Sex and Moteki: Hints of a Changing View of Female Sexuality in Japan
Date
2014
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Bi-College (Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges). Department of East Asian Studies
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Award
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eng
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Bi-College users only
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Abstract
While the Japanese comics known as manga are generally fictional, manga still depicts real aspects of Japanese culture like food, traditional clothing, and mannerisms. Scholars who write about manga have found that manga reflects on and informs its readers of Japanese culture, whether the reader is a member of that culture or not. In manga female characters are often portrayed with extremely stereotypically feminine features and characteristics, they are frequently docile…. Likewise, the male characters are shown with strong masculine features and characteristics, such as…. In the past ten years, mangaka, authors of manga, have become increasingly open to making characters that do not fit in the normative male or female gender roles. In fact, manga is becoming progressively more realistic and thus more able to accurately portray changes in Japanese society. For example, the recent rise in the number of Japanese women expressing their sexuality outside of marriage. However, there are still genres like ero (erotic) manga that represent women as sexual objects, and this greatly contributes to a negative stereotype of Japanese women as being submissive to a "dominant" male. In spite of this, there are manga out there that attempt to combat this sexually-passive image of women with portrayals of women who take control of their own sexuality. In the manga Moteki, the author Kubo Mitsurou rejects the tradition of the dominant male sexual role by creating four strong female characters that are represented as having ownership over their sexuality. I argue that the way in which Kubo Mitsurou presents the women of Moteki gives them sexual agency.
Description
Rabia Shahab was a Bryn Mawr College student.