I am not alone – we are all alone: Using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shota subculture in Japan
Qualitative Research
2022, Vol. 0(0) 1–10
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/14687941221096600
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Karl Andersson 
School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
Abstract
I wanted to understand how my research participants experience sexual pleasure when reading shota, a Japanese genre of self-published erotic comics that features young boy characters. I therefore started reading the comics in the same way as my research participants had told me that they did it: while masturbating. In this research note, I will recount how I set up an experimental method of masturbating to shota comics, and how this participant observation of my own desire not only gave me a more embodied understanding of the topic for my research but also made me think about loneliness and ways to combat it as driving forces of the culture of self-published erotic comics.
Keywords
Sensory ethnography, sexuality, masturbation, comics, queer studies, shota, experimental methods, manga
Introduction
I had hit a wall in my research. Semi-structured interviews (Bernard, 2006) can only take you so far, especially when the topic is sensitive (Lee, 1993), which mine is. A short introduction is called for before we move on.
Corresponding author:
Karl Andersson, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. Email: karl.andersson@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
