Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze

By Kathryn Hemmann

The female gaze is used by writers and readers to examine narratives from a perspective that sees women as subjects instead of objects, and the application of a female gaze to male-dominated discourses can open new avenues of interpretation. This book explores how female manga artists have encouraged the female gaze within their work and how female readers have challenged the male gaze pervasive in many forms of popular media. Each of the chapters offers a close reading of influential manga and fancomics to illustrate the female gaze as a mode of resistant reading and creative empowerment. By employing a female gaze, professional and amateur creators are able to shape and interpret texts in a manner that emphasizes the role of female characters while challenging and reconfiguring gendered themes and issues.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Mar 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030180959

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© The Author(s) 2020

K. HemmannManga Cultures and the Female GazeEast Asian Popular Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18095-9_1

1. Introduction: Interrogating the Text from the Wrong Perspective

Kathryn Hemmann¹  

(1)

East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Kathryn Hemmann

There is a famous bit of fandom lore involving the American writer Anne Rice, who is best known for her 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire. In September 2004, Rice’s novel Blood Canticle, the newest book in her Vampire Chronicles series, received a number of extremely critical reader reviews on Amazon. Rice responded to these reviews by using her own account on Amazon to post a long, unpunctuated tirade making unkind claims concerning her readers, whom she accused of making stupid, arrogant assumptions about me and what I am doing.¹ One of her comments, You are interrogating the text from the wrong perspective, continues to be satirically bandied about on online message boards. An important reason why Rice’s accusations of interrogating the text from the wrong perspective struck a dissonant chord within online fan communities is because it amplified strong statements the author had already made concerning fanfiction. For example, in April 2000, Rice had posted the following admonition on her website:

I do not allow fan fiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your own original stories with your own characters. It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes.²

Rice subsequently took measures to ensure that all fanfiction based on her published work was removed from hosting sites such as FanFiction.​net and Archive of Our Own. Other American fantasy writers, most notably George R.R. Martin and Diana Gabaldon, followed suit in taking action against the means by which readers shared interpretations of texts that the writers themselves did not consider appropriate.

Readers of fantasy literature, who have formed global networks both deep and wide on online message boards and blogging sites such as LiveJournal and Tumblr, considered this attitude of heuristic dogmatism to be hubris of the highest order. Who is a writer, after all, to tell readers how their work must be interpreted? Indeed, what can publishers do, and what can critics do, and what can academics do to force readers into a certain canonical interpretation of a text? The satirical use of the phrase interrogating the text from the wrong perspective is therefore used counter attempts to argue for a correct interpretation of a text based on stated authorial intent or simply what is on the page. The expression has thus come to playfully represent a practice that feminist literary critic Judith Fetterley calls resistant reading, or interpreting a text in ways that the text itself does not immediately suggest or for which the text does not provide overt evidence.³ Resistant reading, or interpreting the text from the wrong perspective, has implications for a gendered reading of texts that extend far beyond any sort of Barthian death of the author. Specifically, looking at texts from a different perspective is a way for female-identified readers to claim agency over stories and discourses that have traditionally excluded them.

This book is about what prominent feminist literary critics such as Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Rita Felski have called the female voice or feminist poetics.⁴ I have chosen to call the viewpoint of female writers, artists, and readers the female gaze instead of the female voice following Laura Mulvey’s definition of the male gaze as set forth in her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema. Mulvey writes:

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female form which is styled accordingly.⁵

This definition may be inverted in order to understand what it would mean to view the world from a female perspective:

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/female and passive/male. The determining female gaze projects its phantasy on to the male form which is styled accordingly.

I will address the erotic implications of the female gaze in my chapters on fancomics, but at the outset I want to focus on what it means to understand the female as subject. By granting narrative privilege to female characters and thus allowing them to become the heroines of their own stories, writers, artists, and readers recast their roles so that they no longer serve as passive victims or the mere objects of legal and political discourses. Female characters exercising narrative privilege, as well as the writers who write them, the artists who draw them, and the readers who read them, can also turn a female gaze onto male-dominated narratives, thus reconfiguring stories at a contextual and metatextual level.

My Life in Shōjo Manga

The seeds of this project were planted in 2008 during the fall of my third year of graduate school, when I was 25 years old and still obsessed with shōjo manga. I study Japanese comics, but I’m not an anime nerd or anything, I would laugh nervously when I spoke with other graduate students I met at workshops and conferences. My apartment, where manga overflowed from my cheap bookshelves and spilled into piles on the floor, was my secret shame. I read every manga I could get my hands on, from the charming adventures of lost kittens to surreal sexual psychodramas. What gave me the greatest pleasure, however, were stories of regular girls attending high school and college and finding love and friendship against a backdrop of cute clothes, fast food, and lavishly accessorized cellphones. The year 2008 was a good year to be in love with shōjo manga, as dozens of volumes were released in translation from multiple American publishers every month. Specialty bookstores, such as the branches of Kinokuniya and Book-Off in Manhattan, had fully stocked sections of shōjo manga imported from Japan. Meanwhile, young amateur artists were forming communities online under the auspices of art-focused social media websites like DeviantArt and Pixiv, where they shared their fan art and original character designs inspired by shōjo manga.

As much as I was fascinated by shōjo manga, however, the academic discipline of Japanese Studies did not seem to share my enthusiasm. My goal as a PhD student was to one day find a sustainably funded position at a university, and I received multiple assurances that no reputable department would hire someone who is specialized in comics—especially not girls’ comics, which cycled from one trend to another alongside seasonal fashions and were thus ephemeral and ultimately disposable. Kind people with good intentions told me that my time on the job market would be much easier if I were to write my dissertation about literary fiction, a topic that would be taken seriously by the members of search committees. I had originally come to graduate school to study the work of contemporary Japanese female writers, so I simply continued along that course. The main focus of academic work on these writers seemed to be women’s suffering, a theme I found unpleasant and, quite frankly, boring. As a young woman myself, I knew all about sexism and misogynistic social pressures, and I was sick of it. I didn’t want to read about women suffering beautifully, or women suffering nobly, or women suffering peevishly, or women suffering in abject horror—I wanted to read about female pleasure and empowerment, and I wanted to read about it from a female perspective. Unfortunately, given the challenges presented by my still-developing Japanese proficiency and the limited range of women’s fiction available in translation at the time, this was easier said than done.

My great revelation came when I first read Philip Gabriel’s fantastic translation of Kirino Natsuo’s 2003 novel Real World (Riaru Wārudo), a strange and dark little book narrated by four profoundly disturbed and unlikeable high-school girls, each of whom is characterized by her own set of neuroses. By the end of the novel, this group of friends is shattered by tragedy, but I was thoroughly impressed by incredible adventure of self-destruction these girls embarked on over the course of the story. Each of the characters is ferociously articulate about how she hates adults, school, and society in general. After reading so many academic essays (largely written by male scholars) about how schoolgirls served as empty symbols open to the attribution of abstract concepts such as innocence and freedom, it was wonderful to see my own complicated experience as a teenage girl captured in a novel written by another woman. As opposed to the male fantasy of innocent girlhood, this was indeed the real world. The fact that Kirino is Japanese and significantly older than me was irrelevant—my recognition of myself and my own circle of friends in her writing was instant and profound. As I researched Kirino, I found that, despite the darkness of her fiction, her interviews and essays are characterized by sparkling wit and cutting humor. Kirino has claimed that she does not identify as a feminist, a term that was admittedly a loaded term in Japan (as it still continues to be around the world). In spite of her disavowal of feminism, it was still meaningful to me that her novels and stories never hesitate to demonstrate the full depth of the violence and misery experienced by women while critiquing and openly mocking misogynistic attitudes.

I continued my work on Kirino for my dissertation, but I could not help but be bothered by the suffering of her characters. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, to write about something positive and uplifting for a change? Wouldn’t it be refreshing to write about stories in which female characters do not have to suffer? Wouldn’t it actually be kind of cool to write about shōjo manga?

I was born at the tail end of 1983, which puts me squarely in the generation that came of age in tandem with the rising popularity of anime and manga in the United States. When I was a kid, the cable television station Cartoon Network broadcast older anime like Speed Racer (Mahha GōGōGō) and Battle of the Planets (Kagaku Ninjatai Gatchaman). By the time I was in middle school, more recent anime like Dragon Ball Z (Doragon Bōru Zetto) and Sailor Moon (Bishōjo Senshi Sērā Mūn) had started to appear on regular network television. When I was in high school, the Pokémon boom was in full force, and large national box store retailers like Media Play and Best Buy had dedicated sections devoted to anime that offered hundreds of titles in VHS and DVD formats.

A VHS tape with two episodes of anime could run upward of $30, however, and DVDs were even more expensive. This made anime largely inaccessible to most people my age before online file-sharing services became more commonplace and easier to use. What I could afford were manga, which were often sold alongside anime. Even better than the standard paperback prices of these graphic novels was the fact that many of them catered perfectly to my interests. I found the American superhero comics of the 1990s to be ridiculous and impossible to relate to, and I felt the same way about many of the action-oriented shōnen anime targeted at a male demographic. When I picked up my first volume of shōjo manga, it was like a ray of light had broken through dark clouds. No longer did I have to settle for overgrown boys punching each other! There were artists out there who told stories about girls—and not just girls who suffered from the sidelines as they supported the boys, but girls who spoke and fought for themselves. I had finally found a genre in which young women could be the heroes of their own stories, and in which they looked fabulous doing it.

The first shōjo series I fell in love with was Sailor Moon . I had watched several episodes of the anime on broadcast television, and I was delighted to find that there was a comic version available in English. I had never seen anything like the flowing and delicate art style used by Takeuchi Naoko, the creator of Sailor Moon, and it did not take me long to begin tracing images of the characters in the spiral-bound notebooks I used for school. When I ventured onto the message boards and image galleries (mainly on the now-defunct web hosting service Geocities) scatted across the fledgling internet, I came to realize that I was not alone in my fascination with the Sailor Moon universe. There were other young women all around the world sharing their love of magical girls. Moreover, the communities they formed betrayed none of the exclusionary attitude dominating other online fandoms, such as those for superhero comics and epic fantasy series like The Lord of the Rings. A great deal of early Sailor Moon fanwork was childish and immature, but that was okay—a lot of us were young, and no one cared. Although the unrelenting academic and social pressures of high school forced me offline for a few years, in college I rediscovered the joy of online communities, where many Sailor Moon fans, now older, explicitly associated the franchise with feminist ideologies and queer rights activism. Furthermore, they were motivated by Sailor Moon to launch their own creative projects, which they posted online as webcomics while they pitched their stories to professional publishers of graphic novels.

By this point in my life I had begun to read scholarship on anime and manga, and I was frustrated by the male-centered perspective on shōjo manga and its animated adaptations. Of course, there are people in the world who derive sexual pleasure from images of young women; that goes without saying. It also makes perfect sense that straight cisgender men might attempt to escape the overwhelming expectations of masculinity fostered by late-stage capitalism by seeking a refuge in fantasies involving the presumed carefree innocence of high-school girls. Even as an undergraduate I could understand the appeal of such fantasies, especially toward the end of the month right before rent was due. What I desperately wanted to see, however, were serious scholars talking about people like me—young women who were not sex objects or empty symbols or vanguards of consumer culture or escapist fantasies. I wanted recognition for the experience of real people like me who watched Sailor Moon and saw our own hopes and dreams represented as our fears and frustrations were vanquished in explosions of flowers and sparkles.

While writing my senior thesis, I encountered a short essay by Shelagh Young titled Feminism and the Politics of Power: Whose Gaze Is It Anyway? in an edited volume called The Female Gaze : Women as Viewers of Popular Culture. This book, which was published in 1989, was already more than 15 years old, but Young’s response to feminist debates surrounding the music video for the American singer Madonna’s single Material Girl felt as if it could have been posted on someone’s blog just that morning. Young argues that the insistence on the ideological purity of feminist politics has the unfortunate effect of alienating women who want to enjoy popular culture even as they remain critical of its messages. The idea that there is nothing wrong with enjoying something while you analyze it—problematic aspects and all—struck me with a powerful blow. This was the exact tool I needed to begin dismantling the misogyny implicit in many critical studies of shōjo manga. After all, there are many different ways of looking at popular culture, and stories can be interpreted in radically different ways depending on one’s perspective. Specifically, the notion of a female gaze gives agency to female creators and readers instead of relegating them to the position of helpless victims of a patriarchal culture that only serves the needs of straight men.

In many stories starring magical girls as their heroines, there is a transformation (henshin) sequence in which a mundane human becomes endowed with special powers and a highly focused sense of purpose. This book, Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze , is the magical transformation of my doctoral dissertation, and it was inspired by a similar magical transformation in transnational pop culture mediascapes. During the 2010s, shōjo manga became mainstream in the United States and began to influence a generation of female creators who drew directly from its narrative and visual tropes to create their own original stories even as supernatural-themed young adult romance targeted at female readers catered to the same demographic that frequented the manga sections of major bookstore chains. Speaking from personal experience, I was able witnessed an incredible sea change between 2008, when fan conventions were dominated by adult men, and 2018, when the winners of major industry awards in comics and animation are young women. How did we get from Sailor Moon as an underground phenomenon in 1998 to Steven Universe as a major driver of cultural change in 2018? This is an ambitious question that must be approached from multiple fields of disciplinary research in order to be fully understood, and in this book I will offer my own contribution to explaining this cultural shift through textual analysis. I will not simply read major licensed popular media texts, however; I will also focus on the creative production of fans, both fans who have become professional artists and fans who choose to remain amateurs. Through my analysis of both traditionally published work and subculturally oriented fanwork, I argue that female-driven fandom cultures have created a feedback loop that has driven cultural production and, with it, the culture of mainstream mediascapes.

A Brief Overview of Shōjo Manga History

Shōjo manga, or manga for the shōjo demographic of preteen girls and young women, stands at the center of a thriving comics publishing industry in both Japan and the United States. In contemporary Japan, there are four major demographic publishing categories. The first is shōnen , or manga for elementary- and middle-school-age boys. Shōnen is the most popular genre both in Japan and abroad, and it includes internationally recognized titles such as Naruto, One Piece, and My Hero Academia. Manga for young men in high school and college, as well as older men, is called seinen manga, and it includes everything from the ultraviolent science fiction of Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Attack on Titan to moé stories about cute girls, such as Yotsuba&! and Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Manga for women, or josei manga, is stereotyped as featuring primarily love stories that feature both heterosexual couples, as in Natsuyuki Rendezvous and Bunny Drop, and homosexual couples, as in Maria Watches over Us and World’s Greatest First Love.

When it comes to popularity and profitability, however, a close second to the genre of shōnen is shōjo , the various subgenres of which are