This chapter has suggested that while hyper-masculine depictions of the male body can be found within bara manga, a close reading of the bara published
within Bádi magazine has demonstrated that tropes of physicality which evoke masculinity do not dominate all bara. Instead, these depictions of hyper-masculinity are embedded within a much more diverse representation of gay subjectivity, which includes ‘normatively’ gay and masculine gachimuchi and transvestite okama subjectivities, amongst others. Indeed, this chapter has shown that the bara manga of Bádi magazine maybe be broadly situated in one (or more) of three thematic clusters, only one of which (erotic bara) appears to include depictions of the male body similar to those featured in the gay manga analysed previously by McLelland (2000) and others.
Furthermore, the contextualised approach adopted within this study has suggested that it is necessary for researchers to engage with the role bara manga play within media in order to truly come to terms with which gay subjectivities are promoted and how this promotion relates to issues such as the construction and dissemination of ideas concerning masculinity.
Overall, this chapter suggests that researchers must engage with bara manga as a situated genre and follows Ruh (2014) in questioning claims that bara is typified by homogeneity. These findings are not only relevant to the study of bara, but also to the study of other genres of manga. As an emerging discipline, Manga Studies has the potential to deconstruct reified ideas concerning stylistic genre whereby all cultural productions from a particular ‘genre’ are automatically and uncritically perceived to share common characteristics. This chapter, and the others collected in this volume, mark an important exploratory step in this direction.
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