yuri is widely understood as a subsection of lesbian/sapphic media (and queer media more broadly) in japan. i personally have been a big proselytizer of the form of media itself, but i seek to expand upon it to a point where it's not just a form of media, especially as the forms of fascist thought are growing in a planetary scale. with this, i'd like to propose a small "not-manifesto-but-kinda-one-but-also-there-will-be-an-actual-thing-for-this" for the expansion of yuri as more than that and trying to cite ways in which i think this has already been done.
"yuriology, an approach to theory and creation"
to me atleast, the way in which i tried to create yuri as a theoretical approach has to do with trying to combine things and combining certain ways to look at creation. in this respect, i have sought this kind of thing to be planetary in nature, a thing that can be built by everyone who seeks to push this towards better platitudes and goals and solutions. at the heart of yuriology is desire—desire to love, desire to see the world flourish, yearning, anger towards all systemic injustices, etc. it is one that is deeply entagled with trash as well. those who are treated like the same way as garbage, trash art, trash states of mind, etc. it is one that doesn't just seek creation as an end to itself, but also one that encourages the remixing and recreation of already existing media. it's one in which its construction is never done, its work always in progress, until the world which we seek has truly changed for its best ability. although things will get better, we have to deal with the world now and build the future we wish to uphold.
"the yuri of absence: frameworks and context"
in 2018, the author iori miyazawa was interviewed by rikimaru mizoguchi. in this interview, the concept of "yuri of absence" was created. basically, it goes like this.
a minecraft screenshot courtesy of the mod big globe and its mod page. point is: imagine you will this scenery. the lushous grass, the dense but peaceful forest, flowers and the crops sprinked everywhere across the terrain, the mountains across the horizon, the beauty, the serenity of it all. the sky is so clear. it feels like as if living in such a world would be a paradise.
it's almost as if a yuri moment can happen there.
if you ever thought of that about anything, then you kinda already get the point. if you didn't, there's probably other things which you assign certain qualities towards despite not really having those. the point is that you do end up adding certain things to objects/other things/landscapes/art due to what has influenced you. you all have a framework.
"yuri agriculture, postmodern yuri, yuri about the void, yuri about the flowers"
one of the funnier things i've encountered and done myself is adding the word yuri before/after something.
"everything subsumed under yuri"
in truth, the project of yuriology is never done. it will forever be in progress. it will forever be a thing that will destroyed and built upon, a thing that's constantly updated forever as the project goes on. all it has to do is to survive. it's to fundamentally make yuri what i think it ought to be, beyond just the media itself. it's to make sure this concept is more than just a bunch of easily identified things that can be consumed—it's to make sure that the concept of yuri can be woven into the very fabric of your being. it's about embodying yourself into it. into desire.
there are two groups of people that have been created. the "chronically online," a group of people (mostly children) who are online nearly all the time and talk about things that only happen in the cyberspace (particularly tumblr, twitter, reddit, youtube, etc.), and the "grass touchers," a deified group of people who supposedly carely only about things in the material world and supposedly don't care about social media discourse. there are constant invocations to "touch grass" that appear in social media in order to degrade those who are "too online." however, in a world that accelerates in atomizing and polarizing us through the death of third places in the world, an oligopolized and ubiquitous social media landscape that harvests and categorizes our data to personalize our feeds and make us worse with a business model that seeks to sell our data to advertisers in order to give us targeted ads, and the increased polarization of both the digitized world and the "natural" (i use this term loosely) world, i think that this distinction is useless.
this distinction between the grass and the online is starting to fade—it's starting to fade quickly. every form of reality, from material to social to cultural to political, is being shaped by the internet we live in, especially after the first 2 years of the pandemic.