Hagio Moto’s Marginal and BL manga as feminist fabulation

Content Warning: Discussions of sexual assault and gendered violence

Major Spoilers for Marginal

Hagio Moto—a key manga artist of the year 24 group shoujo renaissance—is famous for her comics exploring gender and sexuality (The Poe Clan, The Heart of Thomas), and her often mystical, mind-expanding sci-fi (Otherworld Barbara), as well as works that do both (They Were Eleven, A, A’). Marginal, released from 1985-1987, is an example of this overlap. Set on a Dune-like desert world in which all women have died out, and all babies are born to a mysterious religious figure known as “Mother,” Marginal explores what gender relations might look like in a world with no women.  Here, Hagio follows in a long sci-fi tradition of feminist novels and short stories like Suziki Izumi’s “Onna to onna no yononaka” (A World of Women and Women, 1977), Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), and Kurahashi Yumiko’s Amanon koku ōkanki  (Records of a Voyage to Amanon, 1986), which use a fantastical premise conduct speculative sociological experiments into other ways gender could be done. Marginal is very much worth the read alongside these texts, as a work of feminist fabulation which uses emergent “boy’s love” tropes to talk about heterosexual relationships, as much as to fantasize about homosexual ones. 

The year 24 Group—Hagio Moto and her contemporary Takemiya Keiko in particular—were instrumental in establishing the tropes of the emerging boy’s love genre: comics about gay men or boys originally written for mostly audiences of women and girls. Hagio herself has said that she first got interested in telling stories about romantic relationships between two boys after Takemiya took her to watch the French film, Les Amitiés Particulieres (1964) about a romance between two boys at an all-boy’s boarding school. After getting into the film, both Hagio and Takemiya wrote manga stories exploring relationships similar to the ones in the film—Takemiya’s “In The Sunroom” (1970) and Hagio’s “The November Gymnasium” (1971)—which became two of the first published manga stories about a gay male relationship. Hagio continued to explore queer themes in most of her later works, including The Poe Clan (1972), The Heart of Thomas (1974), and, of course, Marginal. Hagio’s first BL works were likely a major influence on both later mainstream-published BL comics, and the yaoi doujinshi genre which emerged in the 1980s. 

Feminist scholars and fan studies academics in both Japan and America have long been interested in the question of why stories about gay men are often so popular with (often presumed to be straight and cisgender) women, whether those stories are BL manga or Kirk/Spock slashfic. Scholars like Constance Penly and Kotani Mari have proposed a number of psychological explanations; that women and girls find it easier to project themselves onto male characters than the narrow set of female archetypes that they encounter or feel empowered to write in fiction, or that women are interested in stories about the subversion of gender roles which they relate to their own struggle against gendered expectations and oppression.

Others, like Cynthia and Henry Jenkins, have argued that perhaps it’s not worth spending too much time philosophizing about “the normal female interest in two men bonking”—after all, no one’s getting this philosophical about why straight men are so into watching lesbians make out. It’s my personal take that all of these scholars are probably right to some degree. Different female readers are likely approaching BL or slash fiction from their own varied places across a range from identification to voyeurism, depending on their own relationship to their gender and sexuality—and the cisgender, heterosexual, gay, and transgender people of all genders who read these comics and make up the audience, which publishers often just call “girl’s comics readers,” are relating to these stories to their own experiences of gender in their own ways. 

With regards to her own work, Hagio Moto has often talked about how writing boy’s love manga freed her to explore kinds of stories that she felt like she couldn’t tell about female characters. To some extent, this was freedom from the publishing industry’s censorship—in an industry where women’s sexuality was considered more taboo, Hagio could probably get away with more explicit discussions of sexuality in her works by writing about men. But Hagio has also said that the freedom that she got by writing about male characters was from her own hangups and compunctions about writing women. In her own words (in conversation with her roommate and manager Akiko Joh):

Joh: That’s because the readers are girls. They are ruthless in judging female characters, but they forgive male characters for just about anything. [Laughter.]

Hagio: That’s true…I found that the boy characters could say what I wanted to say so easily. They were standing in for me. It went very smoothly…But once I had done that, I found that when I created a female character, I would put myself into her, and I was told that I was imposing my own notions of what a woman is on the character. I thought, “Ouch!”…[Laughter.] It made me realize that I am still bound by stereotypes.

In fact, when Hagio first wrote “The November Gymnasium,” she drafted out two versions—one with all male characters and one with all female characters—but found that the story she wanted to tell about gender and romance flowed more naturally with male characters. Hagio is very honest that her male characters aren’t meant to depict realistic men.  Instead, they are intended to be tools for female readers to think about their own identities and desires. As Hagio puts it in the above interview, “I think there is that, but it also goes both ways…the male characters who appear in girls’ comics are a girls’ ideal, right? There aren’t any boys like that in real life. In the same way, the female characters who appear in boys’ comics are completely unrealistic.” 

Hagio’s manga Marginal is a particularly interesting example of how BL comics can be used to talk about women’s experiences of their own gender and the patriarchy. Marginal is set in a sci-fi world where there is only one woman—“Mother”—who gives birth to all new children on the planet Marginal after pollution has rendered all people on the planet sterile. All of Marginal’s other residents are men, who live in all-male societies, and adopt romantic relationships with each other. The twist of the series is that Marginal is revealed to actually be an enormous experiment conducted by a space-based company on a post-apocalyptic planet Earth. In this vein, Hagio has talked about the comic Marginal as an “experiment”—a speculative anthropological study of a world with no women. 

Marginal is often regarded as an influential early BL work because of the comic’s focus on romantic and sexual relationships between men. On Marginal, because there are no women, men flirt, marry, and have sex with each other, in a way which equally mirrors ancient Greek homosexuality and heterosexual relationships in a patriarchal feudal society in equal parts: younger men, called “irokos,” are pledged or sold to older men, or “nenjas,” and play a feminine role in the relationship. It’s easy to see the connection with the yaoi tropes of the “seme” and “uke” partners in the way Hagio depicts these relationships: the iroko partners are often depicted as beautiful, willowy, feminine men who take a “receiver” sexual role, and the nenjas are usually buff, masculine men who are the more aggressive and experienced sexual partner.  While there is no official English-language translation of Marginal, fan translators will often gloss iroko as “uke” and nenja as “seme.” 

It would be easy to read Marginal’s worldbuilding as a transparent yaoi premise—an excuse to write a story about gay BDSM relationships in a world where those relationships are openly socially accepted. And I’m not saying that it isn’t. One major feminist criticism of yaoi manga is that stories which depict gay male characters for women’s voyeurism, or for women to project themselves onto, are fetishizing and exoticizing actual gay people. And this is a criticism I have of Marginal too—the manga walks a fine line for me between feeling sympathetic versus just sensationalist about its gay characters. 

But part of what fascinates me so much about Marginal is how Hagio is interested in not just exploring the sexual aspect of these relationships, but their other social roles as well. The first iroko character who we encounter in Marginal is a sex worker, living in a brothel with other irokos who have come of age but not managed to find a nenja to financially provide for them—  immediately drawing the link between economic and romantic/sexual relations in the story. This theme continues throughout the story. We see irokos who are destitute because they do not have a nenja for financial support, nenjas considering their personal finances in deciding whether to buy a iroko or talking about how glad they are to have an iroko to do their laundry for them, and irokos filling a role as primary caretakers for children. Nenjas tease irokos for being too obsessed with their appearances, and are rebuked by irokos who argue that their appearance is one of their main tools for achieving power and agency. 

Hagio is definitely interested in using the nenja/iroko dynamic in Marginal as a way to talk about power dynamics in sexual relationships.  In the manga, we see many instances of irokos being subject to sexual violence by nenjas. But the manga is also very clear that sexual violence is not the only system of disempowerment and control which irokos are subject to—they are also forced to do labor and denied financial independence, and their freedom of movement without a nenja as a chaperone is restricted. In the manga, the sexual violence which nenjas commit against irokos is alternately condoned or condemned by the broader society depending on the economic relationship between the iroko and nenja in question in a nuanced way which parallels real world discussions of marital rape and consent under financial coercion. The gender relations in Marginal are richly textured, and explore all of the axes of power on which the patriarchy operates—not just the sexual one. 

We might think of Marginal as what science-fiction scholar Marleene S. Bar would call a work of “feminist fabulation”: a story which uses a sci-fi or fantasy premise to reveal truths about gender relations in our own world. In fact, at one point in Marginal, one of the characters talks about reading John Wyndam’s Consider Her Ways—a real world sci-fi novella about a world where a virus has killed all the men and only women remain—which I read as a tongue-in-cheek nod to how Hagio sees Marginal as fitting into a tradition of feminist science fiction which explores gender roles by asking what would happen to society if one gender disappeared. 

Japanese feminist scholar Kotani Mari, in an interview with the anime director Kunihiko Ikuhara, has claimed that a lot of yaoi stories, especially BDSM yaoi stories, can actually be read as stories about power relations between men and women, and tools which feminist authors use to fantasize about disrupting these structures: 

“I think that when female authors want to write about deviation, about jumping out of the system, the form that they choose surprisingly often is [yaoi] stories dealing with the bondage system….An old man tying up and raping a young boy is about the same as the relation between men and women—that’s how it is depicted. But then, the man who supposedly controls the boy might suddenly go sexually crazy and take the boy with him and run away. When that happens, the system itself is no longer preserved, the two men are deviating away from the system.”  

The scenario that Kotani describes is almost an exact summary of the plot between the characters Kira and Grinja in Marginal, where Grinja, a nenja, falls in love with an iroko, Kira, and continues to attempt to pursue him even after Kira has been sold to another nenja. The world of Marginal can definitely be read through this lens Kotani suggests—in the manga, Hagio creates a socially sanctioned power relationship which in many ways parallels relationships between men and women in a violently patriarchal society. But she also uses this comic to explore what happens when those social structures are disrupted. We encounter characters who transgress the norms of nenja/iroko relations by exchanging sex for money, engaging in polyamorous relationships, or wanting to remain irokos even after they have gotten older. As the comic goes on, we encounter more and more characters who transgress against both the gender roles of Marginal’s society, and the heterosexual society which exits outside of it: the “Mother” of Marginal is revealed to be an iroko who has been forced to undergo feminizing surgery, the Margrave who controls Marginal is considered deviant in his own society for being on feminizing hormones as treatment for an unrelated medical condition, and Kira, the center of the main love triangle of the comic, is a previously-thought-to-be-impossible intersex person who is capable of having children even on the blighted Earth.

Perhaps by telling a story about a world with only “male” characters, Hagio is making these familiar dynamics of gender relations more foreign to us. Like the book’s characters from outside of the planet Marginal, we’re more shocked by these dynamics when we see men being subject to them, since we aren’t used to this sort of violence in our own society. Showing familiar power relations in this unfamiliar position also draws our attention to how artificial these systems of oppression are. In fact, the main twist at the end of the manga, Marginal itself is revealed to be an experiment, artificially constructed by “the company” to breed humans who can survive on a cataclysmically polluted earth—and the entire hierarchy of its societal structure is revealed to be something artificially created by researchers. 

One compelling read here is that Marginal is making the point that gendered power dynamics are arbitrary and socially constructed, but do real economic work of creating an unpaid laborer class. Marginal might be saying that there’s nothing inherent or “biological” about women’s oppression—if women didn’t exist, a society could reinvent the patriarchy without them. In this manga, Hagio rejects the narrative that women’s oppression is innately tied to cis women’s wombs or ability to bear children, with perhaps an even more depressing claim about people’s desires to dominate each other. Marginal is a world where child-birthing is a revered position of social power, and most of the characters are incapable of getting pregnant, but their society has still forced them into an oppressed position that is symmetrical to women’s oppression in the real world, just to create a class whose labor and sexuality can be exploited. 

But Marginal is also a hopeful feminist text—it’s a text that says that queer people, people who transgress a society’s norms, will always exist, and continue to exist, no matter what the norms of the society. At the end of the comic, its main characters (Kira, Grinja, and Ashijin) end up in an implied polyamorous triad after the trio find a way to use Kira’s psychic powers to connect to the planet’s consciousness and heal the Earth. Even in this society with gender dynamics very much like ours, its characters manage to transgress against and escape its oppressive structures through their ability to literally dream of a better future, and their love for each other. 

Obviously, no one narrative about boy’s love manga is going to accurately capture the myriad of ways that different authors and writers, bringing their own experiences of gender and sexuality to the art, are going to relate to and make meaning from it. But Marginal is one strong example of the way that yaoi can be used as social commentary—and what a story with no women in it can say about women.