Shota, or shotacon, is a Japanese genre of comics and illustrations that feature young boy characters in a cute or, most often, sexually explicit way. The genre emerged in the amateur culture of self-published comics – dōjinshi – in Japan in the 1980s, which is centred around huge conventions that have come to attract hundreds of thousands of participants (Kinsella 1998: 295–96). Shota was first an offspring of the male homoerotic genre yaoi, which is read and produced mainly by women. Male readers discovered shota through lolicon, a genre that features young girl characters in a sexually explicit way. Yet other male readers positioned themselves against the lolicon reading shota fans (Watanabe, 1998). This ‘complicated mix of male and female producers and consumers’ (Saitō, 2007: 236) of shota is reflected in its many subgenres, differing in style, themes, the age of the characters and the explicitness of the sex, as well as in the readers’ views on whether or how sexual desire for fictional boys is connected to sexual attraction to actual children. Untangling this largely unresearched knot of desires for fictional boy characters will give us a better understanding of human sexuality and provide a more solid basis for policymaking.
In my current research, I am asking how fans of shota comics in Japan think about desire and identity. My methods have included web surveys, participant observation at dōjinshi conventions and the above-mentioned semi-structured interviews, both recurring and one-off ones. In these interviews, my research participants have talked about various aspects of their relation to shota comics: what kind of shota they like, how they see themselves in relation to the story, how they engage with shota concretely (how they read or draw it), what shota gives them and so on. While the answers are sprawling, a few themes have emerged. My main finding, which I explored through filmmaking, is that some readers use shota as a way to relive an alternative version of their own pasts, which had sometimes been traumatic or uneventful.
So far everything makes sense. Semi-structured interviews had been transcribed, coded and funnelled into neat findings. A bit too neat, maybe. I had a persistent feeling of only having traced the surface of my topic, and of wanting to go deeper. Filmmaking had added a ‘knowledge of being’ to the ‘knowledge as meaning’ (MacDougall, 2006: 6) that words convey, but my understanding of my research participants’ experience remained largely intellectual. What I needed was a method that could remove the ‘separation of mind and body’ (Stoller, 1997: xv), and so give me an embodied understanding of my topic.
The solution had been there all along, printed in plain language in the interviews – I had just not seen it so clearly. Because no matter how my research participants’ takes on shota differed in terms of favourite theme, preferred age and style of characters, how they related their own selves to the story, and so on, they had one thing in common: almost all of them said that they masturbated to shota material. I tried to inquire about the details of these masturbation sessions, but it was hard to know what to ask, and the conversation sometimes stalled. In addition, it would have been impossible for me to grasp how the intellectual reasoning, for example, of entering an alternative past, was connected to the bodily sensation of masturbation without me ‘doing it’ myself. Audre Lorde (1997: 282) has written: ‘The erotic cannot be felt secondhand.’ Indeed. And so I realized that my body was equipped with a research tool of its own that could give me, quite literally, a first-hand understanding of shota.
