Yaoi As Adolescent Exploration -

My Japanese friend, Hanako, has a far more technical way of describing yaoi, and, in doing so, she manages to elucidate the myriad meanings of yaoi:

Yaoi precipitates from an adolescent fascination with sexuality. It's geared toward adolescent girls who have an active sexual curiosity but - because they may feel threatened by reading porn in which women are in a subservient position - need to feel detached from the sexual act. This opens up the notion of sexuality to them without them having to face it - sex is an expression of love but not something that has any physical relevance to their own experience. The feminine male characters (the aforementioned Uke) serve as a replacement for the female.

Now yaoi in the US is an umbrella term to describe several types of male on male stories. Yaoi itself is an acronym culled from the words yama nashi (no peaks), ochi nashi (no climax), and imi nashi (no meaning). It describes specifically those stories that parody popular titles by depicting the title's characters having sex. The word june (pronounced as two syllables with an accent on the 'e') defines hardcore erotica. Shounen ai describes love stories (yaoi takes existing manga and turns them into shounen ai that could cross into june). There's also a subgenre called shote con, stories about sexual relationships with pre-pubescent boys - these are outright child pornography but have gained a vocal readership among older women.

Shounen ai is similar in plot to shoujo in that it focuses on the relationships between characters above all else. They are love stories, the grounding concept among all that is considered yaoi in the US. The eroticism in the genre stems from a quintessential, perhaps fictitiously pure, love, the ideal for a young girl emerging into puberty. And for older women it's a nostalgic glimpse at a kind of innocence past that spawned so much happiness.

To learn more about yaoi in an academic context, Matt Thorn, Associate Professor in the Department of Cartoon & Comic Art at Kyoto Seika University, Japan, who specializes in shoujo manga, goes into the yaoi phenomenon quite extensively.

One of the most proactive yaoi sites on the web is Aestheticism.com, many of whose staff also help organize YaoiCon.

And a 'Yaoi' search on the web will yield near endless possibilities.