ABSTRACT
Thousands of young women in Taiwan, as in North America, Europe, the Antipodes and Japan, enjoy reading and writing stories about romantic and sexual relationships between men.1 Or rather, between male fictional characters taken from the mass media. This type of fan fiction is usually traced back to the mid-1970s, when women fans of the American Star Trek television serials began writing “slash” fiction (e.g. Kirk/Spock) (Jenkins 1992: 187; Pugh 2005: 91). At roughly the same time, a genre of popular manga called “BL” (short for Boys Love) emerged in Japan, aimed at young women readers, featuring love stories between beautiful schoolboys, and Japanese manga and anime fans began producing doujinshi (amateur manga based on manga and anime characters) and selling them at comics conventions. In the mid-1980s, Japanese women began to create a genre of doujinshi called “yaoi,” which depicted male-male erotic relationships between characters from manga marketed mostly to young male readers (e.g. sports and science fiction manga) (Wilson and Toku 2003).
