Queer and Feminist Perspectives on Japanese Popular Cultures Symposium
15-16-17th April 2024
Keynotes
Kawaii with/without borders: A View from the Japanese Diaspora by Erica Kanesaka
Erica Kanesaka reflects on the racial and sexual politics of cuteness. Mediated through a variety of characters, food, toys and texts, kawaii provides a complex site through which race, sex and gender has been mediated between Japan and the United States. Through combining racial and cultural elements, kawaii presents the promise of a borderlessness world, able to float freely between both countries. However in practice, these kawaii texts carry their own complexities for the lived experiences of Japanese diaspora living in the United States, in particular women. Through her cultural survey of the United States context, Kanesaka reflects on the resonances, dissonances and community building that forms around these kawaii texts.
Bio: Erica Kanesaka is an Assistant Professor of English at Emory University. An interdisciplinary scholar, she specialises in Asian American literary and cultural studies, with a focus on the racial and sexual politics of kawaii and cuteness. Her other areas of interest include childhood studies, transnational feminisms, feminist disability studies, and feminist science and technology studies.
Taking Girls Seriously by Laura Miller
Laura Miller reflects on some past interventions in Japanese Popular Culture research. She traces how feminised trends have been the bread and butter of both journalistic and scholarly denigration. From elevator girls to purikura, most activities and occupations are historically and regularly viewed as trivial, silly, and wasteful. She asks us to take all occupations, pastimes, and consumption patterns out of misogynistic and essentialist frames to examine their cultural and economic significance. Although they drive a huge part of the Japanese economy and carry great cultural weight, domains such as the beauty industry, the divination industry, and the manga industry are ignored or trivialised both outside and inside academia. Miller shares a few past encounters with dismissive critics as a method to encourage scholars to continue their own efforts to study any media or culture that humans produce and consume—all of it is worthy of study.
Bio: Laura Miller is the Ei’ichi Shibusawa-Seigo Arai Endowed Professor of Japanese Studies and a professor of history at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She has published more than 80 articles and book chapters on Japanese culture and language, including topics such as English loanwords in Japanese, girls’ slang, self-photography, elevator girls, and the shaman queen Himiko. She is the author of Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics (University of California Press, 2006), and co-editor of four other books. Her most recent book is Occult Hunting and Supernatural Play in Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2024).
🌼 Day One (15th April, EDT)
5:30 to 6:45pm: BL and queer studies
What does it mean to call oneself a fujoshi (a term literally meaning “rotten women” referring to fans of homoerotic Boys' Love manga)? BL tanka poet Matsuno Shiho (b.1973) creates personas that blur the line between masculine and feminine, and her work shows that gender is a self-made construct, something people create for themselves, rather than naturally occurring or even socially assigned. In her poems, crafting gender becomes a kind of writing that creates a new kind of virtual fantasy self. Matsuno defines gender as a self-made construct that opens up avenues of new aesthetic experience. In so doing, she connects the fujoshi to questions of potential political liberation for women and sexual minorities. We draw on Rio Otomo's formulation of BL as "a utopian blueprint" for alternative modes of knowing and relating to each other as social beings.
Our paper uses Matsuno's poetry as a lens to look at the role of women characters in BL manga. BL manga such as Mokumokuren’s The Summer Hikaru Died and Kurahashi Tomo’s Let’s Be a Family feature several types of female characters: mothers, sisters/siblings, female friends, and girlfriends. All these women contribute to the understanding of fujoshi as a particular identity. Are these women passive observers? Are they voyeurs? Active participants? Somewhere in between? Matsuno's poetry reveals how the female observer in BL manga transcends gender boundaries between masculine and feminine and enters a fantasy world where escape from social norms becomes possible.
Bio: Marianne Tarcov is an Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She is at work on a book project titled Screening Open Secrets of War, Mass Culture, and Hometown in Twentieth-Century Japanese Poetry, which is currently under review at Cornell East Asia Series. She has published two peer-reviewed articles in Journal of Japanese Language and Literature. She also guest edited a special section of the journal entitled Bodies in Pain, Flux, and Pleasure: Transgressive Femininity in Japanese Media and Literature. Her translations of modern Japanese poetry have appeared in Asymptote, Poetry Kanto, Octopus, and elsewhere, and her translations have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She received her PhD in Japanese literature from University of California, Berkeley before teaching as a visiting professor at University of Chicago and University of Notre Dame. Her research interests include but are not limited to modern Japanese poetry, documentary cinema, Japanese popular culture, gender and the body in contemporary Japan, and women’s professional wrestling (joshi puroresu). Emma Jiarong Wang is a Ph.D. student interested primarily in gender studies and visual arts in contemporary China and Japan. Prior to joining the EAS Department at McGill, she worked with Prof. Ayako Kano, Linda Chance, and Hsiao-wen Cheng at the University of Pennsylvania during her M.A. Her current project is about "Global Japan," the communication between Japanese cultures and other countries, especially gender representations in Japanese anime for Chinese audiences, and the roles of these representations in developing queer identities of Generation Z and the Fourth Love community. Her research looks at the discourse around queer bodies, and the intersection between identity, modernity, and technology.
In this paper, we investigate the breedable and pregnant male body in pornographic Boys Love (BL) manga. Specifically, we analyse three manga centering on government-sponsored programs to combat Japan’s famously declining birth rate (shōshika) by forcing men to become pregnant and give birth. Scholarship in feminist science and technology studies has examined the ways the biomedicalization of reproduction has produced pregnancy and birth as a genderless and rational process of genetic exchange. In the context of this discursive masculinization or at least de-gendering of reproduction, one might argue that these manga take this trend to its logical conclusion by presenting male pregnancy as a solution to Japan’s birth rate crisis.
However, these manga do not present a genderless and clinical image of pregnancy, but rather depend on scenarios of compulsory impregnation common to “breeding kink” pornography to expose men to titillating forms of gendered violence and degradation. Jamie Hakim, in his study of sexualized images of men online, argues that neoliberalism is “feminising” in the sense that the forms of affective, flexible, and precarious labour once most common to women are now among the only types of labour available at all, including for men. Following Hakim, this paper argues that these manga present anxieties about contemporary masculinity in times of “feminising” economic and political collapse, epitomised by the low fertility crisis. We seek to understand how and why pornographic texts that are ostensibly written by and for women are reimagining hegemonic masculinity through the device of breeding programs.
Bio: Jaclyn Zhou is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, in the department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies and the Berkeley Center for New Media. Ying Han is an MA student at the University of British Columbia, in the department of Asian Studies. Her research focuses on contemporary Japanese women’s and diasporic literature.
This paper analyses one of the few film adaptations of a Year 24 Group BL manga: Summer Vacation 1999 (1989), based on Moto Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas (1974). This film was a collaboration between director Shusuke Kaneko, who up to that point had primarily worked in erotic “pink” films, and Rio Kishida, a feminist playwright and screenwriter probably best known for her play Thread Hell (1984). Working through Lee Edelman’s framework of queerness, in which the queer represents the Lacanian concept of ab-sens - “the absenting of meaning from being” - this paper attempts to understand the bishōnen as a recursive void. Noting themes of repetition and recursion in early BL works, this paper argues that the bishōnen exists outside liminal time and categories of meaning, forming a utopic potentiality only accessible through a re-worked ontology of being that denies being. The tension in the themes of queer potentiality and queer nothingness exhibited in the bishōnen are noted and suggested to be a useful tool in reconciling two oppositional modes of thought: queer positivity and queer negativity.
Bio: Dr River Seager is a film studies scholar specialising in the overlap between gender and genre. Their AHRC funded PhD explored the depiction of gendered archetypes in the work of screenwriter Alan Sharp. They have published on Scottish cinema, Gundam, and trans* anime fandom.
7:00 to 8:00pm: Neurodiversity; On/offline spaces
This presentation examines the fantasy comic Frieren: Beyond Journey's End from a perspective employing crip theory and queer theory to explore its depiction of temporality. The central research question investigates how the comic's portrayal of time, especially concerning the differing temporal experiences of Elves and humans, aligns with and enriches our understanding of neurodivergent temporality, specifically ADHD. By applying the crip time—a concept highlighting how the time experience of individuals differs from normative temporalities—the presentation seeks to uncover new layers of meaning in the narrative of Frieren.
The methodology combines a detailed analysis of the manga's narrative structure and character development with insights from crip and queer theory. This approach allows for a nuanced interpretation of the comic's temporal dynamics, particularly the asynchronous and non-linear experiences of time that characterise ADHD. For instance, ADHD is described in terms of internal restlessness, interpersonal asynchrony, and a sense of social delay, all of which can be mapped onto the narrative strategies and temporal representations in Frieren.
Furthermore, the presentation explores how manga, as a medium, is uniquely suited to depict crip time. Manga’s visual elements, such as layout, and character expressions, offer a compelling way to represent the multifaceted nature of time perception. This analysis is extended to compare the depiction of temporality in manga with that in animation, considering ADHD characteristics in attention and focus.
Overall, the presentation highlights how Frieren challenges the normative understanding of time and life stages, offering an alternative perspective that aligns with the principles of queer negativity. The characters in Frieren, through their non-reproductive forms of legacy, embody a queer approach to existence and heritage, living their unique temporalities in ways that diverge from societal expectations.
Bio: Yuuki Namba’s areas of specialisation include analytical aesthetics, sexuality, crip theory, design. A corporate employee with a Master's degree in Literature from Kobe University, Yuuki co-authored SF Prototyping (Hayakawa Publishing, 2021) and is a visiting researcher at the Ritsumeikan University Kinugasa Research Organization.
In Tokyo, Japan, cafes are among the several gathering spaces used by various subcultures. Alongside consumer-oriented, corporate- and fan-run events, media events, and themed events, bars and clubs, cafes serve as gathering places for the community. These are not quite a “third space,” since they require buying a drink, snack or paying a cover charge, but they do provide a semi-public space to relax and participate in their preferred subculture.
LGBTQ+ folks are given room to be themselves and explore their identities safely in clubs, bars and cafes in Shinjuku Ni-Chōme. In another part of town, fans of anime, known as otaku, are exhorted to visit maid cafes and series themed cafes in Akihabara. These cater to a primarily straight male crowd, with access to cute women being the main draw. Female Boys Love fans are likewise sent to Ikebukuro to experience businesses catering to their interest, that focuses on love between beautiful boys. In a small corner of Shinjuku Ni-Chōme lives a café that celebrates the Yuri genre for queer fans of manga and related popular media that centres love between women.
This research proposes to understand the history of anime/manga cafes and the place of Yuri Café Anchor in the lives of the Yuri fans who visit there. Using interviews and questionnaires, we want to learn how do these fans identify themselves? What place does Yuri fandom play in their lives and what role does their queerness play in their Yuri fandom? In a city where pop culture is mostly carved into niches that separate people’s fandoms from the rest of their lives, Yuri Café Anchor creates a community space where people can acknowledge their otaku identity alongside their queer identity. This research will provide a case study of this new kind of otaku café.
Bio: Erica Friedman is the Founder of Yuricon and has run the world's oldest and most comprehensive blog on Yuri, Okazu, since 2002. She has edited manga for JManga, Seven Seas and Udon Entertainment, including Riyoko Ikeda’s epic historical classic, The Rose of Versailles. Erica is the author of By Your Side: The First 100 Year of Yuri Anime and Manga, out now from Journey Press.
The development of digital media forms allows young people to showcase and redefine their identities while resisting and challenging normative ideas of the self. With its growing presence in Japan, TikTok is a significant site for observing identity work and self-presentation practices and how they are shaped or supported by the app’s affordances. There is little research on how this app is employed in the saturated Japanese media environment and situated within the long history of cultural practices and young people’s playful use of language adopting new technologies. TikTok app, as the amalgamation of various elements of Japanese techno-visual culture –a self-portraiture via purikura photography, keitai digital camera, and the aesthetics of girly culture, provides a novel space for identity building. This paper draws from the ongoing ethnographic research and content analysis to discuss the self-expression practices of young Japanese women and how they employ various features of TikTok to resist, challenge or elevate their femininity.
In Japanese mainstream media, young women are often presented through the binary of sexualization and modesty and predefined, stereotypical representation. The paper centres on young female gamers and streamers who use TikTok to assert agency and resist conventional beauty ideals and femininities while investing creative and immaterial labour to maintain and monetize their social media presence. On TikTok, they show authority over how they present different aspects of their identities, whether it is through participating in gaming subculture, constructing the ‘modest self’, or through highly erotic and hyperbolic representations of bodies and femininity while inviting gender nonconformity.
Bio: Sonja Petrovic is lecturing and teaching in the Media and Communication program in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She researches identity work and communal belonging on digital platforms, and their potential for various modes of expression and empowerment for young women in Japan. Sonja is also investigating the surge of feminist online practices in the Balkan region, and how they spill into offline public spaces.
As previous scholarship has explored, international anime conventions can be “affective spaces” of fan self-expression, imagination, sociality, and sexuality (Lamerichs 2014, also Napier 2007). Others note the challenges in creating conventions that are spaces for the expression of queer desires, especially in broader cultural contexts that are hostile to these desires (Garza, Santos, and Welker 2020). My own ethnographic research, conducted at the conventions Otakon and Katsucon in 2022 and 2023, sought to understand the role of desire and sexual expression (queer and otherwise) in the space of American anime conventions. From participant observation and interviews, I found tensions around the perceived acceptability of expressing one’s desires at conventions.
Conventions are a place where certain desires, expressions, and behaviours become more acceptable—but some remain on the border of acceptability, and not all attendees might feel empowered to express themselves. In particular, from conversations with queer woman fans and artists in BL fandoms,I discovered that while some feel empowered to express their sexualities and desires, others are more reticent. I also learned that this may be a growing development within conventions and fandom in general, related to broader discourses about fujoshi and the acceptability of BL fandom (Aburime 2024). Some attitudes of fans towards BL manga may be related to disidentification as understood by queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz (Muñoz 1999)—but because of these discourses, some fans are additionally more guarded about openly expressing their desires. This reticence varies on an individual basis, but there may be larger shifts due to broader discourses on acceptability. Thus, the collective (re)negotiation of what is acceptable or not is a key part of anime conventions generally and of carving out queer spaces within these conventions specifically.
Bio: Paul Ocone is an anthropologist and scholar of anime and manga, currently a Fulbright Fellow researching Japanese fan spaces at Meiji University's School of Global Japanese Studies. He has previously published in Mechademia 13.2 and 16.1, with a forthcoming paper in Transformative Works and Cultures, and he has presented at the Mechademia and Fan Studies Network—North America conferences, among others.
🌼 Day two (16th April, EDT)
8:30 to 9:30am: Anime production and online misogyny
In this contribution, I suggest doing a comparative analysis of Japanese animation productions Hunter X Hunter (2011), One Piece, Oniichan wa Oshimai! and Hourou Musuko, as well as their receptions, inasmuch as they make it possible to decipher how the social, medical and legal struggles of transmasculine and transfeminine individuals differ in the contexts of the narratives at hand. Indeed, while transphobia is a widely known concept in queer theory, the specifics of transmisogyny and transmisandry, and their material productions by patriarchalism as a gendered hierarchy organising social roles and labour, may be more complex to apprehend in individual works alone, for they happen on a macrosocial level — which motivates a comparative analysis format. This contribution would fit the symposium because gender performativity (Butler), explored in those works, is a core part of femininity (through a material feminism lens) and explores gender diversity. The receptions of works, through sources like reviews, also allow us to understand the discriminatory mechanisms of gendered platform-interactions, as well as that of more or less meaningful marginalised representations. At last but not least, focusing on transfeminine and transmasculine individuals offers the possibility of thinking gendered signifiers as correlated to material and social exclusions, redefining how gender abolition as an utopian goal — motivating researchers' positionalities — defined by xenofeminism should be reached.
Bio: Emilia Hoarfrost is a French theatre bachelor graduate who has been writing on anime production, otaku culture for 4 years now, across multiple specialised media outlets like Full Frontal, Les Confins du Monde, Jotaku Networks or her own Medium. They also like to animate in 2D and 3D, do compositing, video editing, all aspects of animation and to cultivate a holistic understanding of the media. Being a non-binary trans woman, queer theory and feminism are areas that they wish to explore through Japanese animation as a media.
In 1992, Henry Jenkins provided an ethnographic account of media fandom in Textual Poachers. He examined media fans revealing for the first time that it is primarily women who make up fandoms, departing from popular misconceptions that fandom communities are predominantly male spaces. Despite being such a large, prominent force in fandoms, scholars such as Suzanne Scott and Ryan Redmond write that women are often marginalised and subjected to misogyny within fan spaces. This misogyny persists in all fandom spaces including those surrounding media made for women and girls like shoujo manga. In primarily English speaking online spaces for the transnational shoujo fandom, misogyny tends to present itself both inside and outside the community. This presents challenges that shoujo fans deal with in a variety of ways. These acts of misogyny faced by shoujo fans within primarily English speaking online spaces include anime fans writing off romance shoujo manga as frivolous, uplifting the works exclusively of male writers, and directing misogynistic comments at shoujo fans on their social media accounts. Transnational shoujo fans tend to cope with the misogyny they face online by venting their frustration and finding positive communal responses from friends in their fandom circles. Some do this privately or refuse to name the harasser; some post a more public “call out” naming the social media user or engaging them in conversation. Through data collected online we see that transnational shoujo fans are subjected to misogyny, but do not accept it. Instead, these fans choose to confront it. In this way they can mediate misogyny within their online fan space.
Bio: Rachel Ramlawi is currently a 2nd year PhD student in Purdue’s American Studies department. She has received both her undergraduate degree and master’s degree in Popular Culture Studies from Bowling Green State University. Her research focuses on representations of women within animation, and transnational anime fandom. She is currently researching how Western fans of Japanese popular culture interact with and make meaning from Japanese popular culture.
There’s an important change in the Shonen industry, ranging from narrative and design choices all the way to merchandising and advertising. With the top sellers of Shonen manga in the current charts being manga like Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, and The Apothecary Diaries, both manga that feature women protagonists, we are approaching the age of women led Shonen. To many, this change is readily welcomed. When only men lead stories, we often fall victim to what writer and activist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the single story”: several stories being told from the same perspective. However, are we truly seeing different stories?
Borrowing from Shoujo scholars, Akiko Sugawa-Shimada, in her article “Shojo in Anime: Beyond the Object of Men’s Desire”, points to magical girl anime as a ripe field for studying how women empowerment has been tackled in Japan pop media. One of her main points being that, as much as magical girl anime has made young girls feel empowered in how it focuses on women as powerful problem solvers who don’t need men to save them and instead relied on each other for support, it also features a heavy and constant theme of motherhood and beauty standards that often times shackle these girls into a modicum of submission, almost as if girls can be independent, but not too independent!
Using this as a lens and applying it to current shonen female protagonists, we propose a more nuanced analysis of female protagonists in current Shonen. By studying characters like Frieren, Maomao and Suletta (Gundam: Witch from Mercury), we bring forth a critical view of current Shonen as not stories about women and their experiences as women, but rather an extension of tropes aimed specifically at catering to the male fantasy of a female fictional companion.
Bio: Rafael Dirques David Regis - Industrial engineer from the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO), currently a master’s student in Culture and Territoriality at Fluminense Federal University (UFF) and working as a Robot Process Automation (RPA) software developer and Business Intelligence manager in the creative industry sector in Brazil. Lastly, a researcher of Asian Cultural Industry at NECO (Eastern Culture Research Center). Sarah Silva da Rosa – Japanese language student at the Federal University of the State of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), previously graduated from SENAC College in Multimedia Productions. Researcher of Asian Cultural Industry at NECO (Eastern Culture Research Center) and Classical Brazilian Literature at Metamorphosis Group. Júlio César Valente Ferreira – Ph.D. in Social Memory at Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO). Associate Professor in the Postgraduate Program in Culture and Territoriality at Fluminense Federal University (UFF). Researcher of Asian Cultural Industry at NECO (Eastern Culture Research Center). Gabriela Rodrigues Diniz - Law Student at University Estácio de Sá from Resende - Rio de Janeiro and Researcher of Asian Cultural Industry at NECO (Eastern Culture Research Center).
10:00 to 11:00am: Keynote Kawaii with/without borders: A View from the Japanese Diaspora by Erica Kanesaka
11:30 to 1:00pm: Femininities, the cute, and the queer
In this talk, I explore maid cafes and how they have been visually represented, from YouTube to television, reflecting on the influence of feminism in my filmmaking praxis, during the creation of an upcoming maid cafe documentary, The Inner Worlds of Maids, that I formed with maid cafe participants from my autoethnographic research. Given that there is a tendency to objectify and sexualise feminine-presenting cosplayers, I discuss my approach to undermine this tendency, centering maids as subjects in their own rights, asking questions such as, what is it that might motivate someone to become a kawaii maid and what is that experience like?
Bio: Dr Georgia Thomas-Parr is a Lecturer in Film and Media at University College London.
This paper will explore the various feminist transformations and subversions of ‘Snow White’ and ‘Cinderella’ within Junichi Sato and Kaori Naruse’s magical girl manga series, Prétear – The New Legend of Snow White (2000-1). When read against western fairy tale conceptions, Japanese magical girls inherently subvert the archetypes and tales with which we place them in conversation. The mahō shōjo (magical girl) genre, often placed at the intersection of romance and fantasy, overtly engages with the western fairy tale intertextual web. The heroines are often lost princesses, heirs to magical thrones of power, capable of the quintessential magical transformation from ordinary schoolgirl to overpowered superheroine – a transformation reminiscent of Cinderella’s fabled ball gown and slippers. However, as fairy tale heroines and princesses are criticised for their archetypal passivity, magical girls are forced into necessary activity, frequently – though often to their dismay – tasked with saving the world from an apocalyptic fate.
The correlation of magical girls and fairy tale princesses is often woven into the fabric of their narratives, retelling and realigning western tales within the conventions of the mahō shōjo genre to compelling and subversive effects. Junichi Sato and Kaori Naruse’s Prétear is no exception. Blending the narratives of both ‘Snow White’ and ‘Cinderella’, Prétear positions the western fairy tale tradition as a direct pretext, whilst also disrupting its structures. Throughout, Himeno – with her name outlining her fairy tale role as hime, or princess – self- consciously engages, interacts with, and critiques the fairy tale plots and conventions that shape her life as a magical girl. Within Prétear, these fairy tale plots have become a predestined cycle of female trauma and abuse, emphasised by the animosity felt between the female characters of its source tales. As Himeno works to break free from the cycle of fairy tale storytelling, she necessarily subverts the restrictions of their female archetypes and female relationships.
Bio: Sarah Jessica Darley is a PhD candidate at the University of East Anglia, currently completing her thesis: ‘Like the Wild Beasts, She Lives Without a Future’: The Afterlives of Angela Carter in Contemporary Fairy Tale Literature. Her first publication - 'The Magical Girl Mirror: Reflections and Transcultural Transformations of Euro-American Fairy Tales in the Mahō Shōjo Genre' - can be found within Cross-Cultural Influences Between Japanese and American Pop Cultures: POWERS OF POP (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023), surveying the complex cultural dialogue between Euro-American fairy tales and the mahō shōjo genre of Japanese media. Sarah’s research focuses upon the fairy tale, children’s literature, visual media, reception theory, and gender studies.
This paper will apply Hiroki Azuma’s seminal ‘database’ theory (see: Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, 2009) to the popular, yet largely critically ignored, magical girl series Tokyo Mew Mew. In doing so, it will question our assumptions about ‘database series’: anime and manga reliant on a cavalcade of popular and discreet chara-moe elements. In Azuma’s book, and in the popular consciousness, there is a pervasive view of these series as being aimed at adult men, engaging in the sexualised consumption of their favourite female characters.
Tokyo Mew Mew, created by Mia Ikumi and Reiko Yoshida, is a perfect example of the series that this simplistic view ignores. The series, which ran in the shoujo magazine Nakayoshi from 2001 to 2002, is a collection of some of the main chara-moe elements that Azuma highlighted: its main character is a catgirl who works in a maid café and fights aliens. Through analysis of its contemporary and modern fandom, as well as Mia Ikumi’s obvious fascination with moe culture, this paper will look at two ways in which Tokyo Mew Mew was able, specifically through its ‘database’ reliance on moe-chara elements over narrative, to reach and inspire young queer readers.
Firstly, this paper will consider the iconic ‘template’ that is the series’ magical girls, the Mew Mews. In ‘database series’, characters are not organic narrative constructions, but rather blank slates designed to carry chara-moe tropes. Within Tokyo Mew Mew’s fandom, these slates became immediately adopted and personalised; Azuma’s anime and manga-based simulacra became tools for self-exploration. Similarly, this paper will then explore the way database-driven chara-moe elements of series like Tokyo Mew Mew offer an opportunity to participate in queer desire in a way that feels ‘safe’ to young people questioning their sexuality.
Bio: Eve McLachlan holds a Master’s in Playwriting and Screenwriting from the University of St Andrews. Her thesis play, AURA, combines the imagery of mecha anime with the language of contemporary theatre. Her critical writing includes And you were there: Loneliness and community in Yume Nikki (published in Kritiqal, 2021) and Dark Passages: Interactive Fiction and the Gothic (presented at AdventureX 2022).
While many Asian female characters in Japanese anime embody a kawaii aesthetic and disposition, Asian female characters in American animation embody a similar kawaii-esque cuteness. Asian creators within American animation create female figures who share characteristics with those in anime likely due to 1) The prominence of Japan’s global soft-power influence and 2) Experiencing childhood familiarity with kawaii and thus adopting a kawaii style in their animation. To elaborate on the connections between kawaii in anime and kawaii-inspired cuteness in animation, I analyse Nurse Joy and Mei Lee, two young Asian female characters in the Japanese anime Pokémon and American animation film Turning Red. I draw from personal observations as an Asian American woman, cute studies research, and work with young students, claiming that even as these characters exhibit positive traits and are not solely stereotypical, they embody particular assumptions associated with Asian femininity that can entail harm for young Asian/American female audiences.
As seen through Joy and Mei, kawaii and kawaii-inspired cuteness are attached to young Asian female characters in anime and animation. For instance, Joy depicts sweetness and innocence, connotations of kawaii. Mei is also cute, with her cute/kawaii visual style likely related to her Asian creator consuming/observing the prominence of Japanese anime and kawaii and being familiar with them as an Asian child; here, an American animation involves a kind of cuteness originating from a different global context. At the same time, Joy and Mei personify assumptions historically and socially tied to Asian girls and women–Joy is a kawaii, subordinate carer and Mei cute, obedient, and academically successful. Specifically for Turning Red, its Asian female creator may have been informed by the (media) contexts of Japan and America, potentially resulting in assumptions from both finding their way into her work and complicating the issue of involving more/reinforcing assumptions surrounding Asian femininity. In turn, impressionable young Asian/American girls who understand characters like Joy and Mei to be like them can come to embody such assumptions as they visualise similar characters and grapple with their own observations of (assumptions found in) kawaii girls in Japanese anime and kawaii-cute girls in American animation.
Bio: Hazel Oh graduated from Emory University in May 2023 with a B.A. in English and minor in Philosophy. She is currently working as a tutor for K-12 and ESL students and is active in non-profit organisations such as Asians in Animation as their Creative Assistant. Through her experiences in academia, education, and media, she aims to further explore the intersections of (Asian) representation in children’s media, child development, and her own positionality as a Korean American woman who was once a Korean American girl.
7:00 to 8:30pm: Media, materialisms, and fan cultures
Kamen Rider (1971 – ongoing) is among the most enduring and prolific of Japanese young boys’ television franchises. It has a core audience of boys aged between roughly two and seven years old and is commonly understood and analysed in relation to this audience. The second largest audience, however, is women in their twenties and early thirties (an audience that includes mothers of the young boy audience, watching together). The franchise has explicitly courted this audience with the inclusion of Boys Love tropes and intertextual references since 2000. This paper explores the queering of a heteronormative viewing scenario (a little boy watching an action-hero under mum’s supervision while dad sleeps in on Sunday morning) through qualitative analysis of primary and satellite Kamen Rider texts. It argues that conceptualising Kamen Rider as a “boys’” text obfuscates the complexities of its appeal for gender (and generation) diverse audiences.
Bio: Sophia Staite recently completed their PhD, an examination of the American adaptation of Japanese children’s television franchises Super Sentai and Kamen Rider, at the University of Tasmania, Australia. Sophia’s research appears in M/C Journal, Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, Aeternum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies, and Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures.
In the Japanese media space divided heavily into “dansei-muke” (male-oriented) and “josei-muke” (female-oriented) works, fans of the franchise Touken Ranbu provide insight into how the media categorisations can be turned into tools to negotiate gendered roles and positions in society. Touken Ranbu is categorised as a josei-muke franchise, where famous Japanese swords are transformed into human warriors. From 2020 to 2023, I undertook an ethnographic investigation of exhibition and heritage sites where Touken Ranbu fans seek out the real-world analogues of their favourite characters. During this investigation I encountered much discussion of “Touken Joshi” (sword girls) from news media reporting on fan presence at exhibition sites. Touken Joshi follows a convention in Japanese that adds -joshi or -jo (girl) to a term, distinctly categorising actors who are contrary to an assumed male norm.
In this paper I ask how gendered labels such as Touken Joshi, or the implicit associations of calling a work “josei-muke”, are negotiated by fans. I do so by drawing on the ethnography I conducted with the Touken Ranbu fanbase, whose actions at exhibition sites complicate the dansei/josei binary. Primary in this complication is their choice of identity. Fans use the term “Saniwa” (an archaic form of Shinto priest) and heavily contest the use of the directly-gendered Touken Joshi. By using Saniwa and other historical terms, the fan community engages in a negotiation of gendered social roles, whilst asserting a non-gendered identity for a group that prioritises equal respect among those who engage with Japanese swords. Despite Touken Ranbu’s josei-muke designation, and despite the categorisation of its fans as “sword girls”, I argue that Saniwa of all ages and genders carve out a space beyond the gender binary through the language of contemporary popular culture.
Bio: Estelle Rust attained her PhD from Keio University in 2023. She researches the social existence of material culture, using a more-than-human approach to explore the relationships between humans and material non-humans. Her PhD dissertation focused on the post-2015 sword phenomenon in Japan, where popular culture based on the history of Japanese swords has inspired emerging and diverse audiences to undertake their own explorations of the past and present.
Neopets is a still-extant virtual pet website, one of the most popular websites in the world in the early 2000s; the Japanese version of the site was launched in 2003 and shuttered in 2008. Every week, the site held a weekly poetry contest, and each poem had to be on some aspect of the world of Neopets. What has thus accumulated over the years is a vast, eccentric comparative literary archive in ten languages: an enormous repository of internet poetry largely by young women and girls about their engagement with a specific virtual world. The Japanese version of the poetry contest was unique not only in its regular featuring of Japanese poetic forms (i.e. tanka and haiku) but also about the fact that it was one of the only versions of Neopets to allow for poems not just about Neopets but about the poets reflecting on the act of playing on the site.
In this paper, using a combination of close readings of these poems and analyses of the Neopets platform itself (drawn from my own 24-year history with it), I aim to show how a seemingly minor phenomenon holds powerful insights into how users actively negotiated their relationship with new types of digital storytelling and sociality—with other users and with their virtual pets—at a crucial time of transition in internet history. I also want to centre an example of the kinds of communities of practice that are largely elided by masculinist accounts of internet history—how, over and over again, dominant perspectives dismiss as frivolous the cultural innovations and vernacular theorizations of young women and girls online, and how they remade platforms in their own image and according to their own needs.
Bio: Andrew Campana is an assistant professor of Japanese literature and media at Cornell University, whose research focuses on the intersections between poetry, video games, and disability. His first book, Expanding Verse: Japanese Poetry at the Edge of Media, is forthcoming from the University of California Press later this year.
9:00 to 10:00pm: Online violence and ethical togetherness (Aurélie Petit, Patrick W. Galbraith, Megan Catherine Rose (chair))
Bio: Aurélie Petit is a PhD Candidate in the Film Studies department at Concordia University, Montréal. She specialises in the intersection of technology and animation, with a focus on gender and sexuality. Her thesis examines the role that the U.S.-based Japanese animation online communities played in shaping contemporary socio-technical uses of social media, and in particular exclusionary practices towards women users. Patrick W. Galbraith is an Associate Professor in the School of International Communication at Senshū University in Tokyo. After earning a PhD in Information Studies from the University of Tokyo, he went on to earn a second PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University. His recent publications include Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan, Erotic Comics in Japan: An Introduction to Eromanga and The Ethics of Affect: Lines and Life in a Tokyo Neighborhood.
10:00pm to 11:30pm: Femininities, body, and voice
This paper examined the regulatory construction of a feminine ideal in Japan during the 1950s. At this time, Japan’s gender politics underwent a series of reformation led by the General Headquarters. The interpretation of such changes by previous literature is disputed as to whether the era marked emancipation or repression for ‘Japanese women’. However, I problematised that the prescription of a regulatory genderideal in post-war Japan cannot be reduced to a monolithic binary but was persistently produced through everyday life, internalising and reproducing what it meant to become ideal Japanese women. Instead of relegating to a reductive view, I analysed the mechanisms of how requirements for modern Japanese femininity were produced, disseminated, and enacted by taking the 1950s lingerie boom as a case study in post-war popular culture. Methodologically, I combined a discourse analysis and a praxiography. Firstly, I analysed women’s magazines and fashion style books to understand how they prescribed a preferable Japanese feminine subjectivation along with an introduction of a new Western intimate garment.
In this process, I also referred to government policies, company documents, and other absent discourses to demonstrate how a particular image of Japanese femininity was selectively incited through popular media. Moreover, interpreting the process of the lingerie boom with a praxiographic approach, I demonstrated how gender as a generative performativity of a culturally configuring body, was disciplinarily constructed with a particular transnational consciousness surfacing with a specific semiotic materiality. Examining Japan as an in-between space that confuses postcolonial and Oriental relations, this work contributes to the plethora of academic discussions on pushing forward Bhabha’s concept of hybridity from the perspective of elucidating the strategic manoeuvrings of power that constitute bodily beings.
Bio: Miyuki Shiraki is a master’s student at the University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies. Having completed her first master’s at the London School of Economics in cultural sociology, she has embarked on an extensive fieldwork in Tokyo before her PhD application, which is planned to be on problematising the production of modern femininity in Japan from the genealogy of the immediate post-war to this day. While her first master’s dissertation was on a discourse analysis of the post-war lingerie boom in Japan, her second thesis attempts to take a more holistic, praxiographic approach.
In this paper we explore the practices of queer feminist artists who work with cute girl anime figures as symbols, texts and avatars. We discuss the works of artists Junko Mizuno, Shoko Kitamoto, Seika Yurie e and Sugary Symbiote and their use of what Mariko Iseri (2015) describes as “flexible femininities” to fragment and distort the hyperfemme body to cute and monstrous ends.
The figure of the cute anime girl is simultaneously a strange departure from and reference to the woman’s figure, metamorphosing into something entirely Other; she is girl, estranged. Online fan discourses riff off the viral infiltration of these figures across anime media as “bug girls” with large shimmering “porthole” eyes and insectoid limbs, or pug dog or cat-like creatures. In an interview in 2010, Japanese psychiatrist Saitō Tamaki (he/him) confessed that he approaches the images of manga/anime girls that so captivate his patients as “extremely strange figures, or strange compositions.” Years later, in an interview in 2022, artist Colin Armistead (he/her) added of those “strange characters with huge eyes […] that are so hyperfeminine” that they become “a little creepy.”
Drawing on Critical Femininities Studies, we discuss how the aesthetics of cute anime girls are being co-opted and experimented with by femme artists to bring its artifice to the fore. Artists across shifting intersections of gender, race, sexuality and disability in responding to these aesthetics play into and“weird” these characters. In doing so they explore its resonances with the real as a disconnected abstraction of women’s bodies, and reflect on femininity, desire, agency and trauma.
Bio: Megan Catherine Rose is a cultural sociologist and artist based in Sydney, Australia. She is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Vitalities Lab, UNSW Sydney, doctoral researcher at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society and director of research at the Global Kawaii Association. Her PhD from UNSW Sydney researched the sign making and resistant practices of Harajuku fashion subcultures. She is currently publishing her ongoing work into cute visual expression in queer feminist subcultures in Tokyo and online fan communities. Patrick W. Galbraith is an Associate Professor in the School of International Communication at Senshū University in Tokyo. After earning a PhD in Information Studies from the University of Tokyo, he went on to earn a second PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University. His recent publications include "Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan," "Erotic Comics in Japan: An Introduction to Eromanga" and "The Ethics of Affect: Lines and Life in a Tokyo Neighborhood."
🌼 Day three (17th April, EDT)
10:00 to 11:00am: Keynote Taking Girls Seriously by Laura Miller
11:30 to 1:00pm: Representation and diversity in anime and manga
The Japanese ideal of “beautiful boy” (bishōnen), or “beautiful youth” (biseinen), has been the focus of a variety of studies (Hemmann, 2020; McLelland et al., 2016; Welker, 2006), spanning from classical arts to the more recent representation in comics and animation. Particularly in shōjo manga (comics for girls) and its subgenre, Boys’ Love manga, male characters are often depicted with androgynous characteristics (aesthetical, behavioural, etc.), without losing their status as “men” and, instead, becoming more appealing to the mainly female readers. Such gender ambiguity also encouraged reflections from a feminist and queer standpoint, both in academia (Tanaka and Ishida, 2015; Nagaike, 2015) and in fandom spaces, on how bishōnen could be interpreted as subversive and disruptive of gender roles. Thus, it prompts an immediate contrast with the stereotypical portrayal of attractive male characters in Europe and North America: what are the traits describing a bishōnen? Why is androgyny preferred when creating a male character? This paper will focus on analysing the portrayal of this ideal in two manga, Wish (1995) by the comic artist group CLAMP, and Sasaki to Miyano (2016-) by Harusono Shō, to analyse the evolution of the aesthetic elements found in bishōnen characters and open a discussion on the different perceptions of what can and is considered masculine or feminine.
Bio: Camil Valerio Ristè is currently a PhD candidate in Japanese Literature at the University of Bologna. His research focuses on queer representation and the re/interpretation of queerness in Japanese comic books and animation from the 1990s to current time. In 2022, he authored a monographic book on the same topic, “Le sue labbra erano rosse, rosse come le fiamme… La rappresentazione LGBTQ+ nel fumetto e nel cinema d’animazione giapponese” (His Lips Were Red, Red Like Fire... LGBTQ+ Representation in Japanese Comics and Animation) for Società Editrice La Torre.
In Japanese popular culture, young women have long been at the centre of representation, but since the 1990s they have also become key contributors. With the flourishing of gyaru culture, these women have become aware of their power of expression and creativity, and have become extremely powerful. As they establish their identity and gain power as active members of their own subculture, the name joshi ('girls') becomes ubiquitous in various media. Although the term was originally used in marketing, it was a label often applied to women who entered what was generally regarded as male culture. In a gendered society like Japan, it was also a label that is applied by men as something unusual. Then, women no longer refer to themselves as joshi. Contrary to the positive use of ‘girls’ to show solidarity in the English-speaking culture, this presentation will examine the impact of women not referring to themselves as joshi in Japan. In particular, it focuses on the recent coinciding rise in the popularity of yuri/GL. Women have begun to take an active role in the representation of desires and the withdrawal from the patriarchy, aspects of which BL has been responsible for a long time. Yuri has long been a popular genre, but it depicted the connection between girls in the light of male desire. However, live-action TV series and anime have changed this tendency and queer women, who had previously been invisible, are now being represented as something that celebrates their desires as well. This paper will also show that the representation of women can be enriched by de-labelling the misogyny and self-deprecation that the expression 'girls' has somehow encompassed, and by shedding the self-image that has portrayed them as 'different from the rest'.
Bio: Maiko Nakamura is an Associate Professor, Tokyo Metropolitan University. After graduating from Japan Women’s University, Maiko studied at University of Sussex, obtaining an MA in Twentieth-century English Literature. Their PhD dissertation was on political and poetic discourse of hero-making in the time of Irish Independence, focusing on writings of Sir Roger Casement and W. B. Yeats. Maiko’s research interests are nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, including literature and nationalism, gender and sexuality, film, and popular culture. Their recent publication is about queer representations in poetic works of Eva Gore-Booth.
This paper will investigate neurodiversity in the cult anime series Serial Experiments Lain from the perspective of its titular autistic-coded protagonist, Lain Iwakura. As an avid watcher of anime who is autistic, I have discovered that many of us on the spectrum are drawn to SEL for the relatability of its main character. Lain occupies a space of “Otherness” within the anime fandom because of her identity as a sentient computer program. Likening the neurodivergent mind to an intelligent machine is a prevalent trope, and many autistic people have embraced this metaphor to express our differences. Lain speaks to the autistic experience because she is othered by her introverted nature, which does not conform to the social and gender norms of her peers.
The autism community today includes many transgender and gender non-binary individuals. However, this facet of the spectrum is rarely represented in fiction. As a result, autistic and queer fans of anime create their own representation through fandom and coding by producing paratexts like fanfiction, fanart, and online discussion posts. Lain’s characterization is fluid, and thus she exists beyond neurotypical thinking and heteronormativity. The guiding question for my paper is: how do marginalised fans merge paratext with the canon of an anime series to create a narrative of their own? I will evaluate both SEL and its autistic paratexts on the grounds of the motifs, themes, and ideologies they present through separate means of transmedial expression. I chose SEL to analyse because, as a Japanese text, it engages with “hidden” disabilities that neurodivergent viewers in the West can understand. I hypothesise that this cross-cultural inquiry will further the discussion on diversity in animation by serving as an open forum for underrepresented groups to affirm their appearances on screen.
Bio: Serafina Paladino is an autistic academic whose research intersects with digital media, fandom, and disability studies. They graduated from the University of St Andrews in 2021 with a Master of Letters in Comparative Literature. Their master’s dissertation examined video game adaptations of Dante’s Divine Comedy, including a close study of the Japanese role-playing game Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne. They plan to expand upon this transmedial foundation in future projects by looking at autism and its representation in the science fiction genre.
In this talk, I will discuss the common pitfalls and unintended consequences of fandom puritanism many overlook, and how it upholds regressive outdated power structures.
Bio: Sam Aburime is an independent scholar of fan studies with a specific focus on queer studies, Japanese culture and media and social psychology. Their primary goals in academia are to rectify media misconceptions, combat disinformation and examine the roots of different prejudices in online communities.
5:30 to 7:00pm: LGBTQIA+ representation and practices
The emergence of studies noting the high queer participation within fandom, including my own recent research on gender-diverse participation in cosplay, represents a growing area of interest in queer engagement with Japanese popular culture. Despite this, there is limited research exploring the underlying reasons for this phenomenon, particularly in relation to gender-bending anime and manga and how transgender individuals interact with this form of media.
As a trans woman, I personally experienced a lack of visual representation of people like me on screen. When trans feminine individuals were portrayed, they were often the subject of transmisogynistic jokes or cast as villains. As a result, I was drawn to gender-bending anime and manga as a form of media that allowed me to explore my gender identity. However, it is important to note that other gender-diverse individuals may respond differently to this genre.
Therefore, I intend to explore the relationship between gender-bending anime and manga and gender-diverse individuals’ consumption of this media. This discussion outlines the initial stages of my research on this topic. It aims to investigate the representation of gender-bending anime and manga series, exploring the implications of how an active gender-diverse audience may interpret these transformative bodily texts. This research will delve into the complex nature of defining the genre of gender-bending and highlight the presence of feminist themes within these texts. Through a critical analysis of select anime and manga series, this study seeks to contribute to the ongoing discourse on gender and sexuality within Japanese popular culture.
Bio: Ashley Remminga is a graduate researcher in the Department of Politics, Media, and Philosophy at La Trobe University. Her research explores queer and, in particular, transgenderand gender-diverse participation and engagement within popular culture and fandom. Her current research explores gender-based language within the cosplaying community and how it shapes the experience of gender-diverse cosplayers.
Through a comparative analysis of the character of Miki Makimura, first introduced as the love interest to the titular hero of Go Nagai’s 1970’s manga Devilman and most recently refashioned in Masaaki Yuasa’s 2018 animated remake of the same, this paper attempts to examine how her body is positioned in dialogues of identity and agency. Miki is the anchor to the young half-human half-demon vigilante hero in Nagai’s manga, becoming an essential marker of his humanity. Despite this, her body, like many of Nagai’s female characters, is used as a site of desirability that can most shockingly transform into a site of abjection and fear. However, in Yuasa’s remake he introduces non-binary characters and refines existing character backgrounds, including that of Miki. She is more than just the locum of desirability; she is an agent of resistance within a narrative of constant destabilizations, and a pivotal point of contact within the human-demon conflict that entails the main narrative. How does the evolution of the character of Miki Makimura lend towards the evolution of the original story to meet the demands of a new audience? Especially within Yuasa’s fluid vision of reality, how does she move past the boundedness of her human physicality to become the voice of reason, not just of the hero but also the audience? Using Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and Barbara Creed’s writings on the “monstrous feminine”, this paper will attempt to decode the body of Miki, and the questions of identity, sexuality and agency located therein, within the larger context of body horror. The paper will closely examine the character of Miki Makimura, and other non-binary characters, present in Yuasa’s anime series against their original appearances in Nagai’s manga, to establish it causally within a larger inferential framework of anxieties of body and identity.
Bio: Aparna Rajeev is a second-year Doctoral Student at Waseda University’s Graduate School of Culture and Communication Studies. Her research interests include anime, identity and trauma. Her Doctoral thesis is an examination of selected manga and anime titles within the dark fantasy genre to isolate and decode constructions of heroism in order to establish connections between hero idealizations and Japanese post-war constructions of identity.
“Game studies” is the discipline that proposes the study of the act of play and how the objects we use to play have the potential to transform reality. Therefore, we can say that games and play have political potential. One author in this study area is Miguel Sicart, who in the first pages of his book Play Matters (2014) states that play is not necessarily fun, but it can be pleasurable in a transgressive and dangerous way. We should add to his study the one of Caetlin Benson-Allott, who in Debugging Game History (2016) says that things are objects that have “a power in the world beyond its mere utility or associations for people.” What happens, then, when feminist activists and LGBTQIA+ marginal communities rescue pop culture products, such as anime and manga, and use the potential of play to denounce their erasure in Peruvian society and history?
This paper proposes to study the LGBTQ+ Peruvian fanzines to understand our ambivalent relationship with neoliberalism, and how the bodies and products inserted in capitalism have the potential to defy a system that does not recognize them because of their performativity, sexuality, race, and social class. To demonstrate that, I will analyse the fanzines Azúcar Amargo (2020) of the non-binary artist Estado de Limbo, and Exploradoras de la Luna (2021) of the trans poet Gia Lujuria. Their work not only situates them as activists and artists but also, in them, they recognize themselves as part of a fan community that sees hope and possibility to change society in fiction. Then, they, as marginal LGBTIQA+ bodies and part of a fan community, use their position in society -one that sees them as a site of anxiety-, to incarnate the excess of sexuality and capitalism, but also to question and destabilise them.
Bio: Alexandra Arana is a Ph.D. student at the University of Pittsburgh and was the director of the Peruvian LGBTIQA+ magazine Crónicas de la Diversidad. Her undergraduate research in the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú won the Academic Research Award in 2012 and the PADET award, for bachelor thesis in 2016. Her research revolves around gender, sexuality and LGBTIQA+ cultures; pop culture, girl culture and fan culture; and transpacific studies. She has published in digital and print media since 2015, and in 2022 she published the book En el jardín de lirios. El amor entre mujeres en la cultura pop asiática.
7:00 to 8:00pm: Fan media and the destabilisation of gender norms
While the global dominance of English has led to the adoption and diffusion of English terms like rezubian ‘lesbian’ and daiku‘dyke’ into the language of Japanese lesbian communities, the linguistic entanglement and construction of these identity terms morph as they move across transnational boundaries. This research focuses on three identity terms commonly found, femmu ‘femme,’ chûsei ‘androgynous,’ and boi(isshu) ‘masc(uline),’ and how this taxonomy acts as a point of reference for constructing lesbian communities and identities yet simultaneously acts as a nebulous constraining diverse expressions of one’s gender and sexuality. The guiding research questions are as follows:
Data was collected over the summer of 2023 in Nagoya through a mix of focus groups and interviews. As such, femmu, chûsei, and boi(isshu) were understood as a framework to connect with lesbian communities, albeit rooted in seemingly binary terms, none of the participants identified with these label terms for themselves. Participants can categorise themselves based on their physical appearance, but they were critical of these broad definitions, referring to the fluidity of how these labels are realised and how an externalised gaze places them into certain taxonomies in contrast to diverse interpretations of individual identities. This metalinguistic discourse, as paired with participants’ embodied experiences within lesbian spaces, display how hegemonic discourses of gender and sexuality are both reproduced and subverted.
Bio: Crystal Gong is MA student at Nagoya University in the Linguistics and Cultural Studies Program who conducts research in sociocultural linguistics with a focus on Japanese, gender, and sexuality. Their current research involves how Japanese lesbian communities’ taxonomies of lesbian identity terms are both used in reconstructing hegemonic discourses of gender and sexuality while also subverting them, effectively creating space for certain types of lesbians while excluding others.
As a self-described “normal YouTuber who aspires to become an o-jōsama” (“young lady”), virtual YouTuber Hyakumantenbara Salome (hereafter, “Salome”) streams live playthroughs of one of a rotating list of videogames on a near-nightly basis, and at over 1.8 million subscribers, her streams are well-attended. Given her aspiration to the status of the wealthy, refined “o-jōsama” character type, her playthroughs are accompanied by her running commentary in the speech style “o-jōsama kotoba,” (“young lady speech”), a fictionalised speech style that is characterised by its high frequency of stereotypically “feminine” linguistic features that similarly reflect a sense of refinement and high social standing. As a part of fandom participation, however, her fans (known collectively as “Salomates”) also utilise this speech style in the largely anonymized live chat that runs alongside the stream, including grammatically marked constructions such as “go-kigenyō desu wa!” (“greetings desu wa!”) and “konbanwa desu wa!” (“good evening desu wa!”).
Drawing on recent work that explores fandom communities and practices through the lens of the “speech community,” this presentation examines the process by which both Salome and her fandom have allowed for the reinterpretation of a marked, gendered linguistic variable as a means of fandom engagement and interaction. Specifically, I analyse how the use of the stereotypically “feminine” sentence-final expression “desu wa” in livechat comments is transformed, serving not as a marker of femininity, but as a gender-neutral marker for engaging in anonymized linguistic play and fandom interaction.
Bio: Hannah Dahlberg-Dodd is a Project Assistant Professor at Tokyo College at the University of Tokyo. Her research is concerned with language use in popular media, and how that language use relates to broader socio cultural ideologies. In particular, I focus on fictionalised speech styles, how they are produced, consumed, and perceived, and the relationship that these styles have with characters (kyara) and personae.
Aggressive Retsuko/Aggretsuko, a Japanese anime character embodied as a lesser panda who is a tea-serving OL in an accounting department by day and a death metal singer at night, struck a chord with audiences worldwide since her 2015 debut. She initially endures gender-based and power-based harassment in the workplace, and matures over five seasons into a much more complex individual than would be expected of a Sanrio sponsored narrative broadcast on Netflix. Her female coworkers, navigating their own struggles and shifting solidarities, stimulate broadening awareness of her potential and encourage her entrepreneurial development. In this way it displays a feminist consciousness within the strictures of Japan’s ‘Womenomics’ era. Over the seasons we see her support network grow far beyond initial expectations and with that, her expanded sense of autonomy and empowerment. She eventually decides to run for political office. Unlike Hello Kitty, Gudetama, and Rilakkuma, Aggressive Retsuko is a relatively minor character domestically whose goods are not available in Japanese Sanrio stores.
However, her global popularity indicates that, despite the obvious cultural particularities of her situation, the global audience found her relatable enough as a representative millennial woman striving under neoliberal conditions in a generationally diverse workplace. Convergence theory would suggest this alignment of fans due to similar economic conditions despite cultural differences. In broader political contexts, backlash against feminisms within and beyond Japan during Aggretsuko’s anime release has also spurred fans to relate to her. Netnography yields a variety of interpretations found in blogs and indie news which frame Aggretsuko and her colleagues in the diverse popular sociological imaginations of writers as an inspiration in these challenging times.
Bio: Debra J. Occhi is a linguistic anthropologist and Professor at Miyazaki International University (MIU) whose research investigates animism and Japanese kyara characters. Recent publications include Neologisms and Knights at the Heart Festival: Analysis of Online Live- Stream Broadcasting Banter Between Fans and Action Heroes, forthcoming in The Handbook of Cultural Linguistics, Alireza Korangy, ed. Berlin: Springer, and Kumamon: Japan’s Surprisingly Cheeky Yuru Kyara Mascot, in Introducing Japanese Popular Culture, Alisa Freedman, ed., vol 2. Oxford: Routledge (2023).