The Rise of Queer Manga

Yuri is a genre of Japanese media that depicts intimate relationships between women, with a century-long history heavily intertwined with Japan’s feminist movements and LGBTQ+ politics. In the genre’s early iterations, explicit discussion of politics was deliberately avoided; intimate relationships depicted between women were not labeled with queer-positive language denoting sexual orientation. This delicate avoidance of LGBTQ+ terminology resulted in the looming threat of compulsive heterosexuality overshadowing the majority of early Yuri works, even with an absence of men in the cast of characters. Currently LGBTQ+ rights are under threat in the United States, and LGBTQ+ works are being censored en masse. Our current political moment underscores the importance of learning how queer people throughout history have navigated politics in media creation and media representations.

Erica L. Friedman is an eminent yuri historian dedicated to the crosscultural sharing and translation of Yuri media. Friedman is a pioneer in this field and runs the world’s oldest and most comprehensive blog on lesbian-themed Japanese cartoons, comics, and related media. In 2022, Friedman published By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri History, which is the first and only book detailing the history of the genre, situating its development in the feminist and LGBTQ+ literary movements in Japan along with the evolution of internet culture. Throughout her career as a scholar, researcher, and speaker, Friedman has advocated and uplifted international LGBTQ+ solidarity in the media landscape through the establishment of her own publishing company, ALC Publishing, which was dedicated to translating and licensing Japanese lesbian media for an English-speaking audience in order to bring these stories to a wider audience. Friedman has lectured and presented at film festivals across the world, such as the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

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