Entry tags:

anime, books, feminism, manga, sf/f

Feminism and manga & anime: A personal history (1/3)
The kind of things people say at parties

"So what kinds of things did people talk about at this conference?"

"Oh, all kinds of stuff. Definitions of science fiction, race and gender, literary canons, feminism and anime--you know, Japanese animation?"

"Feminism and anime?" His smile says that he expects me to share the joke. "Those aren't two things that often go together."

I don't smile back.


The kind of things people put in panel descriptions

Anime: magical girls, panty shots, magical girls with panty shots. Seriously though, most know by now (or should) that anime can be a lot more than Pokemon, creepy tentacle porn, or big robots. What's feminist in anime, and what's not? Why? The gender divide in anime goes as deep as its marketing tactics in Japan (shoujo, or girls', anime, and shonen, or boys'). Discussion about gender, feminism, or progressive ideas in general, is often ignored or shouted down by fans who just want more of those panty shots. Let's get a conversation started.
     --Wiscon 29 Pocket Program

Alternate histories

Last year, at a panel, Justine Larbalestier said something like There are many histories of science fiction, as many histories and as many science fictions as there are readers; feminism wasn't an add-on to sf for her, feminist sf was what she started reading, for her it was the core of the field. For me, too--not all I read, but a lot of what I read, and how, and why; the rest of the world still seemed to think science fiction was a boy's game (hell, it still does), but I knew it was where the girls were. The girls and the women and the genderqueer and the working parents and the nonnuclear families and the multiracial, all the things that were my world, all the things that weren't in the mainstream books I found as a kid. With a few honorable exceptions, mainstream booksdescribed a world I found strange (some people might call it alien, but I read sf, I thought alien was good), a world that no longer existed, or that never really had, a fantasy I found nightmarish. Critics call sf escapist, but I saw my real world in sf, a world where my mother worked--and I liked it; a world where my friends' parents got divorced--and things turned out pretty much okay; a world where girls wanted to do more than marry when they grew up--and people would have thought it strange if domesticity had been their only ambition. You could call science fiction my escape, but if so, mainstream fiction was my prison. Like any prison, it offered much less liberty and independence than I was accustomed to, or felt I had a right to expect.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised my history of anime didn't look much like the world thought it should, either.


Follow the money

Anime is Japanese animation. As far as I can tell, it started becoming mainstream-popular in the US in the late nineties, although it was a minority subinterest much earlier, more via amateur fan copies than professional production. By contrast, manga (comics) have boomed only in the past three to five years--and by "boom," I mean that 2003 saw a 100% increase in publication and the "downturn" of 2004 saw "only" a 40-50% increase. (See ICV2 for 2004 and 2003 figures.) Traditional sf publisher Del Rey recently announced that its new manga line had reached a million books in print. That's in print, not sold, and I haven't found out whether their manga is distributed as mass market or trade paperback--but let's be conservative and assume mass market. Typical mass market sell-through is 60-70%. At the low end, that's 600,000 volumes sold--with a line of six books, averaging 100,000 per book in a year. For the mass market, those are pretty good numbers--and indeed Del Rey's top sellers have started hitting the USA Today bestseller list.

And what's driving these figures is female readers.


But everybody knows girls don't read comics

Women are a minority in mainstream US comics: the most generous estimate puts them at 10% of the industry, and even that percentage drops considerably if we restrict the number to creators rather than including publishing personnel. The percentage of women reading comics is probably higher: I've seen estimates going as high as 30%, but I don't have any links to surveys to hand, so please don't quote me on that. It's clear, though, that the readership for US comics is disproportionately male. (I suspect it's also disproportionately white, but I have even less substantiated information on that.)

In Japan, by all accounts, women make up 50-60% of comics creators and readers.


Community and context

I came to anime by way of manga and I came to manga by way of media fandom.

"Media fandom" can mean many things and contains many populations; in this case, I mean a self-identified and predominantly female group of television watchers whose response to source texts is active engagement in communal response. This engagement may be critical (episode analyses, character guides, etc.) or creative (fan art, fan fiction, fan music videos)--although I would argue that the division between "critical" and "creative" here is largely artificial.

In early 2004, I was reading comics for the first time in years. It was Joss Whedon's fault, more or less: all his shows got canceled, I needed a Whedon fix, he was writing comics, I went into my local comics shop. A lot of my friends and acquaintances from media fandom seemed to be doing more or less the same thing, though their reading wasn't necessarily so Whedon-centric. I branched out, I tried other comics, and--

I wasn't quite satisfied.

Some of the comics were good, but they were good superhero comics, and superhero tropes don't speak to me the way the tropes of my favorite genres do. And it disturbed me that even when I liked the comics, most of them were written by men. I like women's writing; I always have. And I'm always conscious of the ways that it's made invisible.

While I was getting into comics, other women I knew were getting into manga. They made it sound interesting--and they'd mentioned that a lot of it was written by women. I was part of fandom. When I wanted to know more about which manga to try, I knew who to ask.

I didn't discover manga and anime by myself; I wasn't introduced to them by men; I didn't hear of them as men's porn or boys' toys. I approached them from the very beginning as a form of women's art and women's self-expression, sometimes created by and for women, and sometimes created by men but transformed or subverted by women in gendered ways. And from the very beginning, I was fascinated by the generic, narrative, and stylistic similarities I saw between fan fiction and shoujo (girls') comics--and by the fact that the type of fiction that was enjoyed by a minority subculture in the US was mainstream in Japan.

To be continued

2: Shoujo and shounen; slash and shounen-ai
3: Feminist anime and manga