Celebrate 20 Years of the Yuricon Community – Free Virtual Event
YOU ARE INVITED to join us for a celebration of 20 Years of the Yuricon community with a free virtual event!
20th Anniversary Yuricon Community Event – Discussion of Global Yuri Fandom
Featuring James Welker and Verena Maser, hosted by Erica Friedman.
We will be presenting excerpts of our papers for this year’s Mechademia, then talking about our work in understanding and participating in global Yuri fandom – and we’ll have plenty of time to take your questions and just generally hang out and celebrate 2 decades of the spread of Yuri media!
Time:
Aug 14, 2021 08:00 Eastern Time (US and Canada), 13:00 BST, 21:00 JST (Japan).
Registration:
Registration is free, but there is limited space, so please register early. Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMrduyvqTsuEtP2I6jyVHS-DcB5yA7ccEty After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. I hope to see you there!
About the Speakers & Their Work:
Verena Maser
Verena has a PhD in Japanese studies and work primarily as translator of manga and anime from Japanese to German, including Citrus and Yuri is My Job.
No Place for Lilies? Yuri’s Rocky Road to Germany
Ever since the 1990s, manga have seen enormous success in Germany, easily outselling any other form of graphic storytelling. Yet to this day, not all genres are created equal. While fantasy and boys love are thriving, yuri has had to face far more challenges and seen far fewer successes. My talk will trace these challenges both from the angle of the overall market situation, as well as from a linguistic angle, as I myself have translated several yuri manga to German.
Nevertheless, their translation remains a challenge as stories often rely on shared tropes like being set at an all-girls’ school and featuring an “older sister” type paired with a “younger sister” type. Such tropes often have to be rewritten or even erased in translation. This includes the term “yuri” itself, as the lily symbolism is not understood by all audience members and German publishers prefer the term “Girls Love”.
James Welker
James Welker is a professor at the University of Kanagawa. He researches queer cultures, feminisms, & popular culture, in modern & contemporary Japan, including Boy’s Love in Japan/Asia. He is an editor of and contributor to Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia (Collaboration) 2021 Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan, Rethinking Japanese Feminisms, and Queer Voices from Japan.
The Yuri Genre in Its Transnational Permutations
Yuri, that is, manga, light novels, anime, and related media depicting female–female romantic intimacy, has always been a transnational genre. In addition to the genre’s early twentieth century roots in always already transnational Japanese girls fiction (shōjo shōsetsu), Yuricon was an early Yuri event.
While yuri remains a relatively minor genre domestically and globally compared with BL, yuri subevents have been held within larger fan events in Europe, North America, and Latin America, and yuri-only events have been held regularly in both Taiwan and Korea for the past several years. Drawing on participant observation since 2013, in this presentation I discuss yuri-only events in Japan (Girls Love Festival), Korea (Our Lily Festival), and Taiwan (ComicHorizon), yuri subevents in Canada (Yuri North and Yurithon), and other fan events at which yuri works have been present including Tokyo’s Comic Market and Comitia, and BL events in Southeast Asia. I focus on ways that yuri has been transformed in various contexts, as well as links to local LGBTQ cultures.
Moderator – Erica Friedman
Erica Friedman is the Founder of Yuricon. Erica has written about Yuri for Japanese literary journal Eureka, Animerica magazine, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, Dark Horse, and contributed to Forbes, Slate, Huffington Post, Hooded Utilitarian, and The Mary Sue online. She has written news and event reports, interviews Yuri creators and reviews Yuri anime, manga and related media on her blog Okazu since 2002 and is the author of By Your Side: The First 100 Year of Yuri Anime and Manga, coming out in June 2022 from Journey Press.
Love Online – Global Yuri Fandom Speaks For Itself
The term yuri, is both descriptive and divisive, shaped by creators, publishers and by different audiences within fandom. The story of yuri as a genre is the story of a global online fandom, which absorbed, adapted, and regurgitated Japanese words and concepts associated with the genre. Non-Japanese, English-language yuri fandom developed relatively cut off from both Japanese otaku communities and LGBTQ communities in Japan and abroad.
I will trace the arguments, the compromises, the failures and triumphs of the growth of this fandom from a first-person perspective, from small groups online in the late 1990s, through the development of yuri as a manga and anime genre legitimized by publishers and creators in both the West and Japan, by identifying and discussing the terms that were and are being used by that fandom.
About Yuricon
Yuricon was founded in 2000 under the name AniLesboCon, with the mission of bringing together fans of lesbian narrative in Japanese animation and comics to discuss and create stories that represented an entire continuum of lesbian experience. In 2001, the community was rebranded as Yuricon, to to better represent the mission: to celebrate Yuri in anime and manga and to remeber the ties to the lesbian community through the Yurizoku. Yuricon community members participate in panels, write articles and conduct lectures all over the world, in order to expand the global Yuri community.
Essays and articles are collected on Yuricon Essays Page, while Interviews and reviews, Event Reports and news are continually published on Okazu.