ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a self-published lifestyle magazine Laph, produced by and for female-to-male (FTM) transpeople in Japan. Through a textual analysis of the back issues of Laph combined with fieldwork at the magazine, it examines the production and representation of FTM masculinity in the publication. The chapter argues that the strategies adopted by the magazine in its construction of FTM and FTM masculinity can be read as an attempt by a group of people who have fallen outside the norm – in both mainstream society and the (existing) FTM community – to access and place themselves in (rather than resist) the realm of the ‘normal’ from which they have long been excluded. The case of Laph thus helps complicate current understandings of mini-komi or zine publications, and offers a (re)conceptualization of these self-produced media beyond notions of resistance.
