Alejandro’s Thanksgiving Feast
First course: Kale and mustard green salad with carrot shavings and crunchy mealworms (All organic)
Second course: Butternut squash and zucchini “stuffing” with crickets and prickly pear fruit “cranberry sauce”
Intermezzo (not pictured): butternut squash pie
Third course: Fresh Raspberry for dessert
Full album available at http://imgur.com/a/cGDi1 .
Join Alejandro’s fan page at https://www.facebook.com/AlejandroTheDragon !! We just started the page - stay tuned for more updates soon!
HAPPY MUNCHVERNTURE quest for a the punkin pyes 9.8/10 Surely to recive a snuggel Afterways (for diagesstion)
how's life!?
Anonymousi have no idea how old this ask is but it’ll make a good update for the scant few who follow me still i suppose
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sorry about the recent reblogs but i feel like they’re pretty important
i’m still not coming back to this site
if you want to keep in touch with me, send me a message/note/dm whatever it’s called here i forgot
hello. i've seen the commentary you've made regarding the term "bara" and i would like to know if this term is considered inappropriate to use in light of that information? i've noticed some people are already denouncing it, and considering this is tumblr, there's a high chance of people that will call out or personally attack others that still use that term because they aren't as informed
Anonymous“Bara” isn’t worth starting a Tumblr social justice war over. It’s a loanword with a complicated history both in Japanese and English, and a plethora of usages. At best it unites fans with a common interest in the type of art posted on this blog, and at worst it’s a culturally insensitive misnomer.
I would say maybe it’s inappropriate to use it in a sentence like “Gengoroh Tagame is my favorite bara artist,” because that’s not how he identifies. However, the Japanese artists we’ve discussed it with seem more perplexed by its usage than oppressed. It’s an antiquated word there, most strongly associated with the old Barazoku magazine, but it doesn’t connect with modern gay culture.
There’s a long history of Western misappropriation of the Japanese language, so I’m striving to be mindful of that (after using the term “bara” myself for years). This is a nation that calls itself “Nihon” (日本), and we’re still calling it “Japan” 700 years after Marco Polo’s misinformed assertion that the region was named “Cipangu.”
More recently, and with more than a few parallels to the subject at hand, the term “yaoi” came into popular use internationally for the manga genre that Japanese artists mostly refer to as BL (Boy’s Love). These days, artists all over the world are making work they proudly call “yaoi,” and that’s great. If they identify with the term and find what it represents to be empowering, how can you hate on that?
It’s not just a one-way street, either. Japan’s own sexual categories have both influenced and been influenced by Western terminology. Even the word “gay” (ゲイ or gei) has had its own unique trajectory in Japan since it was introduced during occupation following the Pacific War. It became a widely used term in Japanese culture decades before the word “gay” was well-known in the U.S.
From Mark McLelland’s great book, Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age:
Indeed, “gay,” as a signifier for homosexual men and women, was not widely understood even in the United States in the 1950s. The term established itself as a common referent among homosexual subcultures in the United States only as a result of the mass mobilization during the war, which brought a diverse number of homosexual men and women together from all parts of the country and helped standardize gay slang.
[…] Compared with the slow dissemination of the word “gay” throughout anglophone societies, where it was to take another 25 years before becoming general currency, the rise of gei in Japanese was meteoric. Gay (gei) entered Japanese immediately after the war via gay men in the occupation forces, who referred to their Japanese partners as gei boi or “gay boys.” By the 1950s gei, especially as part of the compound gei boi, was being used in the Japanese media to describe effeminate homosexual men.
The meaning of gei originally didn’t quite match up with the American usage of “gay.” It referred specifically to homosexual men (never women) “who displayed transgender characteristics or worked in the entertainment industry.”
The term gei continued to evolve in Japanese usage over the following decades, and by the time the Japan experienced a cultural “gay boom” in the early 1990s, the meaning of gei had grown closer to the newly globalized “gay,” as LGBT activism surged around the world. However close gei has become to “gay,” there’s still an important distinction. When I talk about gay manga, I’m always really talking about gei manga.
Anyway, I’ve gone off on a few tangents here, but this is all to say that the terminology of sexual minorities is often contentious and frequently shifting, and in the case of “bara” it’s complicated further by the tides of cross-cultural exchange.
For more reading on the many complex ways in which language has shaped understandings of sexuality in Japan, I highly recommend reading the above-mentioned Queer Japan, as well as Katsuhiko Suganuma’s Contact Moments: The Politics of Intercultural Desire in Japanese Male-Queer Cultures and Gregory Pflugfelder’s Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse 1600-1950.
in case anyone (and i think a LOT of ppl aren’t yet aware) didn’t see the MASSIVE post i reblogged earlier this month, “bara” is actually more or less equivalent to a slur against gay men in japan, and NOT a cutesy term for buff men
so like, i’m not sure exactly how it became misconstrued as that…
I’ve tried to find some kind of source saying the word is offensive slang from a Japanese source but I can not find a single Japanese source documenting its use or offensiveness besides the typical “barazoku” one.
“The magazine was named Barazoku (The Rose Tribe) by Ito since the flower rose had been a prominent symbol of male homosexuality in Japan, derived from Greek myth of the King Laius who have affairs with boys under rose trees. ” as said from Wikipedia’s “Barazoku” article, both in the Japanese and English articles.
The word “bara” in Japanese can mean a few things: it could mean rose, or it could mean a homosexual male who has come out of the closet. (source: http://www.paradisearmy.com/doujin/pasok2o.htm , first sentence translated as ” “bara” is a “gay” (a homosexual who has come out)” )
The word “rose” is nice for a homosexual who has come out of the closet, don’t you think? A blossomed flower. Perhaps the term has some sort of stereotype attached to it, like how some people will think of flamboyant, skinny, “girly” men when they think of homosexuals.
As far as I know, it is not an offensive word. In fact, to my knowledge, it’s barely even a word in Japanese; In my 5 years of studying Japanese, reading Japanese, and speaking to Japanese people, I have never seen “bara” be used by anyone to mean masculine men OR gay men in general. I knew there was something up with this post so I did some investigating. I’ve known for a while that Japanese people will use other terms, such as gachimuchi, gacchiri, mucchiri, oyaji, ossan, and so on to describe “bara” characteristics instead of the actual word bara. Could it have negative connotations? Maybe, getting called a “rose” might be rude. Offensive? I highly doubt it. Last time foreigners used an offensive word for something popular, Katawa Shoujo, they spoke up about it.
In fact, some Japanese websites even use the word bara (in roomaji):
The website talks about the definition of bara and barazoku in a doujinshi context.And here, we have a tweet from a pretty popular doujinshi artist:
The tweet says: “By the way, I always thought it was weird why homosexuals were called “bara”, but today I saw “Boy’s Love = BL = B (Ba) L (Ra) = bara” and now it totally makes sense.”
Of course, they are incorrect, but it’s telling that even a native Japanese person has basically no idea what the heck “bara” really means.Perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe it’s some new insult that has never been documented anywhere on Japanese websites, or ever used to my knowledge, but I’m just throwing in my two cents. I don’t want misinformation spread.
In one of my film classes last semester we had to tell a story in 3 pictures for a mini assignment so my friend and I did this
