Joseimuke: History and Key Facts

Joseimuke (女性向け) is a Japanese term that is used to refer to a category of media specifically intended to be "targeted towards women." The Japanese word joseimuke (女性向け) directly translates to "aimed at women," and joseimuke media includes but is not limited to video games, TV shows, comics, stage plays, or even pornography, though mostly tied to media in the ACG (anime, comics, games) community. Joseimuke itself is not a genre, but a media category, where the media forms under it can encompass various genres.

The category of joseimuke and its patterns originated in Japan around the late 1900s and first spread to other East Asian markets, such as those in China, Taiwan, and South Korea starting from the 1970s. Around the same time, joseimuke media in the form of translated shōjo or josei manga reached the West as a part of Japan's pop culture exports, but the term "joseimuke" was and still is not widely used for categorization.

According to popular understanding among stakeholders, joseimuke is a general term to refer to any media directed towards women, and is usually divided into three main sub-categories: romance (ex. otome games), boys' love (BL), and other media that don't fit into the previous two sub-categories, but are designed and/or marketed with a primarily female audience in mind. Oftentimes, this last sub-category will feature ensembles or casts of bishōnen (美少年), or "beautiful boys."

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from Joseimuke by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.