Translation Studies
Research Seminar Series Spring 2021
Speaker: Grey Micah, University of Edinburgh
Title: Investigating translations of nonconforming gender and sexuality in shōjo
Date: January 27th, 2021
Time: 4-5 pm
Venue: on Collaborate Learn (through TS Bulletin Board) OR Guest Link: https://eu.bbcollab.com/guest/eca78648f9184cddb37a8cfe1276aa99
Abstract: Over the past three decades, the Japanese mediums of manga (comics) and anime (animation) have become a global phenomenon. Like other forms of media such as literature or film, manga and anime include a vast variety of genres and topics, and like other media, one of their common functions — whether intended or not — is to represent and perpetuate particular dominant norms and ideologies of sex, gender, and sexuality, primarily through their presentation of characters as gendered subjects. Scholarship on this issue calls particular attention to the role of translation and Japan’s relationship to the West in the construction of gender/sexual norms, beginning in the Meiji Period (1868-1912); ideas of translational equivalence have been applied to gender, attempting in many cases to match Japanese expression to Western frameworks. The Meiji era project of “modernisation” and “Westernisation” thus gave rise to some of the earliest modern predecessors of manga: instructive “girls’ magazines” which used stories and pictures to promote new norms of girlhood.
However, manga also has roots in subcultures which subverted and challenged these dominant ideologies — particularly the shōjo (“girl”) genre. One of the foremost originators of the medium, Osamu Tezuka, drew inspiration for his foundational 1953-1956 manga Ribon no Kishi (a fantasy tale of a crossdressing princess born with both male and female “hearts”) from the Takarazuka Revue, an all-female theatre troupe whose members play either musumeyaku (“girl role”) or otokoyaku (“male role”). The 1960s brought feminist and lesbian movements to Japan, and by the 1970s, the shōjo manga industry was experiencing a decisive cultural turn, with women taking over the previously male-dominated production of “girls’ culture” and using the medium to explore socially suppressed topics such as homosexuality, sexual violence/trauma, and gender nonconformity. Even as anime and manga have exploded into the mainstream, some of the most influential works continually call back to these earlier subversive works, and portrayals of non-normative gender/sexuality have maintained a relatively small yet significant presence in popular works — including many of those translated into English. My research attempts to trace the relationships between Japanese- and English-language discourses of non-normative gender and sexuality as depicted in manga and anime, by investigating translations of several shōjo works from different key periods (the 1970s, the 1990s, and the 21st century).
Bio note: Grey Micah is a second-year PhD candidate in Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on issues of non-normative gender/sexuality, ideology, and political economy in Japanese-English translation.