Women and Yaoi Fan Creative Work

Abstract

Slash and Yaoi are types of creative works with homosexual relationship between male characters. Most of their audiences are female. Using textual analysis, this paper aims to identify the reasons that these female media consumers and female fan creators are attracted to Slash and Yaoi. The first author, as a prior Slash fan creator, also provides part of experiences to describe the themes found in existing fan studies. Five themes, both to confirm and to describe this phenomenon are (1) pleasure of same-sex relationship exposure, (2) homosexual marketing, (3) the erotic fantasy, (4) gender discrimination in primacy text, and (5) the need of equality in romantic relationship. This could be concluded that these female fans temporarily identify with a male character to have erotic interaction with another male one in Slash narrative. A reason that female fans need to imagine themselves as a male character, not a female one, is that lack of mainstream media consists of female characters with a leading role, besides the romance genre. However, the need of gender equality, as the reason of female fans who consume Slash text, might be the belief of fan scholars that could be applied in only some contexts.