Girls who like Boys who like Boys – Ethnography of ... - Yuuyami.com

Yaoi Links Garden,” which contained over 500 links to yaoi sites for various
anime series. 14 This all happened during my first year in the United States, a
time during which I suffered from a couple of bouts with depression and had
unhealthy sleep cycles (part of the reason why I cannot really remember how
exactly I stumbled across slash). All I can recall is that I went through most of
the links rapidly, reading until exhaustion in order to be able to sleep. It was a
matter of escapism, nothing more or less. One of my first impressions of
slash/yaoi was its gender-bending qualities, and certainly that appealed to me.
However, it would be too easy to say that this property was my sole reason for
getting into slash; at that point, though I had not taken an Anthropology class
yet, I had already started to reject the dual-pole definitions of gender as a
social rule cast in iron. Rather, slash seemed to have happened incidentally:
though my first impressions were positive, and though the aesthetics and
visuals fanfics conveyed were new and beautifully different to me, the main
properties of slash that had me reading every night or whenever I could were
that it was well-written and had characters that I knew and liked. I needed the
routes of escapism it provided, and though science fiction novels provided me
with the same means in the past, slash/yaoi was far easier to read and did not
require as much active intelligent involvement on my part.
Of course I was not capable of making these observations at the time;
14 This page has changed domains as well as webmasters several times, but still, essentially,
exists. Now renamed to “a night of yaoi,” and found on several mirrorsites (i.e. accessible
from different URLs), it boasts a new layout and structure. One of the URLs it is accessible
from is: http://www.geocities.com/animerosegarden - last accessed 05/03/04
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