• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.18 no.9
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• pp.510-520
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• 2018

This study explored the phenomenon of heterosexual women embracing Boys' Love manga within the heteronormativity context from a feminist psychological perspective. Specifically, the issue of genre characteristics of Boys' Love manga, women's psychological mechanism of reading Boys' Love manga, and the functions and effects of embracing Boys' Love manga were discussed. As a theoretical framework of analysis, I started from the classical psychoanalysis and critically adopted the concepts of the various camps of feminism, queer theory, and Huizinga's Homo Rudens. The results show that Boys' Love manga can be classified as a sub-category of the romance genre, which fulfills heterosexual women's desires of eternal love and equal partnership. From these wish-fulfilling fantasies, heterosexual women attempt to be decontextualized from the heteropatriarchism, to enjoy distancing and voyeuristic separation from the characters in the texts, and to disturb the dichotomous gender system through gender reversal identification. These processes, which can be regarded as a women's play challenging sexual rigorism, ultimately bring about an awareness of the female sexual subjectivity.