List of definitions of “yuri”
The other day I was reading The Yuri-ika special issue on yuri culture (Yuri-bunka no Genzai; #12, December 2014), and thinking of how there was a period when some people cared a lot between distinguish pornographic vs. non-pornographic pop-media, and in the West “yuri” was used for the porn side of the divide, while in Japan “yuri” was the non-porn side.
Later I found online a Japanese list of yuri movies, and included is Queen Crab (2015) by Brett Piper, which focuses on the relationship between a woman and her giant killer crab. Which I concur, it's totally a yuri movie. But that made me think of how many different definitions of “yuri” I've seen, usually trying to delineate a specific feeling by contrasting it with some other type of sapphic fiction.
Western:
- Yuri is lesbians when anime.
- Yuri is the fantasy of romance or sex between women, made by straight people; or, it's media with sapphic themes but which doesn't reflect real-life lesbians or queer issues. Opposed to lesbian media proper, which is made by queer people, or informed by real-life queer experiences.
- (outdated) Yuri is hentai porn with lesbians. Opposed to shoujo-ai, which is romantic but not erotic wlw in anime/manga.
Japanese:
(broadly; casual) Yuri is a general term for sapphic media.
(original; outdated) Yuri (“lily”) is an euphemism for (real-life) lesbianism. Coined in “Yurizoku” (The Lily Tribe), a lesbian column in the seminal (pun intended) gay culture magazine Barazoku (“The Rose Tribe” = gay men).
(current) Yuri is “yaoi but with girls”. That is, it's about romanticised relationships between girls in 2D culture (anime/game/manga), predominantly for a straight audience. (I’ve seen a lesbian woman frustrated to be compared with yuri not because of the male gaze thing, but because “I'm not 2D, I’m an actual person”.)
Though reality and fiction aren't so trivially separated, are they. The lives we live in reality are themselves crisscrossed by fantasy. I'm in love with my wife, who is a real woman living with me in the real world (I think). Yet every so often I'm seized by emotions that I can only describe as yuri. For example, once when she was travelling abroad, I had been cleaning our room when I found one of her earrings—the matching pair of the single one she had left the house with. I put the earring on the palm of my hand and stared at it intently for a long time. Before I knew it, I had this vivid image of bringing it to my own ear; of pressing it through. The moment the metal pierces my skin, the elation… Of course, I didn't actually do any such act, which would have been painful in more ways than one. But living with my wife, sometimes those fantasies take over me in a torrent of emotion that I can only possibly describe as “that was so yuri” [yuri-yuri-shii]“. (Makimura Asako, Yuri-Les Ronsōsen-emaki)
(outdated by Maria-sama?) Yuri is “yaoi but with girls”, in the sense that it's a marketing niche of sapphic media for a target demographic of straight men; either lesbian romance for men who find the girls cute, or lesbian porn for men who find girl-on-girl hot.
Yuri is “yaoi but with girls”, in the sense that it's made by and for straight people, men or women, without reference to real-life lesbians. It is sapphic love, otherised.
Yuri is homoaffective relationships between girls that are queer-coded but remain implicit, of the “bestest gal pals” trope (Japanese “class S relationships”). Such bonds are more intense and romantic than common friendship, but the girls typically do not call one another lovers, nor are shown kissing or expressing sexual desire, nor identifying personally as lesbian or sapphic. Opposed to GL (girl's love), which is overtly sapphic romance. (N.b. that Class S antedates “yuri” as a genre.)
(current) Yuri is any media focusing on the bond between women, on a spectrum from friendship to deep sorority to full-blown romance. “GL” denotes one end of the yuri spectrum.
(sociological; yuri-bunka) Yuri is a subculture about sapphic 2D media; while the themes of the works have shifted and changed with the times, whatever is published by magazines such as Yuri-hime and Galette, or studios such as SukeraSparo and Studio Élan, is by definition yuri, as well as the people who comprise their fan communities, doujinshi, the associated conventions etc.
(old-fashioned, I think? e.g. in 90s VN culture) Yuri is sapphic 2D media without eroticism, focusing on relationships and emotions. Opposed to lesbian/“lez” (レズ), which is a porn category.
(often tongue-in-cheek) Yuri is about the bond between girls, but more specifically about the yearning; more than portraying romance or relationships, it's about their impossibility—forbidden love, distance, absence, extreme devotion/obsession that has nowhere to go; a desire that if fulfilled will destroy one partner or both, like when you want to date a vampire with uncontrollable bloodlust, etc.:
[Miyazawa]: There is this movie called “Sicario” by Denis Villeneuve, released in 2015 (TN: released in Japan as “Borderline”). It's a thrilling masterpiece about the drug war in Mexico. The composer of the movie soundtrack, Jóhann Jóhannsson, passed away this year, and according to one of his interviews, there were two themes in the soundtrack. The sense of dread of two wild beasts glaring and pouncing at each other represents the battle to the death between the illegal police force and the mafia. And the other theme was the melancholy of the border area, two emotional themes. If you listen to the soundtrack with that in mind, you cannot perceive it as anything but “yuri”. Though the movie itself is not yuri at all.
— So if neither the story nor the characters have any yuri, what exactly are you supposed to imagine?
— Two wild beasts glaring and pouncing at each other. It's yuri, isn't it?