Heteronormativity in Heart of Thomas
Heart of Thomas, by Moto Hagio, is widely considered one of the first boys’ love manga. It, along with other manga by the Year 24 Group, were the forerunners of the modern boys’ love genre. It is widely considered one of the first outwardly queer narratives in manga. 1/10
Queer narratives are narratives which tell the stories of queer people. This can be done literally, directly displaying the lives of queer people, or allegorically and subtextually, with the various themes being described using proxies such as science fiction. 2/10
Pearson states “Queer genealogies… are engaged as much in a process of un/doing history as they are of un/doing gender… undoing may be less a refusal than a failed iteration, even where that failure is, to some extent, deliberate and agential.” 4/10
Queer themes include topics such as institutional and societal stigmatization, questioning of identity & ostracization. Not every queer person will have such experiences, but they are common enough, born from a world lacking a fundamental equality with its queer population. 5/10
As such, when writing queer stories, especially subtextually or allegorically, these are general symbols which can act as indicators of its allegorical structure. 6/10
Heart of Thomas excludes or restructures these themes to fit into a heteronormative lens. As a result, although it is considered a boys’ love manga, it lacks the structure of a queer narrative, and conforms to a heteronormative story. 7/10
Themes of queer narratives serve to primarily to mirror those in queer theory, and as such should portray a disruption of some norms. Blackburn et al sugget that “The disruption of norms is a key tenet of queer theory…” 8/10
“such standards are at least interrogated and more likely disrupted, focusing specifically on the disruption of sexual and gender norms, such as the binary between heterosexual and homosexual or that between man and woman.” 9/10
Reading Heart of Thomas as a queer narrative is nothing more than a historical artifact of being one of the first explicitly gay manga. It lacks the structure and themes of a queer narrative, and instead conforms to heteronormative standards. 10/10