Yuri, a genre of Japanese comics, animation, and related media focusing on lesbian themes and content, is unlike the four main demographically focused genres of Japanese media. Without a single, discrete source, yuri is the product of disparate creators and audiences with conflicting needs, tropes, and conventions of storytelling. With such incompatible demands, the different audiences (i.e., female, male, straight, gay) who read, watch, and create derivative material in yuri fandom often lose sight of the roots of yuri, while publishers promote properties that are marketable to a minority male audience rather than to the majority female audience.
Women radically altered the world of manga as artists in the late 1960s, pioneered by the group known in English as the Magnificent 49ers. They became the first women to draw comics specifically by and for women and included sexual and gender minority themes in their work (Thorn 2008). Hagio Moto drew Toma no Shinzo (Heart of Thomas [1974]) with gay elements, and Riyoko Ikeda (note 2) created several key manga which deal with lesbian love and included transgender characters in her work. Her stories, Oniisama E (Dear Brother [1975]) and Claudine (1978) both feature crossdressing women, and Claudine can be interpreted as either gay or trans. 49ers Igarashi Yumiko and Yamagishi Ryouko both explored same-sex love between women in, respectively, Paros no Ken (1986) and Shiroi Heya no Futari (1971).The latter work can be considered the first yuri manga, as it drew from many of the conventions of girls' literature and same-sex romance used or established by influential S writer Yoshiya Nobuko and thereby cemented these as tropes for future yuri manga (Yoshiya 2003).
The creation of Comiket and the spread of small presses and self-published comics, known as doujinshi, opened up a new door to expression for sexual and gender minorities to create stories for themselves. Early doujinshi and minicomics gave Japanese lesbians a chance to tell their stories outside the confines of editorial constraint. Artists like Amamiya Sae, Takashima Rica, Ang, and Morishima Akiko created comics to express their own personal narratives, explicitly lesbian for lesbians, completely separate from popular pornographic comics featuring lesbian sex for male consumers. Lesbian stories for lesbians had finally found a home.
Corporate sales, creator identity, and audience heterogeneity lead yuri to an awkward place in terms of genre identity. Is yuri the schoolgirl romance created by men for a male audience who consider love between girls pure, or is it the girl's romance that has roots in S literature for a female audience who fondly remember their days admiring upperclassmen at all-girls schools? Or is it for lesbians, whose stories are nominally acknowledged in narratives of self-awareness of love for a member of the same sex or feelings of being different, without any use of the word lesbian? The heterogeneity of creator and audience causes difficulty in both definition and scholarship. Who gets to define yuri?
Yuri is a gift from God, that is what yuri is.