Nenja
From BoyWiki
Nenja (念者, "lover" or "admirer"), in premodern Japan, was a term applied to the older and sexually active male partner involved in a homoerotic relationship with a wakashū (若衆, "youth"), a sexually passive adolescent boy, in the context of the historical practice of shudō (衆道,"the way of youths"), also known as nanshoku (男色, "male love").
The sense of the word can be rendered as the "person who thinks of a particular youth", the character nen (念) being of difficult translation, as its meaning falls somewhere between rational "thinking" and emotive "feeling". Unlike the term wakashū, its counterpart nenja had no age signifier, although there was in principle an expectation that the lover would be older than his beloved.[1]
References
- ↑ Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), p. 36.
