ABSTRACT
This chapter traces how trans-inclusive animated tentacle erotica in the genre known to Americans as hentai entered US culture in the late 20th century and took on new life in the currents of the transnational internet. While the original reception of tentacle porn shows that Americans imagined Japan as a place of sexual strangeness, hyper-phallicism, and titillating nonconsensuality, gradually representations of tentacles became dissociated from associations with the hetero-phallus and were reimagined in queer subsections of tumblr, reddit, and 4chan as a consensual, transfeminine site of sexual imagination.
