential, the basis of a separate fantasy attraction, is erased. Fantasy and reality are independent fields, and fujoshi can fluidly access both."
I think Galbraith has a start here. At least, he bases his ideas on open-minded conversations with actual people instead of psychoanalytic bullcrap. But there’s still a problem, and that’s the nature of “transgression.”
So, if you haven’t read Galbraith’s article, the main point of it is that moe-loving male otaku and female fujoshi insist on dividing fantasy and reality. Their fantasy comes from the highly consumerist social realities of 1980’s Japan, and runs alongside society in tandem, but it’s also beyond all that. It’s transgressive, opening up limitless imaginary potential. For otaku and fujoshi, the moe character, the key figure of the fantasy, is what philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call a “Body without Organs” (BwO), which is “the ‘virtual’ dimension of the body that is a collection of potential traits, connections and affects.” Galbraith says this moe BwO “engenders virtual possibilities without limits or control.” Fujoshi fantasies, especially, appear to him to be beyond the limits of gender and even humanity: he points to women who parodically pair things like pepper and salt, and shows like Axis Powers Hetalia that slash countries to indicate the scope of the fujoshi’s “transgressive intimacy.”
It sounds great, doesn’t it? I’d love to think that when I read yaoi doujin or watch Hetalia, I’m being all subversive and experiencing something purer than your average consumer. I’ve even read Deleuze&Guattari before and thought of my own peculiar “2D complex” as a BwO. But here’s where I start running into problems with Galbraith. Because what I like the most about D&G is that for them, “transgression” isn’t just about getting beyond restrictions to some state of purity outside the world. It’s not about reaching transcendence. “You never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit” (A Thousand Plateaus 150). The BwO is process of desire, but it’s not desire as a pure, transcendent, ideal fantasy. Neither is it desire as unsatistfiable Lack, or as hedonistic pleasure. It’s desire as an “immanent limit” (154). Let’s put it this way: their main example of a BwO is masochistic bondage. The point is not that you have to break out of the restrictions on pleasure to fulfill your desire, but that you can play desire through restrictions. Likewise, in the end they say that you still have to “respond to the dominant reality” and mimic the “stratifications” that organize it (160). You explore the strata of “social formations” to find their potentials, the places where things can change, and where they connect (161). That’s how you make yourself a BwO: through the “connection of desires” (161), not the separation of ideal fantasy from commercial reality.
That’s why I don’t believe it when Galbraith says that “The further away from reality and limitations on form the greater the virtual potential and affect.” And I don’t think fujoshi fantasies are “without limit” as he says. I mean, just look at the content of the fantasies he cites. He describes how a group of women coming back from a con started making up a story about the road they were walking on, figuring it as a “loser (hetare) in love with one particular car, the top, who is an insensitive pleasure seeker (kichiku).” Eventually the cruel car turns the road into a “sex slave” for all the other passing cars that are bearing down on it and breaking it. (Now that’s trafficking!) Sure, it’s weirdly inventive in that it’s about a road and cars, but the narrative form and characters are typed according very familiar dom/sub dynamics. It’s about masochistic and sadistic machines. What’s more “transgressive,” and yet more entrenched in power structures, than that?
Some scholars claim that m/m fan works let women imagine attaining equality in a relationship by replacing socially unequal men and women with fantastic depictions of equal men. They tend to downplay the dom/sub angle as a “minor” genre within fanfic. (I’m thinking of Mirna Cicioni’s article “Male Pair-Bonds and Female Desire in Fan Slash Writing” here. I’m sure I read something similar about yaoi too). I say, let’s not kid ourselves here. I read the non-con stuff. I admit it. So I want to take this “minor” aspect (that’s another D&G term) seriously, looking into where fujoshi replicate dominant power structures, and how you can play out desire even within the most limited, conventional forms of storytelling. I want to refigure “transgression” as something less than limitless freedom, but more than mindless conformity. In fact, that’s how I want to think of fandom in general.
That’s not what I’ll do in my thesis, btw. I haven’t the courage yet to defend even a chapter on yaoi in public, and thesis defenses are open to the public here. Maybe someday!
Edit: Hmmm, snazzy in-text links are not working for some reason. Well, Galbraith's article is here: http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/articles/2009/Galbraith.html