The Power of Boys’ Love, a Talk by Dr. Akiko Mizoguchi

Please join us on Monday, June 24, from 7-8:30 pm for a virtual talk with Dr. Akiko Mizoguchi on The Power of Boys’ Love. 

Continuing to expand on networks of support and care that safeguard feminized bodies through forms of knowledge transmission, Dr. Akiko Mizoguchi, Associate Professor in the School of Culture, Media and Society at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan will share her research and insights on works from the ‘Boys’ Love’ (or ‘BL’) genre—comics and other texts about romantic relationships between men primarily written by and marketed to women in Japan. The presentation will look into selected BL comics and novels, contextualize the development of the genre as holding socially transformative potential, and include a discussion of the film BL Metamorphosis, based on a manga (a Japanese comic) created by Kaori Tsurutani, centering a tender friendship between two women, one 75 and the other 17 years old, formed through their mutual BL fandom. Instructions for viewing the film will be sent upon registering for the event.

Mizoguchi’s Japanese-language books Theorizing BL as a Transformative Genre: Boys’ Love Moves the World Forward (2015) and its Dialogue Edition (2017) have been translated into Chinese and Korean. The work articulates the history of the fujoshi (a Japanese term for female fans of manga, anime, and novels that feature romantic relationships between men) community, the conflicts between BL fans and a gay man in the early 1990s, and how the genre has evolved in relation to the LGBTQ+ community into the present. Now, the BL community encompasses not only women, but people from across a wide and fluid gender spectrum, reflecting a queer reading of the genre as promoting the empowerment of plural sexualities and feminized bodies.

About Dr. Akiko Mizoguchi

Dr. Akiko Mizoguchi is a queer visual culture theorist and Associate Professor at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. She has published extensively on film, contemporary art, and LGBTQ+ media. Her work focuses on ‘Boys’ Love’ or ‘BL’ manga (Japanese comics)—male-male romance comics primarily written by and marketed to women in Japan. Dr. Mizoguchi’s award-winning Japanese-language books Theorizing BL as a Transformative Genre: Boys’ Love Moves the World Forward (2015) and Theorizing BL as a Transformative Genre (“Dialogue Edition”): Visiting the Sites Where Boys’ Love Is Born (2017) have been translated into Chinese and Korean. Dr. Mizoguchi has also published in English in various journals. Dr. Mizoguchi was a fellow at The Suzy Newhouse Center for the Humanities, Wellesley College in 2021-2022. Her fully-subtitled BL with AKIKO channel has increasingly drawn global fans’ attention. She is currently working on an English book theorizing BL as a genre with queer potential.