Because being a lesbian was, for Japanese society, a kind of political statement, romantic or sexual content between same-sex partners was not in and of itself considered “lesbian.” While lesbian social and political activism in the 1970s helped create a space for Yuri comics, there was little connection between the two in later years.Ĭommon terms in the doujinshi world in the 1990s were “girl x girl” (女の子x 女の子) or “woman x woman” (女x 女) or the maddeningly vague “onna-doushi” (女同士). Yuri is not the first or only term we’ve had for women in romantic pairings in anime and manga. And later that year, Yuri Hime magazine was launched. I looked around the room, which included an editor of a soon-to-be-launched yuri manga magazine and asked that “we,” those of us in the room, support and promote this newly conceived genre as a genre, not just as a trope of another genre.

Why am I telling you this? Because as the term “yuri” shifts and changes, people lose sight of how we got to using that term and why it’s important.īack to that cafe in 2005. Without a single, discrete source, yuri is the product of disparate creators and audiences with conflicting needs, tropes, and conventions of storytelling. Yuri, a genre of Japanese comics, animation, and related media focusing on lesbian themes and content, is unlike the four main demographically focused genres of Japanese media. I wrote at length about those factors recently in an article “On defining yuri” for Transformative Works and Cultures. And complicating matters, yuri as a genre has disparate roots and factors that influence it. Complicated, because words often change shape after they have been coined and exceed their roots, sometimes even completely changing their meaning to the opposite of their original intent. “Yuri” is a complicated word and a complicated genre. The interviewer asked me, “What is yuri? How do you define it?” I smiled and said, “Of course, anything I like is yuri.” Everyone laughed.

In April, 2005, I found myself in a cafe with a number of popular or soon-to-be-popular yuri manga artists for Yuricon 2005 in Tokyo.

Diferencia entr emanga y anime