WHAT IS BOYOGRAPHY?

  

Boy-ography is the term used to describe a new genre that has been emerging - and is probably best explained as a Western form of Japanese Bishōnen [美少年] – a sub-category of yaoi manga.

CONTEXT

Yaoi emerged in the 1970s as a branch of manga [comic book] created by female authors and aimed at a predominantly female audience who mockingly called themselves Fujoshi, or ‘rotten girls’. These manga stories where unique, in the respect that they featured romantic and sexual relationships between their male characters who didn’t choose to self-identify as gay or bisexual. A 2010 report estimated that the yaoi market was worth approximately £1.7billion annually.

BISHŌNEN: While yaoi has become the umbrella term in the West for non-heterosexual manga – there are in fact many other genres and sub-genres within this category. One such sub-genre is Bishōnen [美少年] - meaning ‘beautiful youth (boy)’ - and describes an aesthetic, that can be found throughout East Asia to identify those young men ‘whose beauty and sexual appeal transcends the boundaries of gender and sexual orientation’ - an aesthetic that can also be found in the West dating back to the classical era and documented in Germaine Greer’s book The Beautiful Boy, published in 2003.

In Queer Theory ‘identity politics remains as a necessary standpoint for the promotion of equality and freedom’ and forms the core ideology of Queer Politics. Boyography isn’t Queer Theory or Queer Politics. Boyography celebrates its gender. Boyography isn’t gay, bisexual, transgendered or lesbian. Boyography is post-queer. It isn’t about gay culture. It’s something different.  It’s post-Queer As Folk. It’s like a British version of American Queercore. This is the next generation of diversity. This is boyography.

Boyography is a genre that is by its very nature ‘interstitial’ because it exists between the fleeting worlds of childhood and adulthood, between male and female, gay and straight, good and evil, moral and immoral. It inhabits a realm of Artaudian fantasy and Foucault discovery. Boyography is the symbolic fit between the values and the lifestyles of a whole swathe of people who would identify themselves as ‘other’.