asking on anon bc why not. as a west asian, i feel overwhelmingly disgusted by the fact that people are culture appropriating of yaoi and yuri. western queer relationships are not yuri/yaoi, they’re queer and theres nothing wrong with that. being queer isnt a bad thing, stop appropriating terms thats never belonged to you because you’re feeling guilty of your whiteness
Not to mention there’s been some contention even amongst Japanese peoples on whether Yuri and Yaoi are focused on pacifying white cishet audiences, from some articles I’ve read, so there is that extant layer of white assimilationism and the commodification of Japanese-ness for the sake of the white gaze.
And this also explains why some artists have voiced that Anime characters are typically either ethnically ambiguous, white, or East Asian, while other BIPOC characters are poorly portrayed.
And when non-Japanese audiences use it to reference non-Japanese things, it removes it further and further away from the culture and instead turns Japanese-ness into an aesthetic consideration.
Another factor is that the attention such art receives is from white-dominant audiences, which tells you how/who these are geared to already. Many narratives featuring East Asians especially feature graphic violence, abuse and control over hyperfeminised East Asian bodies, which slides into Sinomisogyny and Sinomisandry. ( @this-is-sinomisogyny )
There’s definitely a way to go about Yaoi/Yuri which involves more well-balanced narratives that do not continuously feed the hyperfeminised sinomisogynistic and sinomisandristic stereotypes, as well as respectfully portray a diversity of BIPOC characters without tokenising.
All in all, I believe this is the fetishising of Japanese art, cultures, bodies and qualities. This constitutes Orientalism and Sinophobia. At the same time it’s also against the backdrop of more race-based bigotries.
