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In the early 1970s, Japan saw the emergence of three dynamic and overlapping communities of women and adolescent girls who challenged Japanese gender and sexual norms: the women’s liberation (ūman ribu) movement, the lesbian community, and a sphere comprised of artists and fans of queer shōjo manga (girls’ comics), including the now globally popular boys love (BL) media genre. In this talk, James Welker examines these communities and their cultural import. He shows how, individually and collectively, they found the normative understanding of the category “women” untenable and worked to redefine and expand its meaning by transfiguring ideas, images, and practices selectively appropriated from the “West.”