ABSTRACT
The yaoi genre of erotic fan art and fiction has been a successful export from Japanese culture to the global context, particularly via internet communities. Regulatory issues of content censorship and intellectual property pose particular challenges for the governance of global online fan communities. This chapter examines the internal regulatory practices of one such community, Y! Gallery, in order to explore the role that Michael Warner's idea of creative counterpublics plays in the normative constitution of online spaces. McLelland has used the counterpublic concept to describe the yaoi community as a deliberately transgressive counterpublic, and Wood's discussion of shonen ai emphasises its importance as a transnational, resistant counterpublic which challenges the mass media romance discourse. Minority 'counterpublics' are defined by a tension with a putative mainstream public. The concept of a counterpublic liberates legal ideas of publics from singular majoritarian models of mob rule.
