My Wiscon schedule!

[oyceter]

Or: in which I pick everyone's brains here and shamelessly exploit you to seem a bit smarter on my panels.

Assimilation and the Immigrant Grandchild
Room 629, Sat. 5/28 1:00–2:15 pm

M: Mary Anne Mohanraj. Isabel Guzman-Barron, Nnedi Okorafor, Oyceter, Ibi Aanu Zoboi

What is assimilation in the U.S. for those with immigrant narratives and experiences as part of their family stories? How do we define it? Is it inherently oppressive? Inherently xenophobic? Completely necessary? Are the most challenging aspects of a new group’s culture always excised, or do these new cultural ideas stimulate growth and change in our mainstream society? And in what ways does assimilation happen? Join us to recast yourself not as an American, but as the descendant of immigrants. How did your family assimilate? What privileges and powers did you gain? What did your family, and you, lose in the process?

[I am not even sure I should be on this panel, as I am not sure I fit their definition of "immigrant grandchild." As in, my grandparents immigrated from China to Taiwan, my parents immigrated from Taiwan to the US, and then we all moved to Taiwan, and then I moved to the US. On the other hand, wanted to talk about not knowing my own family history due to language differences and my huge problems with identifying as American even though I have the passport.]

Looking Beyond the Gender Binary in Anime and Manga
Room 634, Sat. 5/28 4:00-5:15 pm

M: Andrea Horbinski. Emily Horner, Johanna Eeva, Oyceter, Andy Smith

Sometimes, the media of manga and anime fail hard at handling gender. But sometimes they are amazing. In some series, people pass back and forth between genders (Sailor Moon), or have gender confusion (After School Nightmare). People also seem to cross-dress a lot more frequently than they do in Western SF/F media. Let's talk about examples in anime and manga that look beyond the gender binary in a meaningful way.

[SO EXCITED! SO EXCITED!

[Brainstorming things to look at: Sailor Moon (Sailor Stars, Sailor Uranus?), After School Nightmare, Hourou Musuko (need to watch), Your and My Secret (did not like v. 1), Phantom Dream, Rose of Versailles (need to read/watch), Utena, Princess Knight (need to read), Nataku in X, Lonesome Eden (? is Taiwan manhua), Kanzeon Bosatsu in Saiyuki, probably a lot more stuff I have not thought about...]

Comments

[laceblade]

SAILOR MOONS: I think that the Wikipedia pages are surprisingly comprehensive, both about Sailor Uranus and the Starlights?
I'm not sure how much detail to leave, I'm assuming you've read/watched SM? I know you posted a while back.

[oyceter]

I've read the entire manga, albeit in Chinese and last year, and I've seen bits and pieces of the manga (mostly the Death Busters arc, though I think I will hunt down the Stars arc since there's some of the changes from the manga!

[kate_nepveu]

I still haven't caught up on _Reload_, but does Kanzeon's gender ever really get meaningful treatment? I don't remember that in _Saiyuki_ or _Gaiden_.

(Fanfic likes to reincarnate the three of them in different genders, but that's another issue. *makes note for my own panel--I definitely want to talk about trans stuff there*)

[oyceter]

I don't really think Kanzeon's gender gets a very meaningful treatment in Saiyuki, although I do find it an interesting take just because zie is a bodhisattva and it plays a bit with how Guanyin as I've seen in Taiwan is frequently portrayed as female and with the Kanzeon/Kanon origin stories.

Heh, Nataku in X probably doesn't get a very meaningful treatment either. Mostly just trying to brainstorm...

Oooo, Angel Sanctuary!

[heavenscalyx]

Latter panel suggestions: Kashi Mashi Girl Meets Girl, Princess Princess.

And, I know this isn't anime/manga, but Persona 4 has a genderqueer character named Naoto.

[oyceter]

Suggestions YAY!

I am going to see if video games, manhwa, manhua, etc. are OT or not, since I think there are some interesting video game examples CB told me about re: player expectations re: gender.

[tatterpunk]

NURIKO! No one has love for Fushigi Yuugi but me, dammit. But I did my last essay on cross-gender performance in Chinese theater, and woah, did that explain a lot about that character.

Maybe Issei of Please Save My Earth?

Isabella from ParaKiss! A minor role, but A) she gets the happy ending! and B) any excuse to drag Yazawa Ai into this.


I wish I could gooooooooooo~~~

[oyceter]

I can't believe I forgot about Isabella!!!!

Oooo, and only have vague memories of Issei, but that's interesting! Yay reincarnation. And ahaha, I have actually never seen/read Fushigi Yuugi, though I vaguely know about Nuriko and should look up more!

[troisroyaumes]

Looking Beyond the Gender Binary in Anime and Manga

!!! Most awesome panel ever!

Now I wish I was going to Wiscon just to listen to this panel. I hope someone takes notes...

[oyceter]

I am so excited and totally squeed when I saw the list of panelists I was going to be with!!!!!

[trouble]

I find it interesting how Utena-dresses-as-a-boy is handled differently in the anime and the movie, especially in contrasting how Anthy presents.

[oyceter]

Yes, very! (OMG my list of things to rewatch/watch/reread/read getting SO LONG)

[glass_icarus]

Oh man, looking at everyone's Wiscon schedules is making me all *____*!!

[meganbmoore]

For the second: Basara (more than one crossdresser, main character was so devoted to to passing that it's eventually revealed that her body essentially convinced itself not to be female or something, and she didn't menstruate for months-I'd have to find the volume for the exact explanation), Claymore, Les Bijoux (long out of print, but the lead's body changes genders, and has a different personality for each form), Kaze Hikaru, and Angel Diary.

[torachan]

Are you sure you're not confusing Basara with Global Garden there? If not, then Global Garden has the same scenario. It's been so long since I've read Basara, I couldn't say, but in Global Garden, the main character is determined to live as her dead brother for her mother's sake, and essentially stops her body from going through puberty with the power of her mind.

[lnhammer]

For Hourou Musuko, I recommend reading the manga over watching -- the anime starts a couple volumes in and does not handle explication of the backstory very well, and is not entirely coherent overall. (Very pretty, though.)

Also useful fodder: The Change! aka The Changelings, being a manga version of a modern novel adaptation of Torikaebaya Monogatari. Yukarism is very early in, but it's another with gender-changing reincarnation. Basara does some interesting things with gender roles, though it takes a while to work through them.

(Samurai High School probably won't help with this topic, though: the cross-dressing is used to reinforce gender stereotypes. Ditto most of the other cross-dressing series I've read.)

---L.

[oyceter]

Thanks for the Hourou Musuko suggestion!

I feel a lot of cross-dressing series end up reinforcing gender stereotypes, but need to think more about that.

[oyceter]

Note to self: Global Garden!

[lnhammer]

I was just coming back to mention that one.

---L.

[jiawen]

Have I mentioned Family Compo (zh: 變奏家族) to you before? I quite like it. Most of the main characters are trans of one sort or another.

There's a lot of poor handling of trans issues in manga and anime, though. (Like pretty much everywhere else.) Is anyone on the panel trans, do you know? Wish I was going to the panel, to see where it goes... Please write a report, okay?

[oyceter]

You have mentioned it! I think I have looked for it in Taiwan but have a really hard time finding things because everything is shelved by publisher ARGH.

I don't know if anyone on the panel is trans or not, though I've asked, and very much agree with you on poor handling of trans issues in manga and anime. Also saw Kanata's comment further down about trans != non-binary, which I hope we talk about as well, and will try to write up a report! (Eh, no promises, just because I am SO BEHIND on everything, but will definitely up it in the priority queue.)

[vito_excalibur]

Oh man. Wish I could be there! Will look forward to the writeups, especially the second one!

[torachan]

I don't know how comfortable I am about Hourou Musuko being on a panel about "looking beyond the gender binary" when it is about binary-identified trans people... (I would love there to be a discussion of trans characters in anime and manga! I just am leery of having it on a panel that seems to be about crossdressing and genderbending.)

[oyceter]

*nods* Thank you for the note! One of the panelists is bringing up trans != non-binary in email, so I hope there will be discussion about that, as well as how crossdressing != genderqueer != genderbending != non-binary and etc.

[dorothean]

I wish I were going to Wiscon. That first panel sounds ... very applicable to me. (My family is like the definition of assimilated.) I think it's so awesome that such things are discussed at a scifi convention. :D

[trinker]

That sort of panel is why I'm sad not to be going to Wiscon.

The fact that I forget that Wiscon is nominally a science fiction con is probably why people like me make some Wiscon-regulars wince.

Ah well.

Perhaps we should have a shadow panel in someone's journal for those of us who are missing out.

[umadoshi]

Yay for Phantom Dream being on the second list! ^_^

[tessercat]

Ouran High School Host Club - very much awesome (mostly, as I recall) when it comes to gender in other than binaries, and the treatment of it.

[oyceter]

I can't believe I forgot Ouran!!!!!

[chomiji]

Seconding Ouran.

Samurai Deeper Kyo has the shaman Akari (in my icon), about whom a friend once said that it was so nice to see a character such as thisone without a dead little sister or some other similar reason for being the way she is.

Fushigi Yuugi Genbu Kaiden has Uruki on the "good" side and Shigi on the "bad" side.

[oyceter]

Oooo thanks!

[alas]

Some more gender-y series, should you need them!

Other cross dressing series: Hana-kimi, and W-Juliet spring to mind as two of the more popular ones from a certain wave of gender-benders, that gender-bent only to spring solidly back into gendered roles D:. Tokyo Crazy Paradise also possibly fits into the genre.

The Day of Revolution by Mikiyo Tsuda - in which a boy finds out he's actually a girl, and all her previous male friends start hitting on her - very slap sticky, and for most part the gender bits make me D:), but I figure you may need some less stellar examples as well? It'd be interesting to contrast this with After School Nightmare's handling of gender confusion. It's also connected (a prequel?) to the longer, coerced cross-dressing focused series Princess Princess.

For some more well known series with gender-crossing characters, there's also Ranma 1/2, Fruits Basket, Gintama, and Nabari no Ou.

[smillaraaq]

Rose of Versailles (need to read/watch)

YES YES YES YES.

Also, if you're going to be touching on Ribon no Kishi, maybe bring up the Takarazuka Revue/Osamu Tezuka connection?

Possibly Kino no Tabi? The protagonist's clothing and language use in the anime and light novels are all deliberately ambiguous, it's not until several stories in that you learn she's abandoned a femme birthname to rename herself after a male character, and one of the movies has a monologue where she debates if she should call herself boku or watashi, ultimately settling on boku.

I don't know if you'd want to go into non-human examples, let alone wandering away from animanga into games to do it, but the PS2/Wii game Ōkami​ might be of some interest. The title character is a kami incarnated in the form of a wolf; apparently the original Japanese version used gender-neutral terms for both the earlier incarnation Shiranui and the later incarnation Amaterasu, and the English localizers were told to keep the character genderless: http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3152879 In the English narration, they did this by avoiding pronouns altogether and either using the characters' names or references like "the god", "the wolf", etc.; since it was harder to work around the pronoun issue in dialogue, they went for alternating genders, having gods and other characters with spiritual insight referring to Ammy in female terms while ordinary humans refer to both Ammy and Shiranui as male. The English-language localizers speculate that the insistence on preserving the gender ambiguity was to distinguish game-Amaterasu from the actual Shinto deity, but I haven't seen anything directly from designer Kamiya Hideki confirming if that was the intent, or if it was a case like Saiyuki's Kanzeon Bosatsu of noting historical shifts in a divinity's gender portrayal (like these references to male versions of Amaterasu: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-japan&month=0407&week=d&msg=pB4O4MQxRxCYt3GhzyZBRA&user=&pw =), or something else entirely. But whatever the reasoning was behind the genderless portrayal, the bit where it gets really interesting, in a sad and frustrating way, is seeing how a lot of English-speaking players react to the ambiguity. Go to any game-focused board and you will find massive long-running, and frequently heated, debates on Ammy's "real" gender. She's female because these characters called her goddess or maiden! No, he's male because girl dogs don't raise their legs to pee! (Actually, some dominant female canids *do* mark that way, but...)She's female because Amaterasu is a sun goddess, duh! No, she's a female deity incarnated in the body of a male wolf! No, Shiranui was a male wolf, but Ammy's body is a statue of Shiranui magically brought to life, so it's genderless!

And so it goes, on and on and on; and the old debates are flaring up in a new form recently thanks to the Nintendo DS sequel Ōkamiden. The localization is slightly less gender-neutral than the original game, although I don't know if that's an accurate reflection of the Japanese original or not; it was produced by a different team than the original game, so they might have had a different attitude than the original director. But there's still some subtle ambiguity -- most characters refer to the new protagonist as male, and Amaterasu as his mother, but the other animal-form kami address Chibi as her "child" rather than "son". And so now folks are arguing over whether or not Chibiterasu is a boy, using the new game's dialogue to support their position that Ammy is female, etc. Even for cute animal characters, it seems, a lot of people are really, really invested in avoiding any sort of ambiguous or non-binary sense of gender...

More non-binary/transgender manga examples

[octopedingenue]

- Sword of Paros!!
- Ai no Shintariki
- Change H goes from horrifying to trainwreck-fascinating to interesting back to horrifying again
- Josei mangaka Yoshihara Yuki's best work is Ningyo Ouji, with the titular mermaid prince who is alternately male/female and the female human who loves hir.

Transmen and non-binary characters are much less common than transwomen. Especially in assumed male-audience stuff like hentai and ecchi shonen/seinen, there's a long history of futanari/newhalf kink, so it's incredibly easy to find "dickgirls" and incredibly difficult to weed through for any stuff that isn't totally creepy/faily. Hit a 4chan "trap"/"reverse trap" thread sometime. Or don't.

Re: More non-binary/transgender manga examples

[octopedingenue]

Oh, and IS is focused on intersex characters, with a sympathetic but Very Special Episode vibe. The art is meh and the story gets much more conventional / less interesting a few volumes in once it settles on one main character, but the first volumes of standalone stories are well worth reading.

[lady_ganesh]

Re: gender binary -- Grell in Black Butler/Kuroshitsuji is both kind of awesome and utterly soaked in Unfortunate Implications. I've only seen the anime, so no idea on the manga.

[smillaraaq]

I'm only partway through both the manga and anime, but what I've seen so far the anime characterization mostly follows the manga version, even though the anime brings the character back on stage much more frequently. The musicals too, while the story canon diverges a little more wildly from either the anime or manga versions of the plotlines covered, Grell's characterization seems fairly consistent (and the actor playing Grell is *amazing*...)

In terms of binary vs. non-binary, though, Grell definitely seems to fit the Extremely Unfortunate pattern you see in so many manga where trans, gay, and cross-dressing/effeminate male characters are all blurred together: if a man likes "girly" things and/or is attracted to other men, then he must really want to become a woman! That could be suuuuch a long list, if you wanted to go into it...

Otomen is another title I've been dipping into lately that seems to have an awkward mix of awesome and awful all bundled together -- the main characters all have some sort of conflicts related to their having hobbies/tastes/skills etc. that are stereotyped as inappropriate for their gender, or else lacking in stereotyped as gender-appropriate skills...a tomboyish girl who loves sports and action movies but is totally un-domestic, a macho athletic boy who secretly loves to cook and sew and collect cute chara goods, a campus lothario who is secretly writes romantic shojo manga under a female pen name, etc. I'm only a couple of volumes in, but so far it really seems to be heading towards setting up a storyline where everybody learns that it's OK to be themselves and like whatever they like, regardless of stereotyped gender roles. BUUUUUUUT...the hero's angst over having to constantly act ultra-manly and keep all of his "girly" hobbies and interests deeply closeted is explicitly connected to pressure from his mother; she is terrified that he'll turn out just like his father, who left the family years ago to live as a woman.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not coming to Wiscon, but Thomas Yan suggested that I come over here and suggest something for the gender binary in anime panel--the anime Uta-Kata. It's sort of a magical girl anime gone wrong, and features two couples--one couple can arguably be read as gay, and the other can arguably be read as lesbian.

[oyceter]

Ooooo, thanks so much for the suggestion! I will have to look into it!