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女どうしで子どもを産むことにしました (コミックエッセイ)
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 11, 2023
I'm always on a quest to read manga with queer characters that don't suck. Sometimes I'm lucky, a lot of times I'm not, but if there's one thing that stands out to me it's that autobiographical manga by Japanese queer women has so far been better than anything I've read in the GL genre.
Autobiographical manga shows what it's actually like to be a queer woman living in Japan, including the hurdles that come with it. Meanwhile GL manga either seems to take place in a world where sexual identities do not exist or they keep repeating the clichéd "I like [name] but we're both girls!" line without every really exploring the internalised homophobia behind these thoughts, let alone the societal oppression that causes them in the first place. GL manga is mostly about school girls, seldomly mentions identity, and almost never explores queer culture and queer life. But then in contrast you have works like Our Journey to Lesbian Motherhood here that a) talk about queer life in a realistic and heartfelt manner, and b) show things you almost never see in GL manga, like the lesbian couple having a queer friend group.
Of course, you can argue that an autobiographical manga by a lesbian about her life, and in this specific case about her and her partner's wish to have a child, has a different aim than fictional GL manga. And I'd agree. But I read Western webcomics/graphic novels too and they manage to have queer romance stories that don't feel shallow and that do tie into queer culture. I don't think the medium or the romance genre is the issue, I think the issue is who is deciding what enters the market. The issue is that often manga about lesbians is written for men, so it's not written to be representation for queer women, but a fetishised protrayal for men who think lesbians are hot. I believe the manga scene can do better than that and I believe it will have to do better if it wants to stay afloat as demands for queer rights become increasingly louder in Japan, a country without marriage equality, same-gender adoption rights or artificial insemination rights, with extremely outdated and harmful requirements for trans people seeking legal recognition, and which doesn't have anti-discrimination laws on a national level.
Autobiographical manga shows what it's actually like to be a queer woman living in Japan, including the hurdles that come with it. Meanwhile GL manga either seems to take place in a world where sexual identities do not exist or they keep repeating the clichéd "I like [name] but we're both girls!" line without every really exploring the internalised homophobia behind these thoughts, let alone the societal oppression that causes them in the first place. GL manga is mostly about school girls, seldomly mentions identity, and almost never explores queer culture and queer life. But then in contrast you have works like Our Journey to Lesbian Motherhood here that a) talk about queer life in a realistic and heartfelt manner, and b) show things you almost never see in GL manga, like the lesbian couple having a queer friend group.
Of course, you can argue that an autobiographical manga by a lesbian about her life, and in this specific case about her and her partner's wish to have a child, has a different aim than fictional GL manga. And I'd agree. But I read Western webcomics/graphic novels too and they manage to have queer romance stories that don't feel shallow and that do tie into queer culture. I don't think the medium or the romance genre is the issue, I think the issue is who is deciding what enters the market. The issue is that often manga about lesbians is written for men, so it's not written to be representation for queer women, but a fetishised protrayal for men who think lesbians are hot. I believe the manga scene can do better than that and I believe it will have to do better if it wants to stay afloat as demands for queer rights become increasingly louder in Japan, a country without marriage equality, same-gender adoption rights or artificial insemination rights, with extremely outdated and harmful requirements for trans people seeking legal recognition, and which doesn't have anti-discrimination laws on a national level.
Displaying 1 of 1 review