Abstract
In April 2022, a first-year PhD student published his first peer-reviewed article in the journal Qualitative Research. Less than four months later, amid viral public outrage, that article, Karl Andersson’s “I am not alone – we are all alone: Using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shota subculture in Japan,” was removed from publication and formally retracted by the Journal Editors. This paper explores the controversy surrounding the so-called “masturbation article” and its relevance to the field of publishing studies. I begin with a general overview of the shota manga genre and its legal context and provide a factual short history of the affair. I then demonstrate what a good-faith positive peer review of Andersson’s article may have included and critically assess Qualitative Research’s Retraction Notice, alongside other published ethical complaints. I conclude by showing how both Andersson’s article and the Japanese manga he studies have been censored for the same reasons, with troubling implications for freedom of speech in the twenty-first century.
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16 June 2023
The article was updated for legal reasons
Notes
For the purposes of this article, “shota” and “shotacon” are used interchangeably.
As defined by Wikipedia, gender-critical feminism, also known as trans-exclusionary radical feminism, is an ideology “critical of concepts of gender identity and transgender rights, holding that biological sex characteristics are an immutable determination of gender or supersede the importance of gender identity: in other words that trans women are not meaningfully women, and trans men are not men” [45]. For more on gender-critical feminism as a contemporary social and political movement, see for example Pearce et al. [46], Alm and Engebretsen [47], Wuest [48], and Bassi and LeFleur [49].
I use the term “article” (uncapitalized) throughout this paper to refer to what is properly termed a Note. Further, although it is nowhere stated in the submission guidelines that Notes are peer-reviewed, both the Acknowledgements section of Andersson’s article and the subsequent Retraction Notice make it clear that this particular Note, at least, was fully peer-reviewed.
In their Retraction Notice, the Journal Editors state that the article’s two peer-reviewers did not flag any ethical considerations.
My understanding of “harm” here encompasses serious bodily injury/death and criminal activity only. For the purposes of this exercise, I am not interested in harms involving reputational damage or purely emotional distress.
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Brienza, C. The Masturbation Article Affair: Japanese Manga, Scholarly Publishing, and the Twenty-First Century Politics of Censorship. Pub Res Q 39, 132–146 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-022-09916-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-022-09916-y