Naughty Girls and Gay Male Romance/Porn: Slash Fiction, Boys' Love Manga, and Other Works by Female "Cross-Voyeurs" in the U.S. Academic Discourses

The presented research analyses a phenomenon which is considered ‘curious’ in contemporary American culture: women who write or read about male homosexual relations. Despite the phenomenon’s since the 1970s somewhat common character - popular genres such as Boys Love Manga or Slash Fan Fiction belong to the category - female cross-voyeurs are considered ‘strange’ and ‘unnatural’; much to the contrary of their counterpart, i.e., men who consider female homosexual intercourse as stimulating. From the perspective of Queer Theory, which discusses both our understanding of gender as well as our sexuality in general as socio-historical concepts, Carola Bauer researches the ‘different’ perception of these women and genres in American academic texts from the 1970s to the present. Methodologically a historical discourse analysis, the first part of this study focuses on the academic perception of female authors such as Mary Renault and Marguerite Yourcenar, who specialised in depicting homosexual romances in their historical novel - a curiosum which up until today is subject to much speculation within American literary studies. The second part of this study discusses Slash Fiction, a subgenre of Fan Fiction, in which mostly female fans imagine their favourite male characters from TV or cinema productions in homosexual relationships. This genre, too, has been discussed to a disproportionally great extent within American Media Studies because, so it seems, the ‘normal female interest in men bonking’ is seen as requiring explanation. The final part of this study focuses on academic studies from America which discuss Boys Love Manga, Japanese girl comics which narrate homoerotic relationships. On the whole, this study aims to highlight reoccurring patterns in the depiction of ‘female cross-voyeurs’ within the USAs academic discourse since the 1970s to enable a somewhat directed discussion of research desiderata and problematic tendencies.