Page:I am not alone (Andersson paper).pdf/1

Note

Karl Andersson ORCID - SuperTinyIcons.svg

School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

Abstract

I wanted to understand how my research participants experience sexual pleasure when reading shota, a Japanese genre of self-published erotic comics that features young boy characters. I therefore started reading the comics in the same way as my research participants had told me that they did it: while masturbating. In this research note, I will recount how I set up an experimental method of masturbating to shota comics, and how this participant observation of my own desire not only gave me a more embodied understanding of the topic for my research but also made me think about loneliness and ways to combat it as driving forces of the culture of self-published erotic comics.

Keywords

Sensory ethnography, sexuality, masturbation, comics, queer studies, shota, experimental methods, manga

Introduction

I had hit a wall in my research. Semi-structured interviews can only take you so far, especially when the topic is sensitive, which mine is. A short introduction is called for before we move on. Corresponding author:

Karl Andersson, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. Email: karl.andersson@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk