Tag: gender

Gender and the Academic Job Market in Japanese Studies

Kathryn28 Comments

What A Professor Should Look Like

One of the great sources of frustration in my life is when female grad students act as if I’m insulting them by explaining how difficult it is to be on the academic job market. These women are brilliant, talented, and hard-working; and, in their minds, there is no reason for them not to succeed. A common response I’ve received both online and in person is that it’s nothing more than a pessimistic attitude that has been holding back not just me but my entire graduate cohort.

I couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps gender might have something to do with our frustration and relative lack of success. Certainly, we wouldn’t be the first women in history to find ourselves at a disadvantage on any given job market.

To satisfy my own morbid curiosity, I made a list of the job announcements in the field of Japanese Studies during the past two job markets (2012/13 and 2013/14). I then asked three questions of each position:

(1) Was it tenure-track?

(2) Did the job posting make it clear that the position requires Japanese language instruction?

(3) Is the person who was eventually hired male or female?

I found that the candidates hired for tenure-track positions that did not require language instruction were overwhelmingly male. Tenure-track positions that did require language instruction could go to men or women, but there was a small bias towards male candidates. Non-tenured positions tended to go to women.

The category of “teaching Japanese” might require explanation. To make a long story short, the majority of Japanese Studies PhDs from top graduate programs are not trained in linguistics or second-language acquisition, so jobs that do not require language instruction are considered to be the most desirable. Positions that follow this elite model tend to be elite positions, and positions that require language instruction tend to demand a heavier course load for a lower salary. In essence, teaching language is a burden that is almost never fairly compensated in the field of Japanese Studies.

Perhaps gender has nothing to do with the statistics I was able to gather. Correlation does not equal causation, after all. What I hope to highlight here is an apparent hiring trend that requires a great deal more research in order to be understood and corroborated.

Many thanks to Pau Pitarch of Kappa Bunko for his invaluable assistance!

Without further ado, here’s the data.

* * * * *

2013 – 2014 Job Market
_____

Total Jobs: 16
Tenure-Track, No Language: 4 men, 1 woman
Tenure-Track, Language: 5 men, 2 women
Non-Tenure-Track: 1 man, 2 women
_____

Bates College
Tenure-Track: No
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Female Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Dartmouth College
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Search Failed

George Mason University
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Female Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Haverford College
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: No
Result: Female Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Michigan State University
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Middlebury College
Tenure-Track: No
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Northwestern University
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: No
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Princeton University
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: No
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

University of Kentucky
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

University of Michigan
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: No
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

University of North Texas
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Female Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

University of Notre Dame
Tenure-Track: No
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Female Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Wake Forest University
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: No
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Wellesley College
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Western Michigan University

Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

* * * * *

2012 – 2013 Job Market
______

Total Jobs: 31
Tenure-Track, No Language: 8 men, 2 women
Tenure-Track, Language: 7 men, 5 women
Non-Tenure-Track: 3 men, 6 women
_____

Bard College
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Bates College
Tenure-Track: No
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Beloit College
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Female Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Boston University
Tenure-Track: No
Language Teaching Required: No
Result: Male
Hire Webpage: [link]

Chapman University
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Centre College
Tenure-Track: No
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Female Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Earlham College
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: No
Result: Female Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Eastern Kentucky University
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

George Washington University
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Female Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Grand Valley State
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Kennesaw State University
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Female Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Lehigh University
Tenure-Track: No
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Female Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Macalester College
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Middle Tennessee State University
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

North Central College
Tenure-Track: No
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Female Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

The Ohio State University
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: No
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Princeton University
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: No
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

State University of New York, New Paltz
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Sewanee: The University of the South
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Female Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

University of Arizona
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: No
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

University of British Columbia
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: No
Result: Female Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

University of California, Los Angeles
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: No
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

University of Colorado, Bolder
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language-Teaching Required: No
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

University of Denver
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Female Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Tenure-Track: No
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Female Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

University of Minnesota
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: No
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

University of Pittsburgh
Tenure-Track: No
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

University of New Mexico
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: No
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

University of Notre Dame
Tenure-Track: No
Language Teaching Required: No
Result: Female Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Williams College
Tenure-Track: No
Language Teaching Required: Yes
Result: Female Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

Yale University
Tenure-Track: Yes
Language Teaching Required: No
Result: Male Hired
Hire Webpage: [link]

* * * * *

Totals

Total Jobs: 47

Tenure-Track, No Language: 12 men, 3 women

Tenure-Track, Language: 12 men, 7 women

Non-Tenure-Track: 4 men, 8 women

All Positions: 28 men, 18 women

Cross-Dressing in Anime and Manga

Kathryn4 Comments

This past April, the ever-amazing Leah of The Lobster Dance and I gave a panel on cross-dressing in anime and manga at Sakura-Con in Seattle. Because we had an enormous turnout and not enough time to say everything we wanted to say, we decided to expand our talk and post it online.

Our essay is meant to be friendly and welcoming to newcomers to the fascinating field of Gender Studies, but readers should be advised that some portions of this essay contain mild spoilers for the series under discussion. For those of you who are looking for recommendations for anime, manga, and formal academic scholarship, feel free to jump ahead to our conclusion in Part Seven.

Dan Savage Drawn by Ellen Forney

Part One
The Superpositionality of Gender

Gender plays a strong role in the life of each and every human individual from the moment of birth, even despite our difficulties in defining what “gender” is, not to mention our inability to agree on what qualities constitute the characteristics of and differences between genders. We participate in a constant reinforcement of culturally prescribed gender roles, which we perform and challenge not only in our everyday lives but through our art as well. Because gender is such a major element of how we construct our identities, it’s only natural that we explore it and test its boundaries through the stories we tell ourselves. Anime and manga, which facilitate character development by playing with and transforming images, are fertile grounds for gender play.

Takarazuka Production of For Whom the Bell Tolls

Part Two
The Theater: Kabuki, Takarazuka, and The Rose of Versailles

Cross-dressing has a long and colorful history in Japanese drama. The all-male kabuki theater and the all-female Takarazuka Revue queer our views of the gender binary by demonstrating not only how gender can be and is performed but also how difficult it is to limit ourselves to only two genders. One of the most popular figures in contemporary Japanese theater, Oscar François de Jarjayes of Ikeda Riyoko’s manga The Rose of Versailles, is especially interesting and thought-provoking in her disruption of tropes surrounding women who cross-dressing as men. While many gender-focused narratives are centered around coming-of-age and coming-out stories, Oscar is an adult who is ultimately satisfied with her identity; she generally doesn’t question who she is but rather what she can do to fulfill her potential.

Ouran High School Host Club

Part Three
Cross-Dressing and Humor(?)

While a woman can gain access to spaces of power and privilege by donning the clothing of a man, a man cross-dressing as a woman has little to gain but everything to lose. At least, that seems to be how many comedic anime and manga suggest that we view cross-dressing men. Instead of being empowered, these characters are instead acutely uncomfortable, and we find their discomfort amusing because the story presents them as powerful men temporarily forced into a position of weakness by means of the guise of femininity.

Meanwhile, the world of Ouran High School Host Club is by and large respectful of gender expression as well as lacking in anxiety about gender fluidity. Hatori Bisco subverts heteronormative shōjo tropes through the enjoyable antics of Haruhi and her friends, and the humor generated by Haruhi’s lack of concern about stereotypical gender roles pokes fun at the artificiality of the gender binary.

Le Chevalier D'Eon

Part Four
Gender Trouble and Phantom Femininities

Setting aside shōnen humor and moé sex appeal, there are two main categories of habitual male-to-female cross-dressing in anime and manga: boys who don’t want to cross-dress but are forced to and then get used to it, and men who cross-dress in order to preserve the memory of a woman who has vanished from their lives. What we see in many anime and manga series involving male-to-female cross-dressing is an insinuation that certain feminine feelings can only be expressed through female bodies, and that men can never truly become feminine as long as they maintain male bodies. In other words, such phantom femininities suggest that gender is not fluid and that it takes more than clothes for a man to escape his physically mandated masculinity.

Wandering Son

Part Five
Wandering Son: What You Can’t See

Wandering Son serves as a point of constrast in our series on cross-dressing. First, by presenting both acts of cross-dressing and transgender identities, Shimura Takako allows the reader to differentiate between social delight in situational cross-dressing for humor and the very real fear of transgressing gender norms via a more permanent movement along the gender identity spectrum. Second, the series covers issues of transmisogyny and masculine privilege deftly and realistically. While many cross-dressing characters in anime and manga are ensconced in the realm of comedy or speculative fiction, Wandering Son‘s setting in a naturalistic portrayal of contemporary Japan allows the author to critique social norms directly instead of through metaphor.

Ōoku

Part Six
Ōoku: Cross-Dressing in a Matriarchy

Ōoku‘s narratives about cross-dressing and gender are able to go beyond those of many other works of speculative fiction because of the breadth and depth of the work, which shows over a century of social change with a large and diverse cast of characters. Yoshinaga Fumi illustrates the constructedness of the gender binary by showing us how another version of the binary must be rebuilt piece by piece in a world in which women wield political and sexual power.

The Rose of Versailles

Part Seven
The Endless Potential of Gender Performance

Gender and sexuality are incredibly complex, fluid, and personal. The possibilities are endless, and they don’t fit neatly into predefined boxes. While this can be scary and overwhelming to think about, it’s also thrilling and wonderful. Many anime and manga explore the excitement of this endless potential of gender performance, and there are plenty of scholarly resources to draw on for anyone who would like to dig deeper into cross-dressing and nonbinary gender.

*****

If you’re looking for more of Leah’s writing, check out her cooking and food culture blog I’ll Make It Myself!, and feel free to follow her on Twitter as well. Leah is too awesome to be confined to her own blogs, and she has been a guest blogger on Have You Nerd? and Comparative Geeks. She also updates The Lobster Dance page on Facebook regularly with links to her own work and to other fantastic essays from all over the internet. Leah is easily a top contender for the title of Most Interesting Person on the Internet – go check her out!

Hatarake Kentauros

Kathryn7 Comments

Title: はたらけ、ケンタウロス！(Hatarake, kentaurosu!)
Artist: est em (えすとえむ)
Year Published: 2011
Publisher: Libre Shuppan
Pages: 160

Hatarake Kentauros is a one-shot manga by the BL author est em that contains eight stories and a kaki-oroshi (a short afterward section created especially for the tankōbon publication). The subjects of these stories are centaurs trying to make a living in contemporary Japan. The first four stories are about a salaryman centaur named Kentarō, the challenges he faces at work and while commuting, and his relationship with his human co-worker. The fifth story is about a centaur who wants to apprentice at a soba shop but can’t fit into the kitchen and is assigned delivery work instead. The sixth story is about a centaur craftsman who makes shoes even though he can never wear them, and the seventh story is about a centaur model who becomes depressed because his lower half is always replaced with human legs in Photoshop. The eighth story is about a young centaur graduate who is nervous about moving to Tokyo and beginning work at his first job.

The world created by est em in Hatarake Kentauros is largely homosocial; and, although nothing is ever expressly stated, the reader is encouraged to think of the male protagonists of the stories as gay. The salaryman Kentarō misses a day of work due to a cold and is visited by his male coworker, who prepares noodles while making observations on Kentarō’s kitchen, which was built to accommodate a centaur. The apprentice soba chef ends up bonding with an attractive apprentice ramen chef, and the two decide to open a portable street stall together. The centaur shoemaker rescues the son of his employer from an arranged marriage, and the two grow old together while operating their own business in a different city. The bonds between these male characters are gentle and subtle but no less powerful for not including overtly romantic or sexual elements.

What I like about the stories in Hatarake Kentauros is that they avoid a facile allegorical application of social justice by disallowing a one-on-one correspondence between “centaur” and “gay.” Although they’re just as “human” as anyone else, the centaurs created by est em are most definitely “other.” They’re too large to fit into crowded elevators. There are special lanes for them on the streets because they can’t ride in cars. They need to eat large quantities of food, and they have separate toilets. Centaurs aren’t just different from humans in terms of the shapes and sizes of their bodies; they also live for hundreds of years and take almost fifty years to mature into adults. It is therefore difficult to map categories of real-world otherness, such as gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality, onto est em’s centaurs. The reader is thus able to understand the characters in Hatarake Kentauros not just as platonic symbols but also as individuals.

At its core, Hatarake Kentauros is about the stories of individuals. It’s not about social justice or about men in love with other men. est em’s Equus (released at the same time as Hatarake Kentauros), on the other hand, is much more raw. In my opinion, it’s also more artistic. Some of the book’s stories have almost no dialog, and the impressionistic yet forceful lines with which the centaurs of Equus are drawn emphasize their muscularity and masculinity. These centaurs are sexy – especially when they’re having sex with each other. The stories of Equus do not limit themselves to contemporary Japan but look back to other times and places in which centaurs lived freely in the wilderness apart from human habitation or were inherited from father to son like slaves. Equus makes a clear connection between otherness, sexiness, sexualization, and discrimination, and it’s not afraid to hit the reader where it hurts.

I could write much more about Equus and Hatarake Kentauros, but, to make a long story short, these two manga are brilliant, genius-level works. If you can read Japanese – and even if you can’t read Japanese – it’s absolutely worth the ridiculous shipping rates of Amazon.co.jp to import these two books from Japan.

ETA: Hatarake Kentauros will also be available via JManga starting on Thursday, April 19.

Sailor Moon and Femininity

Kathryn11 Comments

It would be many years before I would understand that femininity, the practice of femininity, and the fetishization of femininity degrades all women. That femininity is not a “choice” when the alternative is derision, ridicule, workplace sanctions, or ostracization. That femininity is a set of degrading behaviors that communicates one’s level of commitment to male authority and women’s oppression. That femininity is coerced appeasement, regardless of how successfully it is now marketed to young women as feminism.

So says Jill Twisty at her blog I Blame the Patriarchy.

I agree with her. So much has been written on this topic that I don’t need to be convinced that such a statement is true.

But… What if there were no men?

Or what if men existed, but simply weren’t that important? What if we didn’t live in a patriarchy? What if we didn’t live in a world where men are assumed to be the standard normative subjects and the ultimate bearers of political, legal, social, economic, religious, and sexual power? What if “femininity” didn’t need to be defined according to its deviations from “masculinity” (which connotes maturity, power, authority, and rationality), and what if “femininity” weren’t something to be performed for a presumed audience of men (and women who wield a male gaze)? Would femininity still be perceived as a submission to oppressive phallocentric interests?

These questions form the core of why the manga Sailor Moon is so fascinating to me. A story about women, created by a woman, edited by a woman, written for a popular female audience, and enthusiastically embraced by an adult female fandom, Sailor Moon is an example of a homosocial female space in which women can talk about women and femininity without having to worry about what men are thinking.

Because the early volumes of the series are about young girls – and beautiful young girls (bishōjo) at that – their reception has not always been feminist-positive, however. For example, in his monograph Beautiful Fighting Girl, psychologist and cultural theorist Saitō Tamaki discusses the anime version of Sailor Moon as a prime example of why the “beautiful girl” trope appeals so much to men. In America, cinema scholar Susan Napier and anthropologist Anne Allison both take issue with the series, finding it a stale mash-up of tropes characteristic of the mahō shōjo (magical girl) genre as it has existed since the mid-seventies. Both scholars also view the anime series in particular as catering to a male audience eager for sexual titillation. Napier, for instance, finds the Sailor Scouts “lacking in psychological depth,” while Allison finds it troubling that the “girl heroes tend to strip down in the course of empowerment, becoming more, rather than less, identified by their flesh,” a trademark visual feature of Sailor Moon that “feeds and is fed by a general trend in Japan toward the infantilization of sex objects.”

Unfortunately, these evaluations do not take into account the female fans of the series, who seem to be less interested in the sexual aspects of the short-skirted female warriors and more eager to identify with the empowered femininity they represent. These fans are also willing to tolerate the weak characterization in the opening volumes of the series in order to enjoy the opportunities presented later in the story for the female heroes to develop their individual talents, personalities, and bonds with each other. In Sailor Moon, the female heroes begin as girls, but they gradually mature into capable and competent young women who must shoulder great responsibility and make difficult choices, usually without the support or interference of men.

To celebrate the recent North American release of a new translation of the Sailor Moon manga, an eighteen-year-old blogger on LiveJournal wrote of the series that:

[Sailor Moon] is a world where femininity is not something to be ashamed of, it’s the source of POWER. The girls don’t use their pretty clothes and jewels and compacts as playthings to impress men – these things are all weapons against evil, and powerful ones. They declare themSELVES pretty, needing approval from no one. Our hero possesses all the typical “chick” attributes – emotional, tearful, forgiving, loving, nurturing – and she uses these attributes to triumph and kick ass. She burns monsters alive with the purity of her love, sends out supersonic waves that shake the villains down when she bursts into tears, and her friendship and forgiveness is the most effective superpower one could ask for. The “girly” emotions and affectations are not something to be ashamed of or suppressed, but the source of the power these girls wield. They don’t have to imitate guy heroes at all or act “masculine” to be taken seriously – girliness is just as powerful.

Although someone like Saitō might see Sailor Moon as nothing more than a smorgasbord of tropes that can be endlessly combined and recombined to suit any male fetish, and although prominent critics such as Napier and Allison echo his reading, female readers find something entirely different in the series: they see a group of young women who fight not for the approval of a father or a boyfriend (or a male reader), but rather to achieve their own goals and ambitions. Moreover, they learn that being female isn’t something to be ashamed of; and, according to later developments in the series, neither is homosexuality or a transgendered identity.

Far from regurgitating the tropes of the magical girl genre, Sailor Moon creator Takeuchi Naoko overturned the conventions of both shōjo romance for girls and bishōjo fantasy for boys. Furthermore, the female fans of Sailor Moon aren’t invested in the series merely in order to lose themselves in fantasy (and spin-off merchandise), but rather because they find that the series empowers them to combat real-world problems directly related to the assumption that young women and the femininity associated with them exist only to please men. The fantasy created by Sailor Moon is not an escape from the gendered conventions and restrictions of reality, but rather a safe space in which these aspects of reality can be tested and challenged. Perhaps this is why Sailor Moon has appealed to so many women outside of its target demographic, and perhaps this is why it has appealed to so many boys and men as well.

If you haven’t read Sailor Moon, the Kodansha Comics re-release is beautifully published and contains a wealth of translation and cultural notes that help make sense of the story and characters. The first two or three volumes of the series can come off as a bit childish; but, as the characters grow and mature, the story does as well. If you’re a girl or a guy, or if you’re a serious manga reader or don’t read many manga at all, Sailor Moon is worth reading simply for the experience of entering a world in which femininity is indeed ” is not something to be ashamed of” but instead “the source of POWER.” The manga is also an excellent introduction to an alternative realm of discourse (common in Japanese manga and spreading to Western comics – partially due to the influence of Sailor Moon) in which female writers and artists can tell their own stories without really worrying about how men are reading and looking at them.

If you’re intrigued, check out the Sailor Moon Manga Moveable Feast hosted by Sean Gaffney’s at A Case Suitable for Treatment over on Manga Bookshelf.

Feminism and Final Fantasy (Part Five)

Kathryn13 Comments

If we can assume that the fantasy trope of mystical female other in bondage gear is popular among men, perhaps we can likewise assume that the fantasy trope often referred to as Draco in Leather Pants is popular among women. According to this trope, a man with a complicated past, equally complicated motivations, and a markedly antisocial streak has a heart of gold somewhere deep inside – especially if he’s handsome. The character Balthier from Final Fantasy XII meets all of these conditions; and, judging from the amount of fan fiction and fan art that has been created in his honor, female fans of the game love him.

It is therefore not unreasonable to argue that Balthier’s design and characterization both contain just as many fetish elements as Fran’s. After all, the male characters in the Final Fantasy series are subject to the same narrative tropes as the female characters. If Rydia is wedged into the role of spell caster by virtue of her gender, then Cecil is similarly cast into the role of the dark/white knight by virtue of his own gender. Moreover, if Rydia is sexually attractive to men, Cecil is perhaps even more attractive according to non-heteronormative female standards of male beauty (which include delicate features and long, willowy limbs). This is fantasy, and we want our characters to be attractive, and interesting, and suitably epic. There is no rule, after all, that says fantasy has to be any less subject to the confines of narrative tropes than, say, interwar French existentialist fiction.

If everyone in the Final Fantasy games is fetishized, and if everyone is subject to gendered tropes, however, can the series really be called “feminist”? Through my discussion of Rydia, Aeris, and Fran, I have attempted to prove that each successive game in the Final Fantasy series has become less sexist and phallocentric. I posited at the beginning of this essay that a “feminist” work contains “strong” (by which I mean “multi-dimensional” and “featured prominently”) female characters who are not villainized. By this standard of judgment, the games in the Final Fantasy series are indeed feminist works. Even though the player-protagonist is often male, this character is usually subordinate to the narrative importance of a central female character. Even though the story of this female character is seen through the eyes of a male character, it is her story that is being told, and the male player-protagonist is just along for the ride. While the player controls the gameplay, the actions of the female protagonist advance the plot and open more of the game’s world.

Although we could once safely assume that the gamer behind the player-protagonist was male, this is no longer the case; he is now just as likely to be controlled by a woman. The player-protagonist may have his own story, but he is also the eyes through which the player looks and the hands and feet by which the player explores and manipulates the world. Such a direct player identification thus makes his identity somewhat less than stable, along with his gender and sexual orientation. The player-protagonist is arguably little more than a cipher in many situations (such as Tidus in Final Fantasy X, who is never addressed or referred to by name, lest the player’s identification with him be impeded), and the true spotlight shines on the female protagonists of the series, such as Rinoa, Garnet, Yuna, and Ashe.

Perhaps, because these female characters were created by development teams consisting primarily of men, they can never be considered “pure” feminist role models, but there is another side to the equation – the female (and male!) fans of the series who have been inspired by these characters and have interpreted them in ways that may differ wildly from the original intentions of their creators. As I have argued elsewhere, a text does not end with the “Game Over” screen but rather spins into ever wider and deeper perversions in the personal fantasies of the player. These personal fantasies can then be reinforced and expanded upon when introduced into larger communities of gamers. Player reception is engaged in a feedback loop with Square-Enix, which has used the enormous revenue it has earned from the Final Fantasy franchise in order to develop games that will better appeal to its fans, both new and old. The strong female characters of the series have resulted in a large and vocal female following, which has in turn resulted in Final Fantasy XIII, a title that has been celebrated as a truly feminist video game. As gaming technology becomes more sophisticated, and as the narrative mechanisms of role playing games become more innovative and complex, I am looking forward to meeting the female characters in the future of Final Fantasy.

I cannot claim to have the final word on Final Fantasy, or on the topic of video games, role playing, and gender. Allow me to therefore cite my sources and inspirations, both online and in print.

The absolute best pieces of writing on Final Fantasy that I have ever had the pleasure of reading are collected under the title The Rise and Fall of Final Fantasy. Each of these essays is quite long, but each is beautifully written and provides all of the background information I have omitted, which is presented in a humorous and highly intelligent tone. The online video game “magazine” The Escapist recently posted a video essay called True Female Characters, which is a bit superficial in terms of analysis but makes some good points and provides several examples of female characters in video games who are prime examples of sexist stereotypes. A short, journalistic article called Getting the Girl offers an interesting counterpoint to this discussion in the light it sheds on female game developers and the market pressures they face when designing female characters. The website The Mary Sue has a number of interesting pieces on women and geek culture, including statistics relating to female gamers.

If you’re interested in other aspects of the Final Fantasy series as viewed from a “scholarly” analytical perspective, there is an essay in Mechademia 4: War/Time titled “Imagined History, Fading Memory: Mastering Narrative in Final Fantasy X.” This essay is somewhat crippled by the word count imposed by the journal, but it contains an interesting argument relating to how the narrative structure of the game may relate to Japan’s experience of modernity. There are also several interesting and tangentially related articles in an academic journal called Games and Culture, including an essay on ethics in Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy VII, as well as an interesting piece on fantasy races in MMO-RPGs.

On a broader level, Sharalyn Orbaugh’s “Busty Battlin’ Babes: The Evolution of the Shōjo in 1990s Visual Culture” (found in the collection Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field) is an excellent discussion of cross-gender character identification in a Japanese context. All four chapters of Tania Modleski’s short but brilliant Loving with a Vengeance discuss the romance tropes surrounding male characters and might be useful for a sustained inquiry into why a character like Balthier (or Sephiroth) is so popular with female fans. Finally, while I was writing this essay, I was addicted to Eleanor Byrne and Martin McQuillan’s Deconstructing Disney, which opens by making a strong case for why we should continue to analyze popular culture and then goes on to provide an fantastic model of how to do so.

All of the games and characters I have discussed, as well as (almost) all of the images I have borrowed, belong to Square-Enix. Square-Enix, I love you. Please don’t sue me.

Part One
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Part Three
Part Four

Feminism and Final Fantasy (Part Four)

Kathryn3 Comments

When one looks at Fran from Final Fantasy XII, the first thing that jumps to mind is most likely bunny girl or perhaps fetish character. Fran is tall, beautiful, and wearing very little clothing. The clothing that she is wearing is black leather bondage gear. She is marked as exotic not only by her rabbit ears but also by her Icelandic accent and the coffee color of her skin. If there were ever a character who seems designed solely for heterosexual male viewing pleasure, Fran would appear to be that character. Putting issues of costuming aside, however, I don’t think Final Fantasy XII’s characterization of Fran is in any way sexist.

Before I explain why her characterization isn’t sexist, let me first address the issue of why I don’t think her characterization is racist. Although it’s very easy to jump to the facile conclusion that Fran is just another example of a hyper-sexualized black woman, I would argue that this is not in fact the case. The most significant counter-argument against this claim is that Fran is not black, at least not in the sense that being “black” in America carries with it a great deal of history and cultural significance. In Ivalice, the fantasy world that Fran inhabits, there are many races of people with whom the player has extensive contact, and none of these races is distinguished by racial stereotypes (as, for example, Vulcans and Klingons are in the Star Trek universe).

To give an example, the Bangaa are a type of bipedal lizard-like people with floppy puppy-dog ears. Some of them are bounty hunters, and some of them are merchants or traders, and some of them are mechanics. Some of them are vicious and cruel, and some of them are pleasant and kind. Some of them are intelligent, and some of them are stupid. Some of them have red skin, and some have green skin, and some have blue skin, and some have brownish-yellow skin. Because the player comes into contact wide such a wide variety of Bangaa, and because the game itself does not stereotype them in any way, it’s almost impossible to create an overgeneralizing racial profile.

Fran’s race, the Viera, are the same. Although they all have rabbit ears, different individuals have different color hair, eyes, skin, and ear-fur. While some dress in skimpy clothing, others do not. While some live in the forest like mystical rabbit-healer-elf-ninjas, others do not. While some are wise and bound to nature, others live in urban areas and engage in commerce and trifling romantic affairs. The fantasy world of Invalice is a pan-cultural diaspora in the truest sense of the word, and one of the primary themes of the game is that the twin concepts of “homeland” and “people” are nothing if not extremely problematic.

While Fran may be exotic, then, I don’t feel that the game’s depiction of her is particularly racist. Nor do I feel that it is particularly sexist. As I mentioned earlier, the Viera are a diverse race of people. Even though the race seems to have originated in a heavily wooded area of Ivalice and has developed ears to hear the semi-magical “voice of the forest,” many Viera do not live in the woods and consider their ears as nothing more than mere decoration. In the case of the Viera in general, this makes a sexist equation between woman and nature, or woman and mysticism, or woman and emotion, difficult. In the specific case of Fran, who is an engineer and pilot, such an equation is utterly non-applicable. Moreover, even though the player may fetishize Fran, Final Fantasy XII does not. Not only is Fran significantly older and more mature than any of the other playable characters, but she is the object of no one’s sexual attraction, and even her relationship with her male partner Balthier is characterized as friendly yet professional.

The game makes it hard to draw sexist conclusions based on any of its female characters either in terms of plot or gameplay. Ashe, the character around whom the game’s plot revolves, is a princess, but she is less concerned with love than she is with political strategy, international alliances, and the consequences of the use of weapons of mass destruction. Ashe comes pre-equipped with a sword; but, if the player decides to make her a spell-caster instead of a melee fighter, there are no consequences. Likewise, although Fran comes pre-equipped with a bow, the player can choose to make her a two-handed weapon-wielding tank of a melee fighter.

As in many earlier games in the Final Fantasy series (including Final Fantasy V, Final Fantasy VI, Final Fantasy VII, and Final Fantasy VIII), gender bears absolutely no relevance to fighting ability in Final Fantasy XII. The player builds each player’s abilities though a device called the “license grid,” which is the same for all playable characters, regardless of gender. Furthermore, a character’s base statistics (for values like attack power and physical defense) are dependent on his or her equipment, the selection of which is also non-specific to gender. Men can be healers dependent on magic, and women can wield battle axes larger than they are.

In other words, there is nothing about Fran’s character or fighting capacity that is innate to her race or gender, save her revealing costume. The clothing of the game’s other two female characters, Ashe and Penelo, is similarly racy, but so too is the clothing of the game’s three male characters. This point brings me to an important twist in my argument about the fetishization and sexism inherent in the female characters of Final Fantasy – are male characters not fetishized and subject to sexism in exactly the same way?

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Part Five

Feminism and Final Fantasy (Part Three)

Kathryn9 Comments

It can be argued that all of the characters in Final Fantasy VII are amalgamations of popular character tropes. One of the most important and popular characters from the game, Aeris, comes dangerously close to many of the various tropes identified with a Mary Sue. For example, the short paragraph of text in the game’s manual describes her as “mysteriously beautiful,” she has an exotic name, she has an usual and dramatic back story, she’s exceptionally talented in a wide variety of areas and possesses rare powers, she is the last of her race, all of game’s characters (even the markedly antisocial ones) adore her, she is brave, cheerful, and incorruptible, she is too pure for this earth and sacrifices herself to save everyone, and her only flaws, innocence and naivety, are far from damning. I am not trying to suggest that Aeris in fact is a Mary Sue character, or even that Mary Sue characters are necessarily a bad thing. What I am trying to suggest is that the character receives a very sympathetic portrayal and occasionally seems to good to be true.

No matter how close Aeris comes to a Mary Sue, she can never be a true Sue, as she is neither a writer nor a reader stand-in. That particular role belongs to Cloud, a confused and lonely young man who just happens to have a bigger sword than anyone else. It’s difficult not to sympathize with Cloud as he wins countless battles, runs up endless flights of stairs, snowboards, rides a huge motorcycle, cross-dresses, discovers his forgotten past, wins his revenge from the psychopath who torched his hometown, and is praised and admired by almost everyone in the game’s cast. At his core, though, Cloud is emotionally vulnerable and just needs someone to comfort and understand him.

That someone, for the first half of the game, is Aeris. Unless the player is armed with a cheat sheet of responses to in-game dialog, Final Fantasy VII sets Aeris up to be Cloud’s love interest. Aeris’s many attractive qualities serve to make her mid-game death more dramatically effective, of course, but they also serve to make her a more desirable partner for the player-protagonist. In this sense, then, she is what I might call a male-generated Mary Sue. She is not everything that the player wants to be, but everything that the player wants to be with. In other words, she is a perfect romantic partner, someone who is strong and kind and beautiful but still unconditionally attracted to the dorky male hero. Is the strength of such a female character truly empowering when it only serves to bolster the ego and libido of the player-protagonist?

Actually, quite a few female gamers have declared that yes, it is empowering. Over-rated though it may or may not be, Final Fantasy VII brought an extraordinary number of new players to the franchise with the richness and depth of its storytelling, world building, and gameplay. Many of these new players were female. As I mentioned earlier, although we can now say that it’s misleading to think of the majority of video game players as male, that stereotype wasn’t so far from the truth in 1997, the year that Final Fantasy VII was released during the early years of the Playstation gaming console. Female players were attracted to the game both by the burgeoning mainstream popularity of gaming and by the presence of female characters who were more than guns and boobs on a remote-controlled stick. Many female gamers in my generation grew up with Aeris and Tifa, and we saw these characters as much more than Cloud’s love interests – we saw them as real people, with real personalities. We also saw them as role models in a way that would have been difficult with the extremely limited dialog of earlier characters like Rydia.

Aeris may have been too good to be true, but she had thousands of lines of dialog that at least made her seem real to the player. Moreover, her dialog was not merely ego-reinforcement for the player-protagonist. Aeris kept secrets, and she had her own set of motivations that never became entirely clear until after her death. The character knew things that she did not share with the player-protagonist, and she expressed emotions that were not directly related to the player-protagonist or to the development of the game’s story. In other words, she had interiority.

Final Fantasy VII also passes the Bechdel Test in that Aeris is friends with Tifa, and the pair on multiple occasions talks about things other than Cloud. Tifa is herself an interesting character. Although her character design is all legs and chest, and although her fighting style seems tailor-made to show off her tight shirt and short shirt (witness her victory pose at the end of every successful battle), she has much more dialog than Aeris, and she is arguably a much darker character.

After the Shinra power company destroys her village and covers up the operation, she moves to the city of the company’s global headquarters, where she opens a bar that will serve as a base for a terrorist resistance movement. Throughout the game she is conscious of the human cost of terrorist activity, as well as the consequences of shutting down the world’s major source of electrical power. She must also navigate the guilt she feels at having bullied Cloud as a child, the confusion she feels regarding his amnesia surrounding their shared past, and the jealousy that she begins to feel toward Aeris. Yes, Tifa’s huge boobs are on constant display, and yes, the camera looks up her skirt when Cloud saves her from falling at the end of the game, but a new generation of female players were able to see past this and sympathize with Tifa as a complex character. Although there are countless fan works depicting the seduction and rape of both Tifa and Aeris, there are arguably many more that explore the aspirations and anxieties of the characters outside of sexual or romantic relationships.

Female players therefore brought with them a female gaze. This gaze not only transformed female characters from objects to subjects, but it also turned an objectifying lens on the male characters. These new female fans took advantage of the fledgling world wide web to form communities with other fans with whom they could discuss topics such as whether Cloud’s nemesis Sephiroth was even more attractive than Cloud. The international character of the internet also exposed Western fans to the work (and particularly the artwork) of Japanese fans, and soon Cloud was no longer in a romantic relationship with Aeris or Tifa but rather intimately involved with the evil military leader Sephiroth. For a generation of female fans too young for Star Trek, then, Final Fantasy VII was a gateway into alternative readings of popular texts. To give it due credit, the game has a story and cast of characters deep enough to actively encourage the female gaze that helped to make the game so popular. Although the vagaries of corporate marketing decisions are beyond me, I can only assume that Square quickly connected the unprecedented success of Final Fantasy VII to its popularity with gamers of both genders, since each successive game in the franchise has featured stronger and more developed female characters – as well as a colorful sprinkling of homoerotic tension between male characters.

Part One
Part Two
Part Four
Part Five