FLB home News resources for undergraduates graduates faculty staff graduate assistants flb business office flb graduate student services   staff directory FLB directories UIUC home old browsers September 14, 2005 2005-2006/005 Visiting lecturer to discuss issues with child pornography laws in Australia Mark McLelland, Ph.D., of the University of Queensland, Australia, will give a talk entitled “The World of YAOI: The Internet, Censorship and the Global ‘Boys’ Love’ Fandom” on Monday, Sept. 26, at 3 p.m. in Lucy Ellis Lounge, 1080 Foreign Languages Building, 707 S. Mathews Ave., Urbana, on the U. of I. campus. The lecture is free and open to the public. In his talk McLelland looks at the recent explosion of cultural concern over child sexual abuse and child pornography, particularly as it relates to the trading of such images via the Internet. Legislation originally enacted to prohibit the sexualized representation of actual children has recently been extended to include fictional representations and in Australia includes text as well as graphics. Taking the online global fandom dedicated to "boys' love" (also known as "yaoi") as an example, McLelland argues that legislation prohibiting fictional accounts of "child" sex abuse is ill-conceived and potentially damaging to human rights and freedom of expression. McLelland asserts that present legislation which collapses yaoi materials into the category "child-abuse publications" is, in his words, “blind to the complexities of desire and sexual identification and inadvertently criminalizes a large international fandom of women and girls who create and trade in images of ‘boys' love,’” thus reinforcing what he calls “sexist and heterosexist structures in the wider society,” and, he adds, “once again silencing the voices of non-conformist women.” McLelland is an ARC postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. He is the author of "Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan: Cultural Myths and Social Realities" (RoutledgeCurzon 2000), "Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age" (Rowman & Littlefield 2005) and co-editor of the collections "Japanese Cybercultures (Routledge 2003) and "Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Japan" (Routledge 2005). He has also published numerous journal papers and book chapters on the intersections between gender, sexuality, popular culture, and new technologies in Japan. McLelland’s visit to the U. of I. is cosponsored by the UIUC Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the Comparative Queer Studies IPRH (Illinois Program for Reading in the Humanities) Reading Group, and the Asia Queer Workshop.