performing anti-work and radical dreaming - damie, 2025, digital
author's note: this short essay was written for my racial capitalism class. it assumes a pretty high level of familiarity with Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism, his Black Radical Tradition and Shauna Sweeney's chapter in Histories of Racial Capitalism and her Black Heretical Tradition. it can probably (?) be read without those, but if there's anything that needs clarifying I can put some notes in lol
The term boy-love refers to the Japanese genre of manga exploring the relationships of male characters; it encompasses both shonen-ai and yaoi, with the first being the tamer, more sensual storylines, and the second featuring explicit content. Yaoi (as I will affectionately and casually call the boy-love genre throughout this essay) has become a transnational, global art in the 21rst century, as Wood describes in “Straight” Women, Queer Texts. Throughout her piece, Wood examines the “fantasy” of yaoi- how the texts queer the reader through implication, forcing them to create their own interpretations of the character’s identities. This establishes the audience of boy-love as an increasingly web-based, global “counterpublic” (404), a dynamic and evolving group of people tied together by their interactions with the texts, which are varied and diverse, challenging the traditional notion that readers are “straight” women. In this essay, I argue that this counterpublic framework offers a leg up to analyze yaoi within the space of racial capitalism in America over three main areas. One, the unique construction of yaoi as dually a marketable product, offering an “in” to racial capitalist structures, and an always-already queer product. Two, how yaoi currently creates a space for place-making within racial capitalism and its own reflection of ideals found in the Black Radical Tradition. And three, the limitations of this space and how it can incorporate themes from the Black Heretical Tradition and become a better practice for place-making.
Due to the nature of the art, yaoi exists in a strange bubble for racial capitalism, achieving marketability while also being an inherently queer art form. When boy-love first entered the American scene in the early 2000s with the publisher TokyoPop, most of the books listed were shonen-ai, staying away from the comparatively hardcore yaoi titles. Curiously, in spite of American gender norms, they became widely popular, amassing an audience of mostly women. Wood’s fantasy was the product they were selling, and it had a viable Marxian use-value. This value was then commodified by publishers, seeing an opportunity to profit off of boy-love readers. One could liken this to Leong’s model of corporate social responsibility, wherein a “status leak” (Leong, 2177) could be said to be occurring; female readers would lose some of their status by becoming tied to unacceptable portrayals of gender within capitalism, and the corporation would gain appeal from the public by promoting a “thin diversity” (Leong, 2196). However, this understanding breaks down when we bring in the always-already queerness of the genre. In our current landscape, intimate relationships between men are not within the typical model of American masculinity or homonationalism. The men in these books are seen subverting the act of penetration, instead, focusing on “both partner’s erotic fulfillment and gratification” (Wood, 403), which fundamentally pushes against defining maleness as dominance and control, implicating the publisher in this anti-homonationalism. This implies that the so-called status leak is actually not a status leak at all, but a status siphon, where the authors and counter-public are able to expand their reach more widely through the publisher, forcing them to bear the brunt of the potential negative associations. However, not unlike the dynamics between partners in boy-love, this status siphon is a net positive for both parties, as the publisher gains the benefits of supporting Leong’s “thick” diversity, and accesses markets which are untapped, both valuable assets. Yaoi asserts itself as an unshakably queer product through the creation of these status siphons, a network of strong roots that expand its influence even under crushing pressure from racial capitalism.
Aside from its strong ideological resistance to racial capitalism structures, American boy-love spaces also currently provide various forms of resistive acts, not dissimilar to practices from the beginning of the Black Radical Tradition, including radical dreaming, maroon communities, and market marronage. In Robinson’s Chapter 12 of Black Marxism, he reveals that in its primary stages, the Black Radical Tradition did not exist as “a critique of Western society,” but a “revulsion of racism in its totality” (Robinson, 310). It was “the ability to imaginatively re-create a precedent metaphysic” (Robinson, 309). As previously seen, a core component of yaoi is its queerness through implication (or lack thereof). The fantasies within yaoi present a form of radical dreaming, imagining a world that is gentler, queerer. Yaoi also does not exist primarily to disturb the structure of racial capitalism- it’s simply a form of art that people create. These qualities, born from the power of dreams, imbue boy-love spaces with echoes of the Black Radical Tradition, stabilizing its resistivity. One might then think: If the boy-love space so closely mirrors the main traits of the Black Radical Tradition, then what is yaoi marronage? Marronage is one of the first realizations of the Black Radical Tradition- which Robinson describes at length in Chapter 6- and maroon communities are its lifeblood. While yaoi does not offer a physical escape from the systems of racial capitalism, it does offer digital ones. In counterpublic communities (social medias, fan conventions, etc.), queerness is not only welcomed, but celebrated and desired. Creating these spaces which preserve ontology, pass on culture, and decenter homonationalist views is one of the ways boy-love is resistive. Extending Robinson, Sweeney details another form of marronage, “market marronage” (Sweeney, 66), unearthing the hidden structures of resistance even when engaging in capitalism. Within these counterpublic spaces, artists often self-produce and sell their own merchandise, comics, and commissions; this neo-market-marronage lives on the web too, with artists hosting their own sites and leveraging their counterpublic communities. Without the structural similarities to the Black Radical Tradition, the boy-love space could not thrive within its repressive environment.
While boy-love reflects the Black Radical Tradition to an extent, there are deep silences present within the space, most notably, a lack of Blackness. This essay has primarily focused on the ability of yaoi to do resistive work through queerness, but within racial capitalism, if you aren’t doing work against white supremacy, you aren’t doing work against racial capitalism. Wood describes the visuals of boy-love as “beautiful” and “androgenous” many times, but does not acknowledge these standards of beauty existing within the Western mind for the American reader. This begs the question: who is yaoi an escape for? Perusing shonen-ai titles on Anime-Planet, it took me about 210 titles until one of the covers featured a character who was not pale-skinned, and he didn’t have accurate ethnic features. Clearly, the genre has work to do. I offer a solution: extend the reflection into a mirror of the Black Heretical Tradition. Sweeney describes the difference between the Black Heretical and Radical Tradition as a “[resurrection of] Robinson’s dialectical formulation through a gendered analysis” (Sweeney, 56), not as separate entity, but a more nuanced and expansive practice. Similar to how Sweeney uncovers the narrative of gender in enslavement, one can also uncover the narrative of race in yaoi. This analysis could track the always-already queerness of Black women, and their duality of being masculinized, find the rich histories of Black and brown queer authors and comic artists, and how they interact with the space. But unlike Sweeney, who stopped at the creation of the Black Heretical Tradition, yaoi has a unique opportunity for realization. As previously established, boy-love is entirely within the control of the counterpublic, meaning artists can enact new styles of radical dreaming instantaneously. Without forgoing boy-love’s erotic holes of implication, this new dream can look like diverse main characters, playful subversions of sex roles (ex: power bottoms or submissive tops), casual transness, and more, which preserve the fantastical nature between the reader and story, but recenter liberated people and societies. Yaoi is not a perfect resistive space, but no resistive space is perfect; using this model of the Black Radical and Heretical Traditions, not only can boy-love be supported and embraced as a form of radical praxis, but it can serve as a blueprint for how to structure artistic communities to powerfully dream of liberation.
performing anti-work and radical dreaming - damie, 2025, digital
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