M. J. McLelland’s research while affiliated with University of Wollongong and other places

In 1971 the editors of Oz magazine were prosecuted for obscenity in a London courtroom for their infamous ‘School Kids Issue’, almost the entire contents of which had been created by a team of young people. In today’s Web 2.0 environment, similar kinds of content to that featured in the magazine is created by young people and made ubiquitous on fan websites. In particular ‘manips’ (manipulated images) of all kinds of pop culture heroes from boy band members to characters from Harry Potter are inserted into pornographic contexts. Whereas in the 1970s it was obscenity legislation that was used to restrict this form of cultural commentary, today child pornography legislation can be used to capture this content. I argue that changes to child pornography laws across the western world in the last two decades have resulted in the capture of even fictional images that are or may only ‘appear to be’ a person under the age of 18, rendering some aspects of online youth culture problematic. The ‘juridicial discourse’ that increasingly collapses a complex range of cultural representations into the category of child pornography is a cause for concern for all academics working on online youth cultures and for the young people involved.

In today's hyper-mediated world where computer software can deal seamlessly with a variety of the world's languages and scripts, it is difficult to recall the seemingly insurmountable computing problems raised by “Han” character-based scripts such as Chinese, Japanese (and to a lesser extent, Korean). In the early days of networked computing, some commentators even argued that the continued use of Han characters was a lost cause, and could only result in “intolerable inefficiencies” when used to communicate digital information. In this paper, I consider the orthographic factors that delayed the implementation of cross-platform protocols allowing for the input, display and transmission of character-based scripts across early computer networks (mid-1980s to mid-1990s). I note how Anglophone Internet histories have been largely oblivious to the inherent biases of Internet infrastructure that were built by programmers using ASCII (based on the limited range of characters provided by the Roman alphabet) who also assumed the QWERTY keyboard to be the obvious human–machine interface. Instead of stressing the deficiencies of character-based scripts, I invite the reader to consider how the Internet might look today had it not been founded upon assumptions based on Anglophone usage, and consider the potentialities of a non-phonetic character-based writing system.

Clause 13 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child states that children have the right ‘to seek, receive or impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in art or in any other media of the child's voice’. However, there is one area in which this directive is constrained in various countries by domestic regulations curtailing children's access to information. That area is human sexuality. The arguments for and against children's access to sex education are well rehearsed. In this article, the author pursues a different angle, looking instead at the increasing restrictions placed upon young people's ability to imagine and communicate with each other about sexual issues, particularly in online settings. The advent of the internet and a range of social networking sites have not only enabled young people to access previously quarantined information about sexuality, but also to actively engage in forms of ‘intimate citizenship’ online. In this article, the author focuses on young people's online fan communities which use characters from popular culture such as Harry Potter or a range of Japanese manga and animation to imagine and explore sexual issues. ‘Child abuse publications legislation’ in Australia and elsewhere now criminalizes the representation of even imaginary characters who are or may only ‘appear to be’ under the age of 18 in sexual scenarios. Hence these children and young people are in danger of being charged with the offence of manufacturing and disseminating child pornography. Despite research into these fandoms that indicates that they are of positive benefit to young people in developing ‘sexual literacies’, there is increasingly diminishing space for young people under the age of 18 to imagine or communicate about sexuality, even in the context of purely fictional scenarios.

This introductory chapter briefly examines Boys Love (BL)—a Japanese genre of fictional media focusing on romantic or sexual relationships between male characters, typically aimed at a female audience and usually created by female authors. This tradition fully developed into a self-conscious literary tradition devoted to extolling the charm of youthful male beauty during the Edo period (1603–1868). Confucianism saw women as inferior and not as suitable objects of admiration, and, following this teaching, most of the Edo writers deviated from the Western concept of “romantic love” and wrote narratives about the relationships between older and younger samurai. Additionally, the chapter introduces the four predominant terms that have been used to label and categorize BL which are used throughout the entire text—shōnen'ai, JUNE, yaoi, and BL.

Boys Love (or simply BL) has emerged as a mainstream genre in manga, anime, and games for girls and young women. This genre was first developed in Japan in the early 1970s by a group of female artists. By the late 1970s, many amateur women fans were getting involved and creating and self-publishing homoerotic parodies of established male manga characters and popular media figures. The popularity of these encouraged a surge in the number of commercial titles. Today, a wide range of products, produced both by professionals and amateurs, is rapidly gaining a global audience. This book provides an overview of the BL phenomenon in Japan, its history and various subgenres and introduces translations of some key Japanese scholarship not otherwise available. The book looks at a range of literary, artistic, and other cultural products that celebrate the beauty of adolescent boys and young men. In Japan, depiction of the “beautiful boy” has long been a romantic and sexualized trope for both sexes and commands a high degree of cultural visibility today across a range of genres from pop music to animation. Drawing from diverse disciplinary homes, the chapters unite in their attention to historical context, analytical precision, and close readings of diverse boys love texts.

This paper looks at the recent explosion of cultural concern over child sexual abuse and child pornography, particularly as it relates to the trading of such images via the internet. It is noted that legislation originally enacted to prohibit the sexualized representation of actual children has recently been extended to include fictional representations and in Australia includes text as well as graphics. Taking the online global fandom dedicated to ‘boys’ love’ (also known as yaoi) as an example, I argue that legislation prohibiting fictional accounts of ‘child’ sex-abuse is ill-conceived and potentially damaging to human rights and freedom of expression. I show how present legislation which collapses boys’ love materials into the category ‘child-abuse publications’ is blind to the complexities of desire and sexual identification and inadvertently criminalizes a large international fandom of women and girls who create and trade in images of ‘boys’ love,’ thus reinforcing sexist and heterosexist structures in the wider society and once again silencing the voices of non-conformist women.

This article investigates the implications of Australia’s prohibition of ‘child-abuse material’ (including cartoons, animation, drawings and text) for Australian fan communities of animation, comics and gaming (ACG) and slash fiction. It is argued that current legislation is out of synch with the new communicative environment brought about by the internet since a large portion of the fans producing and trading in these images are themselves minors and young people. Habermas’s analysis of the conflict between instrumental and communicative rationality is deployed to demonstrate that legislators have misrecognized the nature of the communicative practices that take place within the ‘lifeworlds’ of fan communities, resulting in an unjust ‘juridification’ of their creative works. Drawing on Japanese research into the female fandom surrounding ‘boys’ love’ (BL) manga, it is argued that current Australian legislation not only forecloses the fantasy lives of young Australian fans but also harms them by aligning them with paedophile networks. Finally, drawing upon Jean Cohen’s paradigm of ‘reflexive law’ the article considers a possible way forward that opens up channels of communication between regulators, fans, domain host administrators and media studies professionals that would encourage a more nuanced approach to legislation as well as a greater awareness of the need for self-regulation among fan communities.

This paper investigates the implications of the Australian Government’s proposed Internet filtering system in the light of Australia’s blanket prohibition of ‘child pornography’ (including cartoons, animation, drawings, digitally manipulated photographs, and text) for Australian fan communities of ACG and slash. ACG/slash fan groups in Australia and elsewhere routinely consume, produce and disseminate material containing ‘prohibited content’ (i.e. featuring fictitious ‘under-age’ characters in violent and sexual scenarios). Moreover, a large portion of the fans producing and trading in these images are themselves ‘under age’. Focusing specifically upon the overwhelmingly female fandom surrounding Japanese ‘Boys’ Love’ (BL) manga, the paper argues that legislators have misrecognised the nature and scope of these online communities. It is also argued that the sheer scale of this kind of material, and the fact that it is legal for download and purchase in jurisdictions such as the US and Japan, make attempts to prohibit access to these purely fictional depictions in Australia unworkable.