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Introduction: Queer(ing) Japanese Popular Culture

2020; University of Minnesota Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5749/mech.13.1.0001

2152-6648

James Welker,

Asian Culture and Media Studies

IntroductionQueer(ing) Japanese Popular Culture James Welker The queer potential of Japanese popular media in global circulation—particularly manga, anime, and video games, as well as related fan practices—is no secret. The appeal of gender-bending narratives and of often explicit depictions of nonnormative romance and sexuality across these media has led to the establishment of focused fandoms and fan spaces around the world, including virtual spaces online, in languages such as English, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, and, of course, Japanese. This interest in the inherent queerness of some Japanese media has long extended to scholars, many of whom are themselves fans. Perhaps the most prominent example, the manifestly queer female-oriented, male homoerotic boys love (BL) genre that emerged in shōjo manga in the 1970s has long drawn the attention of scholars in and outside Japan, myself among them.1 Other media and fan practices—including those which are overtly queer as well as those which more subtly invite queer readings—have more recently begun to elicit increased academic attention in this context. That this "Queer(ing)" issue of Mechademia attracted some two dozen submissions was, thus, not particularly surprising, though it did make choosing from among them quite challenging. I believe, however, that the six articles selected by members of the editorial board to be featured in this issue offer a strong sense of the diversities of the queerness and queer potential of Japanese media as well as the breadth of scholarly approaches thereto. In the first of these articles, Hannah E. Dahlberg-Dodd takes a sociolinguistic approach to the use in the yuri genre of o-jōsama kotoba, or "young lady-speak," associated with the chronotope of the all-girls' school. Yuri, which centers around the depiction of female same-sex intimacy and targets both female and male readers, overlaps in some ways with and sometimes directly evokes the depiction of passionate "S" relationships between adolescent girls or young women in the Japanese girls' fiction (shōjo shōsetsu) of the interwar period—a genre of female-targeted narratives also frequently set in elite all-girls' institutions. While the yuri genre and "S" relationships depicted in girls' fiction have frequently been associated, Dahlberg-Dodd's analysis demonstrates in a very tangible way how they are related, as well as how language use in the understudied yuri genre reflects a work's target audience. [End Page 1] Kevin Cooley takes on not a genre but rather a character type, the mahō shōjo, or "magical girl," who he identifies as "always wrapped up in the queer, and within a variety of queernesses," in terms of both her gender and her relationships with others. While, as Cooley points out, the figure of the magical girl has frequently been assumed to be a vacuous type, through an analysis of the animated TV series Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Cooley not only shows that there is a "there there" to the magical girl but also that she can serve to critique both the magical girl genre that she inhabits and, far more broadly, compulsory heterosexuality and the capitalist economy it undergirds. Sharon Kinsella turns our focus to another figure, that of the gender-bending otoko no ko or "boy daughter," a label that identifies a new type of cross-dress culture as well as the young men who engage in such gender-bending fashion practices. In this essay, linked to a larger ethnographic project, Kinsella looks at the representation of otoko no ko characters across manga, games, photobooks, magazines, TV, and pornography. As Kinsella shows, while in some ways related to new local gender categories such as X-gender and genderless, as well as a far longer history of Japanese cross-dress culture, otoko no ko practices offer men in contemporary Japan a respite if not an escape from the persistent pressures of normative masculinity. Flipping the tables somewhat, Aiden Pang considers the queer potential of female voice actors performing ikemen (handsome male) characters on Japanese drama CDs though a consideration of the performances of the all-female cast of the female (otome)-targeted, reverse-harem narrative Goes!. In spite of, or perhaps in part because of, the female...