Abstract
This chapter focuses on the work of CLAMP, a prolific four-woman team of writers and artists. Its discussion focuses on three of their most popular titles: Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, xxxHolic, and Chobits. These three manga belong to the demographic genres of shōnen (for boys) and seinen (for men), publishing categories designed to target and attract a male-gendered audience. CLAMP employs a female gaze to the conventions of these genres to subvert gendered character tropes, providing a viable means of female empowerment while queering the gendered specificity of manga genres in the 2000s. This chapter thereby offers an alternative reading of common narrative patterns within contemporary Japanese popular culture by demonstrating the agency of female creators and female readers.
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Notes
- 1.
Examples of such manga would be the titles serialized in Kodansha’s Shūkan Morning magazine and Shōgakukan’s Gekkan IKKI magazine, although such series can be considered to be categorized as seinen manga (as stated on their Japanese Wikipedia pages). Another large body of manga that does not fall into the four main demographic genres is children’s (kodomo) manga, which includes titles such as the perennially popular Doraemon. Frederick Schodt’s Dreamland Japan Writings on Modern Manga (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2007) has more information on manga magazines, demographic genres, and publishing categories.
- 2.
One of the most famous of these proto-shōjo manga is Tezuka Osamu’s Ribon no kishi (Princess Knight), which was originally serialized in Kodansha’s Shōjo Club magazine between 1953 and 1956.
- 3.
Such young men are stylized as shōjo-like through artistic conventions common to the visual characterization of shōjo characters, such as large eyes, ornately styled hair, and a more “girlish” face-to-body ratio. Watanuki, the male protagonist of xxxHolic, is a contemporary incarnation of such a character.
- 4.
Shiokawa, “Cute But Deadly,” 101.
- 5.
Frenchy Lunning unpacks the gendered implication of this clothing style in her essay “Under the Ruffles: Shōjo and the Morphology of Power,” in Mechademia: Second Arc 6: User Enhanced (2011): 3–19. She suggests that the emphasis on purity and vulnerability characterizes such outfits as feminine.
- 6.
This literary construct, known as jun ai (pure love), saw a revival with the publication of Katayama Kyōichi’s 2001 novel Sekai no Chūshin de, Ai o Sakebu (translated into English as Socrates in Love).
- 7.
Susan Napier, Anime, 150.
- 8.
Napier, “Matter out of Place: Carnival, Containment, and Cultural Recovery in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away.” Journal of Japanese Studies 32, no.2 (2006): 297.
- 9.
The shōjo is a different character type than the bishōjo discussed in the previous chapter, although there is significant overlap. In terms of visual characterization, a shōjo is more childlike, while a bishōjo is more overtly sexualized.
- 10.
Napier, Anime, 149.
- 11.
Sharalyn Orbaugh, “Busty Battlin’ Babes: The Evolution of the Shōjo in 1990s Visual Culture,” in Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field, ed. Joshua S. Mostow, Norman Bryson, and Maribeth Graybill (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), 206.
- 12.
Ibid., 235.
- 13.
Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 11.
- 14.
Lamarre, The Anime Machine, 73.
- 15.
Lamarre uses the character Sheeta from Castle in the Sky to demonstrate how the girl, who has the ability to float weightlessly through the air, provides a juxtaposition against the awkward and bulky airships and war planes piloted by the film’s male characters.
- 16.
Lamarre, The Anime Machine, 84.
- 17.
Lamarre, The Anime Machine, 231.
- 18.
Cardcaptor Sakura was adapted into an anime series (1998–2000), two feature-length films (1999 and 2000), and ten video games (released between 1999 and 2004). Along with Sailor Moon, Sakura was one of the most recognizable magical shōjo characters of the 1990s.
- 19.
Innocence and “girlishness” are not restricted to female characters in the broader genre of shōjo manga. One of the defining works of the genre, Hagio Moto’s Tōma no shinzō (The Heart of Thomas, 1974–1975), is centered around two young male characters, Thomas and Eric, whose visual and narrative characterization as shōjo seems almost stereotypical to contemporary readers, partially because Hagio’s work was so influential to other shōjo artists.
- 20.
The pseudo-romance between Watanuki and Dōmeki, a relationship that is far from unusual in the works of CLAMP, is widely discussed and accepted by Japanese fans of the series. Japanese fans have drawn countless dōjinshi fan manga that imagine this relationship as open and explicit. This aspect of CLAMP’s manga will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter.
- 21.
Shiokawa, “Cute but Deadly,” 119.
- 22.
Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 51.
- 23.
Christine Marran, Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xxiv.
- 24.
Sheldon Cashdan, The Witch Must Die: How Fairy Tales Shape Our Lives (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 17.
- 25.
Ibid., 30.
- 26.
Jane Caputi, Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 328.
- 27.
The magazine’s audience of boys is indicated by its emphasis on action and its furigana reading guide for all of the Chinese characters in the text.
- 28.
Lamarre, The Anime Machine, 289.
- 29.
Casey Brienza, “Did Manga Conquer America?: Implications for the Cultural Policy of ‘Cool Japan,’” International Journal of Cultural Policy 20, no.4 (2014): 383.
- 30.
Saitō, Beautiful Fighting Girl, 111.
- 31.
Napier, Anime, 171, 251.
- 32.
William LaFleur, Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 33.
- 33.
Lamarre, The Anime Machine, 216.
- 34.
Ibid., 217.
- 35.
Ibid., 219.
- 36.
Such narratives include Den’eishōjo (1992), Bannō bunka nekomusume (1998), Hando meido Mei (2000), and Mahoromachikku (2001–2003). Many of these animated series are based on manga, although a significant number are based on bishōjo games in which the player’s objective is to court one or more of the attractive young women who surround the male protagonist.
- 37.
Lamarre, The Anime Machine, 298.
- 38.
See Donna Jeanne Harraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991) and Livia Monnet’s “Invasion of the Woman Snatchers: The Problem of A-Life and the Uncanny in Final Fantasy: The Spirits within.” In Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime, ed. Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), which explore the possibilities of a postgendered world in both fiction and reality. In “Sex and the Single Cyborg,” Sharalyn Orbaugh demonstrates how female cyborg bodies in Japanese animation are positioned to serve the interests of male characters and male viewers, this adding a critical feministic perspective on the tendency of male anime directors to objectify female characters in order to make philosophical statements concerning technology. See Sharalyn Orbaugh. “Sex and the Single Cyborg: Japanese Popular Culture Experiments in Subjectivity,” Science Fiction Studies Vol. 29, No. 3 (2002), pp. 436–452.
- 39.
Myra Seaman, “Becoming More (than) Human: Affective Posthumanisms, Past and Future.” JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 37, no.2 (2007): 249.
- 40.
Neil Badmington, “Theorizing Posthumanism,” Cultural Critique 53 (2003): 11.
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Hemmann, K. (2020). The Maiden and the Witch: CLAMP’s Subversion of Female Character Tropes. In: Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze. East Asian Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18095-9_3
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