While BL fandom is diverse, it does historically skew female, presumably because women are looking for narratives that eliminate the explicit depictions of the power imbalances that come with a constructed gender binary and that we are awash in in our daily lives. Sometimes, this means looking to escape into a world in which women—though not femininity—are removed from the equation. In Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan, academic Rio Otomo writes: “To say the reader disappears in BL may sound negative. But forgetting one’s gendered body, or floating away from a fixed identity, is essentially a liberating concept and, for that reason, it is the core idea of queer theory.”
Why are so many women interested in stories that center men and their romantic relationships? In short, because it is exhausting being a woman in a world that…
