ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the function of the Japanese boy-boy comic in constituting the imaginary relations of girls to phallocentric culture and to their femininity. It analyzes the representations of homosexuality and androgyny in Tomoko Naka’s comic The Green Boy as an apparatus for eliciting women’s pleasure as well as a satire on patriarchal views of virginity and marriage. The transformation of the girls’ magazine, shojozasshi, in prewar Japanese society exemplifies the paradoxical empowerment of Japanese women through the subversive use of pleasure under the cover of an obedient silence. Originally devised as an educational apparatus to prepare adolescent girls for marriage and motherhood, the magazines became, in the liberal milieu of the 1920s, a medium channelling girls’ appetite for pleasure. The girls’ comic in the postwar period replaced the girls’ magazine as an apparatus for inciting pleasure, combining the hitherto separate genres of the girls’ novel and fashion magazines in its dramatic representations.
