Patriarchal Cultural Domination in Japanese Boys' Love Manga

This study examines the persistence of patriarchal culture in Japanese Boys' Love (BL) manga, a genre frequently discussed as a space through which women can explore desire beyond conventional heterosexual representation. Using a qualitative approach within a critical paradigm, the study applies Sara Mills's Feminist Stylistics Analysis to Kono Te wo Hanasanaide by Sakimoto Saki, with attention to lexical choices, syntactic organization, subject-object positioning, panel composition, embodied representation, and the seme-uke/alpha-omega hierarchy. The analysis shows that the alpha/seme character is repeatedly aligned with dominance, rationality, public authority, and sexual initiative, whereas the omega/uke character is associated with passivity, emotionality, domestic labor, feminized physical traits, and sexual receptivity. Marking scenes, victim-blaming narratives, domestic role allocation, and visual framing further normalize unequal power relations by coding possession and vulnerability as romantic intimacy. The findings indicate that BL can simultaneously open a female-oriented imaginative space and reproduce heteronormative gender scripts through feminized male bodies. The study therefore argues that the emancipatory potential of BL should be evaluated alongside the textual and visual mechanisms through which patriarchal relations remain aesthetically pleasurable and culturally legible.