By Gwen Frost
More accurately, what isn’t queer about postwar manga. East Asian Studies and Modern & Classical Languages presented the lecture “What’s Queer about Postwar Manga?”, held in SL 140 at Western. Speaker Dr. Sharalyn Orbaugh has been teaching about Anime and Manga for six years at UBC, and is a professor of modern Japanese literature and popular culture at University of British Columbia. Orbaugh previewed that she would be discussing how manga artists have been queering normative ideas of gender and sexuality in sophisticated ways, through both visuals and texts. Manga is a type of japanese comic book or graphic novel, whereas anime is a japanese word for television or cartoon show.
Orbaugh went over definitions of sex, gender and sexuality before delving into how these definitions are challenged in manga. She also included how sex roles compare with sex gender stereotypes, criticizing the enforced binary of the masculine/feminine dynamic in popular culture. The actual sexual-role genders are correlated strongly with the gender stereotypes assigned by one’s culture. These are not just assumptions, but normative standards that “form the prisonhouse of gender in which we all live,” said Orbaugh.
Queer manga is that which intentionally or unintentional challenges commonly assumed binary structures of either/or. The person on the poster for the talk is drawn ambiguously, so that gender cannot be easily interpreted. When talking about the sexed body, drawings in manga often lack characteristics that would help a reader assign a gender to the character, because the artists leaves out “visual cues leave the question of the person’s sex ambiguous.”
Orbaugh quoted Judith Butler’s notion of “the heterosexual imperative”. Seeing that representative sex is a forcible materialization, that reinforces the heterosexual imperative. The lack of ambiguity of gender and sexual identity allow us to recognize who may “legitimately” have sex with who. The imperative also allows to know whether the pairings are hetero or homo, and then react accordingly.
Characters do have gender performance, which allow for readers to guess gender identity. Examples began in the 1950’s, analyzing how japanese popular culture has challenged normative assumptions. In “Princess Night” (1966), protagonist Sapphire engages in a heterosexual relationship, because their bodies are female-sexed and male-sexed, but a homogender relationship, because they are both masculine gendered. 1960’s genderfluid character Frebe offers to perform normative femininity to make Sapphire, who presents as masculine, love her. Frebe is gender fluid, but heterosexual, and then breaks off the relationship when realizing that Sapphire is not male-sexed.
In “The Rose of Versailles” (1972), character Oscar who is female is raised as a male and presents as a male so that they may have access to the royal hierarchy. We may not necessarily be allowed to know Oscar’s anatomical sex as we never see Oscar undressed, but the story indicates the Oscar is a gendered-female. Oscar has relationships with both cis-females and cis-males.
Queer elements of Berubara include Oscar’s characteristics of both presenting as cross-dressed in terms of their sex (cis-female), but also cross-dressed in terms of their gender identity (male gender). Oscar must be a man to serve in the palace guard, but this sexual role is transgressed as Oscar was born cis-male. Manga up until this point accepts fluidity of gender up until the point of a sexual relationship, at which point the either/or imperative is enforced, which then reifies heteronormativity.
In Takanashi Mitsuba’s “Crimson Hero”, the protagonist Nobara has a female body but a masculine gender performance. She is “neither/both rather than either/or” explained Baugh. Despite her fundamentally asexual nature, she finds herself in a homosexual and hetero-gendered interaction that is then compared with a heterosexual and homogendered relationship, where she begins to develop feelings and presents more feminine to “win his heart”, which works, and she gives up volleyball to take over her mother’s tea house.
Patterns in queer shojo manga include female protagonists being depicted as gender fluid, sexuality fluid and then a critique of social and stereotypical roles (shojo manga is aimed at female teen readership). Manga aimed toward male teen readership has less gender ambiguity and more defined sexual roles (shonen manga). Shonen manga queers sex in the character of Shinatose Izana from Nights of Sedonia, who can become either female or male in order to mate- this absence of gender leads to an isolated queerness of sex alone.
The talk closed with a quote on the screen reading “It’s what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it”, by Oscar Wilde.