JAPANESE BOY-LOVE MANGA AND THE GLOBAL FANDOM

The boy-love (BL) manga is a Japanese-style comic strip that features the homoerotic relationships between the male heroes. Since its burgeoning in the 1970s, the genre is predominately created and consumed by Japanese women and has expanded its popularity to other countries including the United States, the United Kingdom and the mainland China. The article examines the tradition of presenting male beauty and sexuality in the Japanese history of art, illuminates the influence of such tradition on Japanese women''s culture, interprets the cross- cultural readership of non-Japanese women by conducting a case study on Chinese female readers, and addresses the factors that lead to this particular transnational cultural phenomenon.