James Welker

James Welker is a professor in the Department of Cross-Cultural Studies at Kanagawa University in Yokohama, Japan. His research focuses primarily on gender and sexuality in postwar and contemporary Japan, especially fan cultures, feminisms, and the LGBTQ+ community.

He is the author of Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls' Comics Artists and Fans (Hawai'i 2024), and editor of BL ga hiraku tobira: Ajia o hen'yō suru sekushuariti to jendā (Seidosha, 2019), "Queer(ing)," special issue of Mecadamia: Second Arc 13, no. 1 (2020), and Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia (Hawai'i, 2022).

He is also the co-editor of "Of Queer Import(s): Sexualities, Genders and Rights in Asia," a special issue of the journal Intersections (no. 14, 2006), with Lucetta Kam; Queer Voices from Japan: First-Person Narratives of Japan's Sexual Minorities (Lexington, 2007), with Mark McLelland and Katsuhiko Suganuma; Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan (Mississippi, 2015), with Mark McLelland, Kazumi Nagaike, and Katsuhiko Suganuma; and Rethinking Japanese Feminisms (Hawai'i, 2018), with Julia Bullock and Ayako Kano.

He has published a number of journal articles and book chapters on Boys Love (BL) media and its globalization, yuri media, the lesbian community, and the women's liberation movement in Japan.