The love between 'beautiful boys' in Japanese women's comics

This paper investigates why the love between 'beautiful youths' (bishoonen) should have become one of the most recurrent romantic tropes in comics bot h written by and aimed at Japanese women. I argue that women writers draw u pon mainstream representations of homosexual men as somehow feminine, but t reat this stereotype favourably, creating the figure of the 'beautiful yout h' an androgynous being who possesses a feminine sensibility and yet experi ences all the advantages of a male body. I show how mainstream Japanese cul ture attempts to limit women's sexuality to its reproductive role within ma rriage, troubling women who express themselves sexuality outside marriage w ith the image of the 'menacing foetus' I argue that the beautiful youth is a figure of resistance: one way in which Japanese women can picture themsel ves as loving freely in a Patriarchal system, without being subordinated to the reproductive constraints of the family.