Abstract
This chapter offers an overview of the main themes discussed in the book. It introduces the concept of the female gaze as a method of interpreting the female characters and the gendered themes of a text, as well as the book’s primary argument, which is that an awareness of an active female gaze can broaden the range of ways in which we understand contemporary Japanese popular culture and its influence on transnational fan communities. The chapter begins with an essay on how the author first encountered manga and why the concept of the female gaze is so important to the millennial generation born in the 1980s and 1990s, when anime and manga began to develop a mainstream audience in North America.
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Notes
- 1.
Sarah Lyall, “Fan power takes on a new meaning.” (New York Times, October 14, 2004), https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/14/arts/fan-power-takes-on-new-meaning.html
- 2.
- 3.
Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).
- 4.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
- 5.
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen Vol. 16, No. 3 (1975): 9.
- 6.
Masami Toku, Shojo Manga! Girl Power! Girls’ Comics from Japan (Chico, California: Flume Press at California State University, 2005), 66.
- 7.
Because of its publication venue, To Terra is technically classified as shōnen manga. Its two leads are both male, and the story is a space opera with dramatic and exciting action sequences. Nevertheless, the manga has strong shōjo stylizations, both visually and thematically.
References
Felski, Rita. 1989. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Fetterly, Judith. 1978. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Lyall, Sarah. 2004. Fan Power Takes on a New Meaning. New York Times, October 14. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/14/arts/fan-power-takes-on-new-meaning.html
Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16 (3): 6–18.
Toku, Masami. 2005. Shojo Manga! Girl Power! Girls’ Comics from Japan. Chico: Flume Press at California State University.
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Hemmann, K. (2020). Introduction: Interrogating the Text from the Wrong Perspective. In: Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze. East Asian Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18095-9_1
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