Reflections on yaoi space and yaoi time: east and west, yesterday and tomorrow – an introduction

ABSTRACT

A brief introductory article for the special collection, ‘Reflections on yaoi space and yaoi time: east and west, yesterday and tomorrow’.

KEYWORDS:

• Yaoi
• Boys’ Love Manga
• genre

Acknowledgements

First I would like to thank my co-editor Anna Madill for all the encouragement and guidance, and of course for agreeing to work with me on this project. Thanks also to those who contributed to this collection with their fascinating research into Yaoi, which has helped to deepen my understanding of the diverse and rich potentials in the study of comics and genre. This collection was inspired by some of the papers presented at the Comics Forum conference, “Genre - A Conference on Comics”, which I organised in 2016. I am immensely grateful to Comics Forum’s director, Ian Hague, for the opportunity. Likewise, I am indebted to all those that helped in the conference’s organisation and made Comics Forum 2016 such a wonderful event: Paul Davies, Harriet Earle, Richard Finn, Ben Gaskell, Ian Grady, Hattie Kennedy, Annick Pellegrin, Simon Turner, alongside staff at Leeds Public Library and Thought Bubble Festival.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I use the Anglophone term here to broadly describe the medium as a whole (inclusive of comics traditions across the Americas, Asia, Europe, and so on).

2. Comics Forum 2016 – Genre: A Conference on Comics, took place at Leeds Central Library on the 3 and 4 November 2016. Details regarding this event can be located here: https://comicsforum.org/comics-forum-archives/comics-forum-2016/ [accessed 28/04/2018].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

William Grady

William Grady is currently a post-doctoral researcher in residence at the University of the Arts London's Archives and Special Collections, studying the inheritance of the mythic west in late-twentieth century British comics. He recently completed his doctoral study, a cultural history of the Western genre in American and Franco-Belgian comics, at the University of Dundee. His research interests fall broadly in the realms of comics, popular genre fiction (particularly the Western), and genre translation in transnational contexts. He is employed as a member of library staff at Manchester Metropolitan University, and has previously taught comics, media theory, and film history at this institution.