The Lobster Dance

Doctor Heteronormative would be a BITCHIN name for the main villain dude.

-Jeph Jacques

With all the talk of herbivore men, pushy women, and linguistic gender-screwups in the air lately, the summer-fall season of Japanese dramas has been surprisingly supportive of non-conformity to the heteronormative cultural expressions of gender.* In particular, I’ve been really impressed with「派遣のオスカル」Haken no Oscar, which translates to something like Lady Oscar Works Temp or Lady Oscar, Temp Worker, and 「オトメン　乙男」Otomen, which doesn’t really translate so well (more on this later).

Haken no Oscar is about a temp worker who loves the shoujo manga The Rose of Versailles「ベルサイユのバラ」, popularly abbreviated to Berubara.

From Fuji TV's website.

I also like 「オトメン　（乙男）」 Otomen, currently in its second season. The title of the show is one of my new favorite play-on-words. The kanji for oto 乙　comes from the Japanese word for maiden, 乙女　otome. The second kanji means men 男 and is pronounced dan or otoko. This new word is a great example of forced reading of kanji to create a bilingual pun. An otomen is a straight-identified man who also loves “girly” things. The main character is the captain of the kendo team by day and an avid baker, knitter, sewer, and general maker and lover of all things cute by night.

Both the shows are really about non-conformative gender identities, but they address it in fairly different ways. For example, Misawa Katsuko, the main character in Haken physically presents as a fairly standard Japanese straight-identified femme: long hair, make-up, wears lace, dresses and skirts, etc. She likes romantic manga written for girls and women, but her very favorite is BeruBara. Now, BeruBara is a somewhat unusual shoujo manga/anime.** Set in pre-Revolutionary France, the main character, Oscar Francois de Jarjeyes, is a noblewoman who has been raised as a man in order to inherit her sonless father’s military position. The fact that she is a woman is not really a secret, either, which makes the premise rather unusual. The manga was insanely popular when it was published in the 1970s and remains popular today because of Oscar’s cool factor: she’s a strong, confident woman who transcends sex and gender. Although she is not free from the shackles of class distinction (a major theme of the book, since two of her closest friends are commoners by birth), Oscar has more leeway in gender expression than most women and men have today. Her freedom to express her personality as a kind of both-but-neither gender is enticing and incredibly appealing to fans. Myself and Misawa included.

Oscar Francois de Jarjeyes: Inspiring readers and watchers for over 30 years.

Unlike Oscar’s, Misawa’s non-conformity is not exactly gender-bending. She presents as a typical Japanese femme working temp at a beauty-products company. The job is not exactly pink collar, but is considered an acceptable and normal job/company for a woman. Misawa, however, is a great example of gendered appearance vs. personality–she completely fits in with the cultural expectations for beauty-, fashion- and job standards for unmarried Japanese women, but Misawa wants to be just like Oscar. Her desire to be like this extremely non-conformative character gives her the courage to stand up for her noble ideals and to do so bluntly, which is not considered particularly feminine behavior in Japan. For example, when provoked, she surprises everyone with her blunt but extremely passionate personality and her tendency to deliver some very Oscar-esque speeches. This, of course, reveals the problem of equating physical appearance with personality. If Misawa dressed more mannishly, would her personality be less surprising to her coworkers?

Despite Misawa’s more subtle gender-bending, most of Haken no Oscar’s nods to gender non-conformity are actually located in the secondary text of BeruBera. However, Otomen’s focus—the entire basis of the show, actually—is about a group of non-conforming high-school boys (and one girl). The boys are all interested in activities that are culturally considered to be for women. Masamune Asuka is the captain of the kendo team (a very manly sport), but he loves sweets, baking, sewing, and cute things in general—a total “otomen.” Tachibana Juta secretly draws and publishes shoujo manga. Tonomine Hajime wants to be a make-up artist. Ariake Yamato is just plain adorable, with a fancy haircut, a beautiful face, and soft skin. Miyakozuka Ryo, their female friend, is a complete failure at all things remotely domestic and excels at kicking ass and taking names, both of which Asuka finds incredibly cute.

The show is a comedy, and the take on the issue of the characters’ failure to conform is decidedly humorous. But it made me wonder a lot about personal preference and culturally acceptable preferences.

The most overwhelming excuse I’ve heard for encouraging “correct” gender behavior in children is “Well, boys will be boys and girls will be girls.” For adults, it’s “Oh, the men can’t be bothered with making Thanksgiving dinner because the football game is on.” I honestly do not believe that most people stop to think about individual preference. If a person likes to watch and play sports, why is that masculine? If a person is bad at sports and would prefer to bake cookies and read, why is that feminine? Couldn’t it just be that person’s preference?

Let’s use me as an example. My love of dark beers, ambitious personality, and enjoyment of sport and exercise do not exist because I am a man. My love of baking and cooking; desire to make other people happy; and enjoyment of shopping for clothes do not exist because I am a woman. My personality and preferences are not limited by my sex.

Now, I know some of you are thinking disdainfully, “Then why do so many women love shopping? And why do so many men like sports?” This is a complicated issue, as it addresses the intersection of individual preference and culture. Children are encouraged by family, media, and social institutions to express their feelings based on acceptable forms of gender expression. For example, women going shopping to relax and socialize is a common sight in the media and in real life; men relaxing with beer and football is an equally common image. These are cultural activities. It doesn’t mean that women are biologically inclined to love shopping; it means that we are indoctrinated with this idea from a young age and it becomes a gender-appropriate emotional outlet AS WELL as a potential individual preference. If we lived in a gender-free world and were presented with all the options for leisure activities equally, anyone could enjoy shopping, knitting, watching and playing sports, and so on without the assumption of sex “matching” cultural gender.

Yet, as it stands, the otomen and others who like activities culturally associated with opposite gender are considered unmasculine or unfeminine. The inclination towards judgment based on the gender bias is so ingrained that we often do not realize why we judge people as we do. We as a society continue to encourage children to participate in culturally “gender-appropriate” activities and express themselves in culturally “gender-appropriate” ways and, to various degrees, shun the non-conformers. The same is true of adults.

There’s a wonderful part in the second season of Otomen in which an extremely cutesy uber-femme new teacher at the high school, secretly hired to out the otomen, invites four of the otomen for tea with some young women. She expects that their love of cute and sweet things will prove their destruction and that the women will shame them into acting like “real men.” Instead, the women find the otomen’s gender-bending aspects charming. The make-up artist fixes his date’s makeup to show off her natural beauty; the manga artist bonds with his date over their mutual knowledge of shoujo manga; the pretty boy impresses his date with his cute haircut and pretty skin. Asuka impresses the teacher by using a lemon to prevent staining after she spills tea on her white dress. Eventually, the teacher is also won over by the otomen’s “girlish” charm points.

The lesson I see in Otomen is that, by encouraging individuals to gender-appropriate pursuits and shunning (to various degrees) the pursuit of activities and interests that do not conform to society’s idea of appropriate gender expression, we are limiting ourselves and missing out on many of life’s ooportunities. This is why we need shows like Berubara, Otomen, and Haken no Oscar: to highlight, normalize and encourage the development and acceptance of gender-free personal preferences.

That is, to let us be not men or women, but individuals.

Watch Otomen (with English subtitles) here or at 9 pm Tuesday nights on Fuji TV.
Haken no Oscar is not subtitled or out on DVD yet, but it’s downloadable from d-addicts for the time being.

*Copying this from another post I wrote: The term sex refers to the biological expression of sex—that is, male or female in terms of chromosomes and/or primary and secondary sex characteristics. Gender, on the other hand, refers to the societal expectations about the cultural expressions of sex – the judgment of whether something is masculine or feminine, and the expectation that one’s gender expression will conform somewhat to one’s sex. For example, when someone assumes that a man hates sweets precisely because he is a man, that is making assumptions about gender expression based on sex.
** Although it is probably the most famous in the canon of shoujo manga and anime that involves gender-bending, which also includes TEZUKA Osamu’s 「リボンの騎士」Princess Ribbon, SAITO Chiho’s 「革命少女ウテナ」 Revolutionary Girl Utena, and, most recently, BISCO Hatori’s 「桜蘭高校ホスト部」Ouran High School Host Club. I absolutely adore Utena and Ouran and highly recommend them.