Forum - View topicLooking closer at the meaning of "Yuri"
|
|
| Author | Message | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Andromeda
Posts: 119 Location: Florida |
|
|||||||||
|
[Edit: This thread refers to a 2005 discussions about BLU and has been split to be it's own topic. -t]
I realize I'm dragging a thread up from ages ago, but I only ran across it today. And I'm a little curious... What I'm curious about is whether the meanings and connotations of "yuri" have changed in English fandom over the last two years. Because otherwise, Karorin's biggest problem was assuming all Yuri was sexual in nature, like a lot of Yaoi (but presumably not all of it) is. Nowadays - and I've seen Answerman back me up on this before not too awfully long ago (may have been back in 2006 or so, I know it was at least a few months ago...) - this is how it goes: *Shoujo-ai = refers to girl/girl that is almost exclusively just romance, though some works also have sexual material. *Yuri = refers to a genre of girl/girl that is a mixture of pure romance stories, erotic romance, and straight (er, no pun intended) lesbian porn, depending on the site or 'zine you're looking at . Technically, you are MUCH more likely to find erotic or porn stories listed under Yuri than Shoujo-ai... but not all stories labeled "Yuri" are actually sexually explicit, and many people use the terms interchangeably. This is especially true on sites (like fanfiction.net) that have character limits on things like story descriptions. Maybe shoujo-ai has more romantic connotations than Yuri, but Yuri is (even if you misspell shoujo-ai as shojoai) almost half the character length as Shoujo-ai, if not even shorter (certainly shorter if you spell Shoujo-ai the most commonly-accepted way). Four characters. Very easy to fit into a description in comparison, and "SA" or "s-a" or the like would probably confuse a lot of people. The fact is that Yuri is unique in that the full-on porn is largely written by men, but the romantic stuff is most often written by women, who are writing it precisely BECAUSE it is romantic material. As a woman who enjoys shoujo-ai that is romantic in nature, I think I can explain the appeal a little. Simply put, it is not about sex. It can be, but in the best stories, it's not a "sexual" attraction first and foremost, it is EMOTIONAL. The concept - which is actually remarkably realistic - is that girls tend to bond with each other much more easily, readily and closely than they do to boys or than boys do with each other. In my opinion, the best "Yuri" stories are the ones where the involved characters start out as best friends, and after going through hell and high water with each other, become so close that "best friend" is not adequate enough to describe how much they care about each other. Some of these stories never even HAVE sex, even if they have (fairly chaste) kisses. Yuri, in other words, not only does not have to be about girl/girl sex, it can actually extend as a term to cover stories that are completely NON-SEXUAL and simply about extraordinarily strong bonds between women, particularly during the turbulent and emotional times of life such as teenage or college years, or after a great tragedy occurs in their life. The fact that the most common "Yuri" fandoms written in by WOMEN are for shows like Sailor Moon (which had the subtle, extremely close bonds between a number of female friends and comrades) or Maria-sama ga Miteru (also much ado about feminine bonds, though less subtle perhaps), says something. So, in short, I think Karorin's biggest problem was actually that she failed to realize what Yuri fandom as a whole is really like. Yes, you have the people who only read Yuri porn, and that's one of the most active areas of the fandom - but guess what? The same can be said of fan fiction or online fiction in GENERAL, because the anonymity of the internet allows sexually-explicit material to be posted and read with at least an illusion of privacy, and humans given the chance will always be interested in sex, especially if (as is the case in American society today) a lot of sexual taboos have yet to be broken offline and in the mainstream, and a lot of people are still squeamish if not outright terrified of publicly acknowledging that yeah people are sexual beings. The truth is that if you ignore the PWP ("Porn Without Plot" or "Plot? What Plot?") crap that's obviously just there for titillation, you would find that a very large portion of Yuri is not only written by women FOR women, it's also written as straightforward romance. I'm open-minded myself. I usually ignore the explicit Yuri stuff, as it's less likely to have plot, but the plot-heavy stories are often quite well-written with likable, well-developed characters (or well-portrayed and well-developed, in the case of fanfiction), and can be quite romantic (and occasionally gut-wrenching, in the good way). Yaoi and Shounen-ai isn't normally my cup of tea, but I am willing to give ANY story a try so long as it is well-written, realistic enough for me to suspend my disbelief, and has good, well-developed characters. This is why you won't see me reading Gravitation (I've heard enough about it from a good friend who is into yaoi and shounen-ai and whose tastes I actually do generally trust, to feel it would be too cliche and that I probably wouldn't like the characters any further than "ooh, that's a cute character design"), but why I didn't run screaming from the (admittedly quite hilarious) homosexual hints and in-jokes in Pet Shop of Horrors (which is an awesome series), or in other series with lots of pretty boys that are aimed at girls (actually, to be fair, I will still "run screaming" from those if I don't like either the characters or the plot, but that's kind of my reaction to stories in general). It's also why I can fall in love with a touching, hilarious, well-illustrated series like Demon Diary, which is subtextually shounen-ai in theme. I think if Karorin stopped and realized that not all Yuri is sexually explicit, and took a look at a lot of the fiction written by fellow (and sometimes even straight!) women out there, perhaps she wouldn't be all "I hate all Yuri it's disgusting I think people who like it are stupid and gross", and more like "I hate Yuri porn and sexual Yuri...".  Because the two ends of fandom are very, very often polar opposites.
On a side note, she actually isn't as far off from the truth as you guys might think on thinking lesbians are more accepted than gay men in society, at least American society. Consider the following (from my own observations, feel free to chime in with corrections if I'm just really missing something though!): *When was the last time you saw or heard of a lesbian being assumed to be a sexual predator because she admitted she was attracted to the same sex (which is not the same thing as being attracted to a child of the same sex)? Because this happens surprisingly often to gay men, despite the fact that most of the serious sex offenses (rape, flashing a child, etc.) are actually committed by heterosexuals (more than 90%, as I recall. In fact, I could swear it was 98% last I checked). Lesbians aren't, for some reason, considered as suspect as gay men are of this. Is it because they're women, and thus perceived as less likely to abuse children because of what, less testosterone or more maternal instincts? I don't know. *If a woman hears a friend or coworker of hers is a lesbian, she may feel a little uncomfortable, sure, but in my experience, they usually get over it pretty quickly (and this is coming from someone who lives in the South, albeit in Florida and a part with relatively few rural areas at that, where there are more transplanted folks from up north or from other countries) and are usually tolerant of it; whereas if a guy finds out the same about a male friend of his, he tends to freak out a little more and - even if he "accepts it" - be REALLY uncomfortable in the guy's presence even if the guy doesn't make a habit of flirting in public or pushing himself on other men he knows aren't gay or bi. And most men are MUCH less uncomfortable around lesbians than that, being roughly on par to the reactions of most women to gay men. *Whenever I see a rant from an uber-religious guy (it's usually a guy when I'm around to see or read it, I don't know why), they seem to go softer on lesbians than gay men. I even caught a rant in a newspaper's Letters to the Editor section once where the guy was arguing against same-sex couples marrying and raising children, and he said something about how gay men and "even" lesbians were not going to be good enough to be parents (it's the fact that he felt the need to say "even" lesbians that I find so interesting...). I've got gay friends of both genders within my larger social circle, and the men complain much more often than the women do about being charged after by uber-conservatives trying to convince them of the "error of their ways". Is this because of the anti-sodomy passages in the Bible? Is it because gay male sex is more expressly addressed there? Is it because people assume that gay men are gay because of sexual perversion instead of an emotional thing (because we all "know" how obsessed with sex men "always" are and how women are "always" more emotionally-driven and sexually-driven) whereas they don't assume the same about women? Is it because so many of them have heard the concept (which I don't think has necessarily been proven) that women are more likely to be bisexual than men and combined this with the concept of women being "more emotionally-driven" than sex-driven compared to men? I really have no idea. For all I know, it's all of the above or none of the above for different people. *Whenever I see examples given of how well same-sex couples can handle taking care of children, it seems to be with a lesbian pair. Seriously, I'm not kidding (I think this might be because people assume two mothers and no father would be better than two fathers and no mother, because of "maternal instinct" or something. It would be logical to assume this, but then, it would still mean lesbian child-raising pairs are more "acceptable" to more people, wouldn't it). *Will & Grace aside, here are comparatively fewer gay men who end up with a partner or regularly have partners on American scripted television than there are gay women who end up in a committed relationship (however tragically it may end for Speed of Plot reasons. *sniffles over poor Tara...*). *Lesbian subtext is noticed in a great many "mainstream" series by mainstream critics and analysts (Xena: Warrior Princess, for instance), who for the most part seem to approve of it and find it interesting, even when they're NOT lesbians themselves. Guy/guy subtext? Seems to be only noticed within fandom, with the strange but notable exception of the Lord of the Rings movies. *In the more blatant stuff with guy/guy, it often also includes girl/girl (WIll & Grace, for instance) and it's either camped up for laughs (Will & Grace), or it's made to be very "art-house" (Brokeback Mountain, which was actually about two bisexual men whose one gay relationship ended in tragedy, contrary to popular view of it as a film about "gay" cowboys. The confusion is understandable, though). When it almost has to be either completely silly or completely art-house the majority of the time, it's not really all that accepted yet. Comedy thrives on the controversial, as does art-house film and "edgy" programs like on Showtime or HBO. So, I don't think the argument is that off base, with the exception of implying that lesbians are universally "accepted", which they still aren't at least in America. But they do seem to meet with less cultural revulsion and backlash than gay men do, from what I can tell, so she's not completely talking out of her derrière here, I don't think. I wonder what she thinks of Xena. Because you can go quite a few episodes of that before you start catching the subtext, if you're as thick as I am, and they never really went beyond "blatant subtext" on account of it being on network television. - Andromeda |
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
marie-antoinette
 Posts: 4136 Location: Ottawa, Canada |
|
|||||||||
|
I don't know about everyone else, but when I used the term yuri, I 100% mean something that is sexual. I do not use it interchangeably with shoujo-ai because I think that the different connotations to both terms are essential to their meaning. If something has a f/f relationship that is not shown to be explicitly sexual, than it is shoujo-ai. If it has sexual scenes in it that are explicit, than it is yuri. It's the same thing with shounen-ai and yaoi, one is explicit and one isn't. That's how I've always used them and this definition is usually supported by others that I deal with.
Thus, while I agree with most of what you said in general, I do definitely disagree that yuri can be anything that does not have sexual scenes in it, because that is what the term means to me. |
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
HitokiriShadow
 Posts: 6251 |
|
|||||||||
|
I go with the yuricon definition and use yuri as a blanket term for girl/girl content regardless of how explicit it is. If I'm talking about hardcore girl/girl sex, then I'll call it yuri hentai to specify.
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
Shugotenshi
Posts: 18 |
|
|||||||||
|
I agree with marie-antoinette completely. The whole point in using those terms in discussing titles with friends is to differentiate the presence or lack of sex.
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
Levitz9
 Posts: 1022 Location: Puerto Rico |
|
|||||||||
|
I find that to be an interesting essay. I whole-heartedly support it.
That's sexism for ya. |
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
Mylene
 Posts: 2792 Location: Indiana |
|
|||||||||
|
That was the most bizarre thread I think I've ever read (referring to what this was split from.)
That is exactly how I go as well. According to an excellent essay by Erica Friedman, someone very knowledgeable on the subject, shoujo-ai is an American creation to go with the old shounen-ai term (which is no longer in fashion, correct? It's now BL?) With that in mind, since I read the essay a year or two ago, I've begun to use the Yuricon definition and have discontinued using the term shoujo-ai (even if the ANN lexicon says otherwise.) Anyway, with regard to the rest of the post, while a very interesting thought, you're giving entirely too much credit to someone who appeared to simply be a troll. Now it is possible there are others out there who might be confused about what the term yuri really means, but that really wasn't the case in that thread--she was just trying to rile people up. Terminology is always such a finicky thing, particularly when it's coming from another language. I'm an American, and when it comes to manga and anime about two young women in a relationship, I call it yuri, as that's what is done in Japan from what I've read. On the other hand, I differentiate between anime and American animation, when anime means animation in general in Japan. In the end, I think it's always going to end up with confusion unless you explicitly state what 'definition' you go by in a discussion. If someone asked "Oh, you like girl on girl porn?" if I mentioned liking yuri, I would likely explain what it means and (as I've done 3 or 4 times before on this site) link them to Erica's essay on the definition of the word. It doesn't bother me for other people to use shoujo-ai, I'm just not going to do it myself. And as for the fandom, I'll admit, I've pretty much only come across men who like yuri just for the sake of yuri. I don't mind, it's their choice, but I personally prefer yuri because of it's representations of delicate romance--as long as it's the right kind (generally meaning it's written by women for women, in my case.) |
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
Andromeda
Posts: 119 Location: Florida |
|
|||||||||
While I wouldn't put it past her to be insulting others who disagreed just to piss them off, and while I wouldn't put it past her to be putting out her love of Yaoi/Shounen-ai to be "controversial" and stir up trouble, the fact is that to me at least, she came off as being at least somewhat sincere in her beliefs, however strange and misguided they may have seemed. If she's a troll who's making it all up, she's a damn dedicated one too, because she apparently behaved much the same on other forums before that. 
That said, I like, on occasion, to jump in to such discussions playing "devil's advocate" (or halfway devil's advocate, in this case, as I still enormously disagree with her obviously, but if she was as sincere as she sounded to me... well, flaming her ain't gonna convince her or anybody else of anything but that I was a silly, temperamental person, now would it?). And on an intellectual level, I must say that her behavior and comments, much as they may offend the majority, still sparked some interesting mental digressions on my part. If I can get that from a troll's post, who's to say I shouldn't?
Ah, it's always good to see other womenfolk who appreciate a cute, "delicate" girl/girl romance. 
As to the confusion, I really was actually honestly asking if the connotations were that much different back in '05, because I could swear they weren't.
Thank you. 
It's sort of funny, really, because it really does seem to be sexism, somewhat rampant, widespread sexism to boot... but it ends up causing LESS active discrimination (at least for lesbians), it would seem, which is just really odd. Then again, we're also talking about a culture (and this I say as a woman, too) where if you're a woman, you can actually usually get away with more than men can in a lot of other cases too (sexual harassment, for instance, or maybe it's just that fewer men than women consider sexually-charged flirting, dirty jokes, etc., to be "harassment"?)... and you know, I've heard of plenty women-oriented self-defense courses that teach a woman (admittedly, rightly) that if you hit a man who's attacking you in the "family jewels" it's appropriate self-defense, but if a men-oriented self-defense course were to say "if a woman's attacking you, hit her in the vulva", people would probably freak out (yes, women are sensitive down there too. It just doesn't stick out as far is all...). When you think about it, if the person's attacking you, honestly, does it matter? They attacked you, after all, and unless you're doing something wrong (e.g. if they're a police officer who saw you assault or rob somebody), if they get hurt anywhere it's their problem, right? But then, we're still in a state of flux after Women's Lib and the Sexual Revolution, so maybe it's not so weird, it's just in the middle of changing to something that will hopefully be as equal as possible for both (in a good way). I will admit though that when you get to more sensitive issues, like rape and sexual assault, it's a mixed bag. I've heard just as many cases of women not being believed when they've been raped or sexually-assaulted, or being painted as a whore by the defense (who subsequently won the case despite having a credible witness who heard her screaming, and some strong physical evidence), or being denied emergency contraception because the pharmacist didn't "believe" in it (true case, made the news a year or two ago I believe, she even had a prescription for it and he wouldn't fill it), or being told they "had to have consented, because your jeans were too tight for him to get off without your help" (true case apparently, it was in the news a few years or so ago, from Italy), etc., as I have heard stories of men picking up a perfectly sober, legal-looking girl in an American BAR (where ostensibly you should be 21 to even enter, let alone be ordering a drink), or a club (which was supposed to only allow patrons over 18 ), sleeping with her assuming that she was well over legal age of consent and knowing she wasn't drunk, only to have the girl and her parents turn around and get him convicted of statutory rape, despite the fact that he had no reason whatsoever to believe she was underage (and in one case, she even had a fake but real-looking ID that said she was much older than 16, 16 being underage in that area). So, when it comes to that I suppose it's a crapshoot of inequality, both genders getting the shift depending on the case, the area it happens in, etc..
Ah, but see, my point was, no matter how much the definitions lean one way or another (certainly, shoujo-ai has connotations more towards romance, and Yuri more towards sexual content), the fact is, the usages are far from universal, as we already see here. Especially notable is that Yuricon - one of the more influential "Yuri" sites/groups/etc. - uses it as a blanket term, and Shoujoai.com, another fairly popular and active site for the genre(s), I believe used Shoujo-ai as a blanket term as well (if you look at their archives, sure most of it is romantic in intent, but a LOT of it is sexually explicit, some of it even pretty much lesbian porn with a touch of "oh they're so in love" thrown in to make it less exploitive). It's true that more people associate Yuri with sex than shoujo-ai, but again, it's not universal. So, when someone says "I [ love / hate / am ambivalent on] Yuri", they really should realize that what they consider "Yuri" may or may not be what everyone else considers "Yuri", which can cause a lot of confusion, especially if they don't clarify really, really well (in this case, it seemed like the poster thought "Yuri" only and exclusively meant sexual material, but it wasn't entirely clear on whether she knew there was romance-centered fiction with girl/girl pairings, or that people used the term Yuri sometimes to refer to them, or what her opinion on them would be really, etc.). For the sake of my argument and clarity, I did use "Yuri" as somewhat more a blanket term, but it was entirely because of the actual argument, which I still think to be quite accurate. I tend to use "Yuri" for more sexually-explicit works and shoujo-ai for more romantic works as well myself. I just know enough to know that on some archives, the labeling system just doesn't work that way; as nice as it would be to have a universal system, there just simply isn't one. I'm sure there's a "girl-love" archive out there somewhere, possibly many, that make the distinction using the terms exactly as you just stated, but on bigger, multi-fandom sites (like fanfiction.net), this gets less and less likely, with many people using their own definition of the term and many people resorting to calling completely non-sexual girl-love stories as "Yuri" simply because it fits under the character-length restrictions easier. Or, in the case of some sites, using one as a blanket term simply because it's easier, or, possibly, because it's in their URL (I could swear this is why shoujoai.com uses it like that, but I've no real proof one way or another...). Of course, it gets even more confusing when non-anime fandoms are tossed into the mix, and people start calling it "femslash" (which could be anything from what marie-antoinette thinks of as Yuri, to what I think of as simply Shoujo-ai), or, even worse, "slash". Some fandoms, "slash" is the equivalent of Yaoi in anime fandom (the Harry Potter fandom is like this to some extent); others, it's any same-sex sexual pairing, or any same-sex pairing at ALL (and in some fandoms, like Buffy, I've seen it mean either depending on the author and archive in question), and, to make things even more confusing, the original fandom to use the term "Slash" (original Star Trek) used it - and to some extent, still does - to mean any story with a romantic pairing at all, regardless of sexual orientation. Which when all is said and done and considered, is actually quite funny, because the whole reason we try to invent terms for these things is to differentiate them from "other" stories, but no single term is ever QUITE universally-used under the same meaning, so we just end up with a whole mess of confusion and linguistic debate. Kind of like "fanfic", which the academics and the fans can't even agree on a spelling for (academics tend to spell it fan fiction, with a space between the two parts), let alone a definition (I've heard everything from "Anything that isn't considered canonical = fanfic", to "It's only fanfic if it's non-profit and not licensed" to "It's a modern extension of the oral literature tradition", the latter when you think about it means even Hercules: The Legendary Journeys could be "fanfic"). Fascinating, isn't it? Language in constant, writhing flux, manipulated by a thousand different tongues.
(Actually, way more than a thousand, but thousand sounded prettier )
-Andromeda |
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
DazzleNeko
 Posts: 44 |
|
|||||||||
|
About that Karorin girl you mentioned....I'm actually pretty good online buddies with her now. She still doesn't like yuri that much (or any lesbian content for that matter), but I don't think she's as extreme as she once was. She actually doesn't mind a few couples.
I think she's just bitter at the overabundance of lesbian things in the media. I can't really blame her though, since there is a lot more of that stuff than things with attractive gay men. There is nothing wrong with lesbians in the media of course, but it seems they are seen as beautiful, whereas gay men are still considered to be gross by a lot of people. This is the impression we get, though it may not be true in all places. Karorin is from Australia, and she says gay men there are very much so hated. I don't live there so I don't know if it's true or not, but I'll take her word for it. I've gotten irritated at some of the things she said in past forums, but she's not really that way anymore. I have sympathy because I know where she is coming from and can relate. She isn't a troll...she's just very passionate in her beliefs. I still enjoy talking to her though, because she's not as bad in conversation as she makes herself out to be in forums. So, please don't think badly of her. She's actually very fun to talk to, and is really nice.
This isn't meant to be a flame or insult, but a lot of times, some of the dedicated yuri fans really hate yaoi, and they expect others to dislike it too. I go to both yaoi and yuri message boards, and the board that gets the most trolls are yaoi boards who have yuri-fans who go there to flame and start trouble. I think a lot of yaoi fans get the idea that the yuri fandom is all like this, and they start to hate them and yuri. I too have felt this way at times when I would see certain trolls trying to pick fights (which is usually a yuri fan, honestly). But I know I shouldn't base an entire fandom off of a few annoying jerks. I know the yaoi fandom isn't entirely innocent. There are many yaoi fans who think yuri is sick and gross, but I think they get the impression that all yuri = hentai with busty women. Some just hate the idea of shoujo-ai too. Some of them just seem to hate lesbians in general and worship gay men, and I think that's wrong. I also get irritated at the ones who just seem to hate all female characters. Some yaoi-haters and yuri-haters are so stubborn that no amount of preaching and rationalizing with them will convince them otherwise. But I think if you are a yaoi-only or yuri-only fan, you should at least tolerate the opposite. You don't have to like it, but don't act like your fandom is superior. Yaoi and yuri are really two sides of the same coin. I view it as hypocrisy to like one, but constantly slander the other. I myself an mainly a yaoi fan, but I do enjoy good shoujo-ai every now and then. I've enjoyed Steel Angel Kurumi 2, which has all lesbian characters. I've also liked Kannazuki no Miko ( just not the mecha aspect). I just hate how the yaoi and yuri fandoms pick at each other so much. How hard is it to just get along and tolerate each other? That's just my opinion, though. 
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
Andrue
Posts: 79 |
|
|||||||||
|
i think of yuri as either way.
sexual or just romantic. cause not all yaoi is sexual. some of it is just romantic. |
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group