Fanfic Forensics

Conference "Comics Worlds and the World of Comics: Scholarship on a Global Scale" underway

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 00:00:06 GMT

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

I'm having a great time in Kyoto at "Comics Worlds and the World of Comics: Scholarship on a Global Scale", the first international conference on manga/comics research at the Kyoto International Manga Museum, organised by Kyoto Seika University. Met a ton of interesting people with very interesting ideas that I'll write about in length later.

Wireless access is a bit problematic so I can't post/tweet as much as I'd like right now, but those who'd like to follow the tweets, go here.

Since I already gave my own presentation on the influence of copyright on the place of dojinshi/fan comics in comics research (click to go to the prezi, it's both Japanese and English), the pressure is off a bit and I can finally give proper attention to what everyone else is saying. Yesterday was the keynote and the workshop for young researchers. Very much looking forward to today's session on shojo manga and gender with the admirable Trina Robbins (who opened an exhibition on American women's comics at the MM on the 17th), and fellow Belgian Pascal Lefèvre's talk.

Must dash to the museum now for the start of day two.

Presentation on dojinshi, fan culture, copyright and amateur-professional divide

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 14:10:45 GMT

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

Yesterday I gave a presentation on copyright issues related to dojinshi and fan culture for the first-year students at the Japanese Studies department of the Catholic University of Leuven. It was based on the conference presentation I'll be giving next week in Kyoto, with more introductory material such as what dojinshi are. The conference version will have fewer cute pictures and more long pretentious words.

I also used the documentary 'Manga Mad', which has annoying background music and a few too many boob shots for my taste, but also a large number of very interesting interviews by mangaka and manga/otaku specialists. It deals with all manner of manga and otaku topics, from dojinshi, yaoi/hentai, character goods, and moe to cosplay. Definitely worth watching.

Conference! Speaking at "Comics Worlds and the World of Comics: Scholarship on a Global Scale&q

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 09:53:47 GMT

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

Comics Worlds and the World of Comics: Scholarship on a Global Scale will take place from 18 to 20 December at the International Manga Museum in Kyoto. I'll be doing a short presentation in Japanese on the 18th on the topic of what exactly "global comics studies" might study. First, the aims of the conference:

In recent years, Comic Studies are seeing an upswing worldwide. Under the conditions of globalization and information society, the internationalization of comics as such, including a sort of comics revival in Europe and America as well as the transnational proliferation of manga, has come to be accompanied by an internationalization of the study of comics. Representative of this trend is the International Journal of Comic Art, founded in 1999 and edited by John Lent. Drawing upon previous research, the Kyoto conference intends to further international exchange. One of its aims is to broaden the perspective of Manga Studies within Japan. In this respect, exchange will be attempted not only with respect to the variety of regional comics cultures, but also to fields of research other than Manga Studies and, furthermore, theoretical endeavors. An equally important aim is to contribute to global comics scholarship, and thereby unfolding the potential of the Kyoto International Manga Museum opened in November 2006, as a facility accessible to Japanese and Non-Japanese researchers alike. The conference will begin this 'contribution' by focusing on whether it is possible to discuss comics beyond the scope of local comics cultures; in other words, whether a scholarly exchange about 'comics' in general can be established despite the fact that the specific works and languages the participants are familiar with differ. The Kyoto conference does not intend to highlight the cultural particularities of Japanese manga; rather, it foregrounds methodological issues which the study of manga may share with the study of other kinds of comics. It invites discussions about the definition of comics from aesthetic, stylistic and semiotic angles, while at the same time calling for the consideration of discourses related to modern society and culture. Regarding the latter, points of common interest could be the relations between nation-state and subcultures, male and female readerships, personal inclinations of fans and public references of traditional intellectuals, the everyday use of comics and its academic research, the role of comics in Europe/America and Asia etc.

I'll have fifteen minutes and talk about eeeeeverything in this mission statement! Pretty much. I started out intending to discuss exactly which kind of media are considered "comics" in this proposed field of "global comics studies", wanting to draw attention to dojinshi or other "non-traditional" comic-like media that are rather neglected by current comics studies. This is now snowballing into a wide-ranging critique of media and methodologies in comics scholarship, social responsibilities of comics scholarship, and how the field is in danger of repeating the mistakes of an academic system that not so long ago persisted in its claims that comics were just too low-brow to study. I'll be discussing whether open access and social media might offer a backbone for a truly global, relevant, and inclusive field of "comics studies". Since things are getting a bit too broad, I'm looking for one topic to tie it all together. Dojinshi will probably be best.

The presentation is taking shape here in this prezi and is a great load of gibberish right now. It'll make sense (and have Japanese added) in two weeks. A list of online resources and highlights that I'm using for the presentation can be found on Diigo with the tag presentation_cwwc.

Feminist theory course notes, session 1 - 22/10/2009

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:09:55 GMT

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

Three months just got sucked into the vortex of cultural week organisation hell. Now it's over and done, and I managed to submit art for Snapely Holidays and Snarry Holidays a day before the November 16 deadlines too, so I can finally focus on research again.

Apart from the manga translation work, of course, but no complaints about that :)

I'm taking part in a fairly awesome PhD course on feminist theory this academic year. Given that the authors of the fics and dojinshi I'm analysing are almost all women and girls, and the kind of open-ended and non-restrictive analysis I want to employ in my research seemed to be related to certain aspects of feminist thinking, I was hoping that a course of this kind might help give me some direction in precisely how to make that open-ended analysis a meaningful one. The first session was extremely promising in that regard. How I wish I'd attended this kind of thing as an undergrad.

Readings are pretty challenging, probably due to my inability to concentrate on anything for longer than a minute and the general lack of exposure to theoretical work that students get in our Japanese Studies course. I've never habitually studied theoretical discourse, and it shows. (The more I think on this, the more bizarre area studies starts to look like as a discipline. How can you give students a theoretical framework for studying every single last aspect of one particular geographical entity?) I'll be blogging and editing my notes on the sessions; it will probably be quite illuminating to look back on them next year and cringe at the ignorance on display. There will be smatterings of Dutch, Japanese and perhaps some other languages in the notes. There will also be the habitual lack of anything resembling organization. I won't be adding many personal opinions/interpretations until I feel a bit more confident that I've mastered the material enough to say something relevant.

Session 1: Feminist epistemology 22/10/2009

The first session actually took place a couple of weeks ago, but I was still in cultural week hell back then and had no time to blog. It was mostly an introduction to feminist epistemology, preceded by prof. Sarah Bracke outlining the purpose of the course -it's entirely new- and participants introducing themselves.

Readings

Chandra Mohanty (1984) “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Boundary 2 12(3):333–58

Sandra Harding (1991) "Whose Science, whose knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives." Cornell University Press. Chapter 5 and 6.

Donna Haraway (1991) "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge.

Notes

1970s conversations
-> 1980s writings

intersecting opressions
1982 Gloria Hull e.a.: All the women are white etc
1983 This bridge called my back
1984 Sister, outsider (Audre Lorde)

simultaneous challenges from less privileged groups of women (canonized story: first feminist theory, then challenged)

1984 Notes towards a politics of location -> crucial to feminit epistemology: feminist thinking should be located, embedded

"a place on the map is a place within history"

niet "women have always...", maar waar, wanneer, voor wie was dit waar?

Sandra Harding US philosopher, early 80s "Science question in feminism", mapping out difference that feminist thinking is making in the academy

epistemology vs. multiple epistemologies (eg feminist epistemology)

women throughout history not generally constructed as producers of knowledge
women's lives not considered legitimate objects of knowledge in canon

STRATEGIES used by woman academics
feminist empiricism (exact sciences): sexist/androcentrist bias/distortion can be overcome by more rigorous scientific method -> corrective objectivity
virtues: strong appeal because it produces new facts and is less threatening for academic practice as usual

standpoint theory: situated thinking, elaborated by feminist theory, knowlege is socially situated and there's a link between knowledge and power relations -> a position of oppression produces better knowledge (bell hooks) because oppressed have to be aware of framework of oppressor as well as their own for survival, meaning they're familiar with double consciousness and knowledge production
virtues: more attuned to thinking about power relationships

feminist postmodernism
strong objectivity: piece of research/thinking manages to incorporate researcher
weak objectivity: academic practice of research removing him/herself from object of research
"Situated knowledges" boek Haraway: juggles standpoint theory in constructivist way: feminist objectivity is situated knowledges
haraway refutes "god's eye view", metafoor ivoren toren
relativism and objectivity are two sides of same coin: researcher is NOT SITUATED
how to produce knowledge that doesn't replicate set of power relations that researcher is involved in?

OTW donashun drive kitteh!

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:32:05 GMT

Moar kittehs!

Insane grad student schedule is insane

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:00:35 GMT

During the following month I will translate two manga ('One Piece' 13 and '20th Century Boys' 15) and an academic article, mastermind a week of various cultural and academic activities involving a couple of hundred people from six different countries (including two dozen university professors) causing mayhem in about five different locations at the same time, finish pics for Snapely Holidays and Snarry Holidays whose designs are getting more complicated by the day, finish two abstracts, prepare a junior class on Japanese culture every week, make an appearance at a con, and select the final fanfic samples for my research from thousands of candidates. One or two instances of relaxed social interaction with friends are also scheduled. Judging from the strange bobbles growing on the inside of my elbows and knees, I should probably squeeze in "defeat bubonic plague" sometime this week. I wonder if it's a good thing when the to-do list is so absurd that it just makes you laugh and laugh and laugh and want to read PhD Comics instead of worry.

In other news, the number of new undergrads starting Japanese Studies at my university has gone up by forty percent since last year. Forty percent. It's very nice to know we're popular and the new group seems to contain a lot of interesting people, but crazy increase in student numbers + no increase whatsoever in staff numbers = frayed tempers. Hats off to the Japanese language teachers who are bravely coping with the worst of the extra workload.

My research ethics, let me show you them

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:31:20 GMT

All right. I'd been meaning to do a write-up of all the ethics questions relevant to my research project for quite a while, but the Surveyfail trainwreck suddenly makes the need for a write-up feel a lot more pressing. Fortunately, others have written quite extensively on how to study fandom while not being offensive and using a sound methodology. See, to name just a couple, theorynut, Kristina Busse's post on research ethics, and of course the AOIR guide. I try to follow these good examples, and the rest of this text explains how, in long and excruciating detail. I'll be tacking a link to this at the top of my main research site and its LiveJournal and InsaneJournal mirrors.

A couple of warnings to start out with:

First and foremost, TRIGGER WARNING. Some of the fanworks referred to in my journals and site, pieces of content written by me, or references listed in the bibliography may contain triggering wording or images. Please proceed with caution.
The journals/site contain and/or link to material that is not appropriate for minors.
Much content on the journals/site deals with yaoi or slash, which (very broadly speaking) means male-male relationships in (fan) media. If this offends you, kindly turn away now.

Some potentially relevant personal and fannish basics. I'm a white, bisexual woman in my late twenties. Before I went to university, I was actively involved in Elfquest and Zetsuai 1989/BRONZE fandom, writing fic and drawing art. After that, I lurked in several manga/anime fandoms for many years, until increasing involvement in Harry Potter fandom with the start of my research in 2008 convinced me to give active fannishness another go. I missed squeeing and drawing, and I didn't want to do research on the fandom without giving back a little. I'm still not very loud or publish much art, but I'm slowly getting back in shape. I read left and right in other fandoms besides HP, but usually don't get actively involved beyond the occasional LJ comment.

The purpose of my research is to compare and contrast the narratives and visuals of fanworks created by English-speaking and Japanese-speaking fans. Since I'm conducting the research in order to earn a PhD in Japanese Studies, the fanworks created by Japanese-speaking fans are the main focus of the project. My end goal is to provide accurate data about the content of dojinshi (Japanese amateur manga), data which is unavailable at the moment in studies of Japanese fans, and to create debate about the similarities and differences between these two kinds of fanwork from different cultural settings. My methodology involves taking large numbers (hundreds) of fanworks, mainly fanfics and dojinshi, describing a range of easily identifiable elements contained in them (such as, who is the narrator, what is the main pairing), and gathering these data in large sets so I can compare and contrast the results for dojinshi with those for fics. I will try to point out interesting similarities and differences, examine those in more detail, offer a range of possible interpretations, and solicit interpretations from others during the process as in this pilot study conducted last year. (If you caught me talking about my research early on in the project, you may have heard me say that I wanted to explain the differences between fanfic and dojinshi narratives. That was indeed the idea I started out with, but obviously, both the "explaining" and "differences" parts were very problematic. I've corrected that outlook now.)

My research involves only content analysis of fanworks (mainly fanfic and dojinshi, will include fanart and Japanese-language text fics later on), not research on human subjects through questionnaires, interviews, or other methods. I try to use as samples only works created by authors who are not minors. Aside from looking for suggestions that they might be minors, I don't search for or keep data about authors. The data about the fanworks I use as samples are/will be stored in this dojinshi data set and this fanfic data set. Note that there isn't much to see there now, I'm just getting started on these, but this short data set created for an early pilot test of the methodology gives a good idea of what I want to make. Any story summaries of the fanfics and dojinshi included in the data sets are written by me for the purpose of contrasting the narratives, and they contain SPOILERS for the stories. The ratings/warnings are the original author's; please pay attention to them before clicking any links, since the stories may contain adult material. If you think I've misrepresented or misinterpreted something, please let me know and I'll correct the information right away. I don't link to or use as samples works on sites that use some form of password protection. (Note: if something on LiveJournal or another journaling service gets f-locked after I first bookmarked it, it may take a long time before I notice this and remove the sample.)

I try to practice open notebook science, meaning that I publish anything research-related that I do -brainstorming, data adding, etc- as it happens, as much as possible, under a Creative Commons licence, to invite immediate criticism/feedback and hopefully allow others to re-use my material in newer and better projects. See Wikipedia for more information on the concept. The data sets published on this site are therefore a work in progress; they are definitely incomplete and may contain factual errors at this moment because they haven't been revised thoroughly -I'm extremely busy with other work and am just recording the basics of the samples I have. (I'm not interpreting these flawed data sets yet, of course.) I identify fics and dojinshi by title and author and, wherever possible, link directly to the stories or to the relevant warnings page if the author has requested that works not be linked to directly. This is done because I want other people to be able to verify my findings easily and quickly instead of having to take my word for it that X percentage of dojinshi depict French kissing, or whatnot. More than a few papers discussing fic that I've read make remarkable claims that I dearly wish I could verify, but can't because the samples are porely defined or locked up in paper fanzines. I want to avoid that.

However, I realize that it can be creepy to see one's name or work showing up in this kind of research out of the blue. While I don't believe anybody has the god-given right to control every way their work is referenced anywhere, I haven't been granted the absolute right to publicly analyze a piece of fanwork in whatever way pleases me, either. If you're the author of a fanfic/dojinshi included in the data sets and you don't want me to include your work or point people towards it, drop me a note and I'll immediately remove identifying information from the entry -author name, title, link, summary- or remove the entry from the data set entirely, as per your specifications. I will also link to stories via a different URL or make other changes that you request. (If you feel like including the exact reason why you want me to remove or change information, please do so, but there's no need. It's none of my business.)

Am I making my sample sets less representative by allowing people to withdraw their work? In theory, yes. In practice, I'm quite confident it will make very little difference. Am I going against my own stated goal of offering data that others can verify by removing identifying information from data about a fic or dojinshi? Definitely, but no methodology is sacred enough that it's worth ignoring people's express wishes. This research is not about open heart surgery or nuclear safety. Nobody is going to die and no outrageously wrong conclusions will suddenly be drawn as a consequence of allowing the people who made the samples I'm playing with to control their own work.

Important note to other researchers not affiliated with fandom: divulging information about fans and/or fanworks to parties with no understanding of the concept of transformative/derivative works can be very harmful for fans. Please, whatever you do with the information on particular fanfics and dojinshi contained in my data sets, don't put it in the hands of those for whose eyes most fannish works are definitely not meant -authors and other rights holders of the original works on which the fanfics or dojinshi are based, people in the content industry who consider fanworks illegal or evil, or minors. If it ever turns out that the data sets I publicize are being put to some kind of use that is risky for fans, I will take the data down immediately, open notebook science or not.

It took me a long time to decide that I wasn't going to contact authors and ask for permission to use their works as samples before starting work on the data sets. While getting informed consent is not generally considered necessary when studying pieces of literature (as opposed to the behaviour and interactions of authors), contacting fic and dojinshi authors just seemed like the right thing to do. But it turned out that the logistics involved would make for hundreds of very ambiguous situations. What if the contact information I have is outdated (a relevant concern since a lot of my samples are from as early as 2001), but I either don't realize this or can't find the new, correct information? Can I use the work or not? If people don't react, does that mean I can use the work or not (and will the author(s) share my interpretation of their lack of reaction)? In the end, I decided this approach would probably lead to a lot of misunderstandings and muddle up the sample set to such a degree that it wouldn't be even vaguely "representative" anymore. Also, I didn't want to come across as asking authors to do my homework by looking at my data and giving their interpretation.

Note that while I don't want to spam individuals about my research, I absolutely do want people to look at the data and let me know their ideas. That's one of the reasons for publishing everything online as-it-happens instead of not asking for feedback until the final draft of the thesis is finished. While analyzing data, I'm helped but also hindered by my own limited point of view, personal experiences, intellectual ability, amount of knowledge, conscious and unconscious convictions, and general humanity. This was never more obvious to me than when I threw my first results out on LJ and got a volley of new interpretations thrown back at me through various channels. I do not want to engage in the kind of science that requires one to read material in total solitude, process it, and emerge after several months or years bearing pearls of wisdom. That won't make me a very good academic and would make my research of far less use to the rest of the world than it could be.

If you see anything in the data sets or on the site as a whole that interests you, that I misinterpreted, or that I seem to have overlooked, I will be eternally grateful if you decide to send me a message or post a comment about it. (If you want I'll do a Snape sketch in return for your help, just shout for it.) Any comments you post on the main site or in its LJ or IJ mirrors are and will remain public, but I will not quote or mention you without express permission in the final thesis or mention your name anywhere if you send me a private message. I will never, ever, under no circumstances use the real name of anyone who addresses me using a fannish name.

While it would take some real work to screw up as spectacularly as the Surveyfail "scientists" did, I may still say or do dodgy things at some point. Should that happen, or if something in the research ethics outlined above strikes you as questionable, please, please whack me with something. Additionally, I try my hardest to avoid racist, ableist, sexist or otherwise harmful language and ideas, but with mixed success because I've lived a very privileged life and am still in the process of gathering clues that should have been acquired a long time ago. Any corrective whacking you might care to do in this area would be tremendously appreciated as well.

Thank you.

Drawble for Alisanne - "Messy Game"

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 23:41:27 GMT

PG, Snarry. Based on this giggle-worthy drabble by alisanne .

Excuse wonky proportions, please. Bigger image here.

A higher power wants me to talk about yaoi

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 12:17:43 GMT

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

I'm still working through the batch of over a hundred new Snape-as-a-main-character Harry Potter dojinshi I bought in July, but once more, it seems all of them are yaoi. Now, I didn't do this on purpose. Really. I specifically went looking for het HP dojinshi with Snape in them in Toranoana and other shops that cater to a male clientele, because I know there are het HP dojinshi out there. I've seen them on the net. They weren't in the shops. Not anymore, the friendly sales clerks said. The female-oriented shops still had shelves and shelves of HP dojinshi, the vast majority of them yaoi.

I grabbed every dojinshi that seemed to have Snape on the cover, and even some apparently gen dojinshi that never even hinted at Snape Inside, in the hope that they might have some significant amount of non-yaoi!Snape. No idea yet if I had any success there.

When I go to Kyoto this December, I'm going to look for more samples. There'll probably be some good new stuff to be found then, with the Half-Blood Prince movie having come out this summer. Maybe even some het, but I'm not holding my breath. The bottom line is, this PhD is going to be about yaoi and slash in all but name. All the samples I've turned up by randomly buying every Snape dojinshi I come across are yaoi. I really, really didn't mean for it to be all about yaoi again, after I very deliberately made pretty much all of my undergraduate papers and my 150-page MA thesis about yaoi. I honestly didn't set out to do a PhD on yaoi, too. But scientific integrity obliges me to represent the data as it is contained in the samples, and the samples are yaoi, yaoi, and yaoi. It seems I'm fated to talk about yaoi and nothing but yaoi for the rest of my academic life. I can't get away from it.

Ah, what a cruel fate. I will attempt to bear it with dignity and not too much goofy grinning.

Fic/art rec: The Mutant Problem

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 19:44:39 GMT

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

In 2015, after Charles Xavier confesses to having used his powers to attack all mutants and then all other humans, Peter Parker writes an op-ed in the New York Times on the mutant "problem".

Xenokattz meticulously recreates the NYT layout for the article and photo gallery, giving this transformative work a feel of authenticity that makes its content resonate on a level that would be unimaginable if the text were presented in a "traditional" fic format. What a powerful and involving way to make a point.

Quick Snarry Games drawble

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 14:52:51 GMT

The Snarry Games have started posting, which is productivity-impairing yet so many kinds of awesome. And look, I made a drawble for the Opening Games free-for-all -'Graveyard Book' Snarry :)

'Slightly Out of Character: Shonen Epics, Doujinshi and Japanese Concepts of Masculinity'

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 19:52:25 GMT

Reading notes on Slightly Out of Character: Shonen Epics, Doujinshi and Japanese Concepts of Masculinity by Megan Harrell.

Overall, this paper offers some very interesting ideas, and I would love to read a longer and more in-depth description of Harrell's research. A longer analysis of the six dojinshi samples described would be particularly relevant. Relatively early in the article, Harrell correctly observes that in the case of female characters, it is the way they deal with the situations they are placed in rather than their assorted 'super powers' or big-ass weapons that determines whether or not we are dealing with a character that doesn't fit the mold of 'traditional' femininity. She subsequently asserts that, while female characters' behaviour is often not as 'subversive' as it might seem at first glance, the behaviour of male characters in dojinshi can be characterized as a very clear departure from real-life Japanese gender norms. From the (limited) amount of research I've done on dojinshi, I feel inclined to support that idea. The descriptions of the sample dojinshi, however, seem too short to offer real support for Harrell's conclusion on the gendered behaviour of male dojinshi characters.

The space constraints of the paper format force the author to omit other pieces of information that some may consider vital for a solid argumentation. I have some reservations about the methodology, for instance; it is not made clear why the two shonen epics described can be considered representative of shonen epics in general, and while the dojinshi are said to have been selected from a larger sample of thirty books, which is good, the selection criteria used in this process are not clearly described. This is not to say that the conclusions drawn are necessarily suspect in any way; the sampling merely makes it difficult for the reader to judge the representativity of the samples used, which is a shame.

Lack of space to offer this kind of 'background' info is one of the major reasons why I absolutely want to include some kind of online component even when writing in the traditional paper format. If in-depth information about the methodology and samples used is not offered in some fashion, the reader has no way of replicating the author's analysis in a meaningful way.

Harrell's analysis of the masculinities depicted in djs is short but thought-provoking. I particularly like the answer it suggests to the question of why events from the narrative canon of the original appear to be incorporated in dojinshi so rarely (at least in comparison with fanfics. Caveat -I can't confirm this impression by an analysis of a large number of sample djs and fics just yet). Harrell points out that dojinshi narratives tend to relocate male characters to a 'private' sphere so that the focus can be placed on interpersonal relationships rather than interactions between the characters and the 'world' described in the source work. I'll definitely be thinking more on this.

Now, highlights and comments. These were made using Diigo on Google's html version of the pdf, which screws up formatting of the Diigo annotations something fierce, as I only discovered at the very end. Ack. Apologies for this not being quite as readable as it could be. All lines beginning with * are direct quotes from Megan Harrell's article. All lines beginning with o are comments by me on the preceding line.

* both the authors and target audience of doujinshi are primarily female, while the entire commercial manga market is dominated by shōnen manga, written by and for men
o I really need to find some numbers to back this up. comment by Nele Noppe
* Though the views on masculinity presented by the shōnen epics differs greatly from the ideals expressed by fanwork doujin, epic manga and their doujin counterparts have both agreed to disagree with the societal ideals of masculinity and, in doing so, convey the desire felt by both women and men to change Japanese society’s status quo for masculinity.
* The salaryman has become an icon representing Japanese masculinity in contemporary times, despite the fact that the majority of Japanese men have never fit the salaryman model, instead being employed at small firms or as blue collar workers. And though this salaryman mode of masculinity is by far still the accepted norm, some departure from it can be seen in the masculinity promulgated by the popular shōnen manga, which are themselves necessarily informed to some degree by escapism.
* the Japanese concept of femininity has expanded, to at least accommodate if perhaps not encourage the adoption of activities and traits that were once exclusively masculine.
* the Japanese concept of masculinity did not expand alongside that of femininity,
o What about the so-called herbivorous young men said to be so numerous? Are they an invention by the media? comment by Nele Noppe
* Thus, the concept of masculinity which heavily depends on simply being ‘not feminine’ could not help but be threatened by a broadened interpretation of ‘feminine’. Societal tension has resulted from this seeming inability of the Japanese model of masculinity to adapt.
o It should be mentioned here that 'feminine' tends to be interpreted as negative in Western society as well. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that masculinities across the globe have not incorporated 'feminine' characteristics to a meaningful degree, because an injection of the 'feminine' is thought to change the masculine in a way that is societally unacceptable. comment by Nele Noppe
* It thus becomes difficult for Japanese masculinity to expand by assimilating features of femininity, because the relatively low value and negative connotations which are assigned to those features carry a stigma that threatens to compromise the value and legitimacy of masculinity, and thus detract from ‘what it means to be a man.’
o Ah look, there you go :) Still no mention of this not just being something 'Japanese', though. comment by Nele Noppe
* the commercialized production of manga placed many constraints on manga artists; pressure to produce quickly and regularly in order to fill weekly publishing demands, for instance, and restrictions on the number of pages they were allotted for each installment.
o The constraints commercial manga publishing places on the story itself gets mentioned quite a lot, but this is the first time I hear the physical properties of commercial manga being mentioned as something that is significally restrictive enough to maybe push someone towards dojinshi publishing instead. Should look into this. comment by Nele Noppe
* The composition of the subculture changed as growth accelerated in the eighties, as the doujin movement began to be comprised more heavily of amateurs and casual authors just starting out in doujin rather than high-talent artists taking up doujin as an alternative to commercial manga, with the result that far fewer doujin artists were crossing into professional status. This coincided with the rise to prominence of the genre of fan-works, or doujin based on a pre-existing published storyline of some sort.
o Important to keep in mind! comment by Nele Noppe
* Fan-work doujinshi also do not rely solely on Japanese works for their inspiration, as stories drawn from western titles such as Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, also became wildly popular.
o Anybody ever looked at to what degree this actually happens? I've seen a lot of HP and LotR, but other non-Japanese fandoms seem to garner very little dojinshi attention (Star Wars etc) comment by Nele Noppe
* Echoing the atmosphere in Japanese society, both the two shōnen epics and the source manga for the doujin being analyzed here strongly project traditional gendered behavior and roles for their male characters (protector, provider, authoritative, pillar) and for their female characters (vulnerable, tentative/unsure, submissive…), while at the same time subverting the societal concept of masculinity in several ways.
o Two manga titles analyzed -can they be considered sorta kinda representative of 'shonen epics' in general? comment by Nele Noppe
o I should add here that I've become very wary of the concept of analyzing a handful of works and drawing these kind of broad conclusions from them. I've read a few articles treating fan stories that I'm very familiar with in this way, and the conclusions drawn all too often make very little sense. comment by Nele Noppe
* In fact, many (if not most) of the female characters in the manga examined possessed uncharacteristic strengths and capability, such as masterful fighting ability, super-powers, and genius-level skill in their fields; however, with the exception of a very few overtly masculine typed women, the presence of these traits is strongly mitigated by the feminine personality traits of the character, and the situations and scenarios into which she is placed, in order to effect a traditionally feminine character.
o Amen. Super powers do not a 'strong' female character make, the interactions she has with the other characters do that (or fail to). comment by Nele Noppe
* In other words, the manga and doujin analyzed all strongly maintained traditionally feminine personalities for their female characters; what was altered was the gendered behavior of the male characters, altered to be less traditionally masculine.
o Are these alterations limited to outward signs, or are the interactions of male characters with other characters also indicative of a portrayal that is 'less traditionally masculine'? Reading on... comment by Nele Noppe
* Doujinshi generally contain much more radical revisions of socially acceptable masculinity than the liberties taken by shōnen epics.
* or being seen as a device to create humor
o I'm not sure that being presented as comic relief necessarily makes an instance of subversion of traditional masculinity less significant (or 'serious'). There is so much more humor in manga and dojinshi than in Western comics or fanfics. Even the most dramatic narrative is most often punctuated by humorous panels. These are not thought to detract from the drama of a story. That something is presented as humorous does not have to imply that it is considered more 'absurd' that the rest of the story by the story's author. comment by Nele Noppe
* The effectiveness of its use in comedy stems from the fact that it is in such obvious conflict with the reader’s preconceived notions of acceptable gendered behavior that it becomes absurd
o True, but I don't think this necessarily detracts from my above point. Hmmm, need to have a more in-depth look at Japanese concepts of humor. comment by Nele Noppe
* One Piece
o On an entirely non-academic note: coooool. Big One Piece fan here. Full disclosure -I'm the translator for the Dutch edition of OP. Scrabbling for my scholarly objectivity now, I can easily see my own likes and dislikes getting in the way of a discussion of OP characters. comment by Nele Noppe
* YuYu Hakusho
o Know of it, read a couple of fanfics about Kurama and Hiei many years ago, but not familiar with the series otherwise. comment by Nele Noppe
* Loyalty 19 , for example, is a trait which is strongly associated with masculinity in Japanese society.
* Other values of shōnen masculinity which aren’t obvious in the salaryman motif include great physical strength:
* though it must be noted that it is not accompanied by valuing of aggression, a fact which is corroborated by the rating of the adjective aggressive
* Another facet of shōnen masculinity is a certain amount of recklessness and a willingness to ‘take on the world,’
* The recklessness of the shōnen male is typically employed in the pursuit or defense of the iron-clad convictions or quasi-chivalrous personal code which is universally possessed by the heroes of the genre, and always contains an aspect of the shōnen hero as protector.
* Shōnen masculinity diverges from the societal ideal of masculinity again on the issue of emotional expression.
o Definitely agree with this aspect of shonen masculinity being different from 'real-world' masculinity. I've got some doubts about the aspects mentioned earlier, but this one, yeah. comment by Nele Noppe
* Shōnen males are also allowed to show a nurturing nature, which most commonly manifests itself in a ‘big brother’ sort of context, with overtones of the position of protector in general.
* However overtly nurturing behavior, which is associated with femininity, and behavior which strays out of the brother/mentor mold is rare in shōnen and as such is usually milked for laughs, such as the earlier example of Kuwabara’s affection for his pet kitten.
* Displaying fear and its associated vulnerability is far less forgivable for the shōnen male than either tears or nurturing behavior and is rarely displayed by a central male character in shōnen material, to the point that it can be considered a real taboo of the genre.
o Interesting... comment by Nele Noppe
* and allowing displaying vulnerability, fear, and
o This seems to contradict the assertion that displaying fear is a sort of "taboo for the genre". comment by Nele Noppe
* The shōnen model of masculinity is built on the foundation of the Japan’s societal ideal of masculinity, the salaryman model, but is significantly different.
* In large part, shōnen masculinity emphasizes an individuality which is, in real life, more attainable for Japanese women.
o Is this individuality "more attainable" for RL Japanese women, or is it just thought to be more attainable? Isn't it more of an ideal? There's tons of marketing that praises products as somehow connected with the discovery of self ('atarashii jibun') -so much that the phrases used start to sound incredibly hollow. Would there be so much desire for things that affirm 'jibun' if 'jibun' were really so attainable IRL? comment by Nele Noppe
* The narratives in fanwork doujin are, like the narratives of the manga they are based on, colored by a certain degree of escapism, in this case from a female perspective. These fanworks, themselves based on shōnen manga, offer us a second view at ideals of an evolving Japanese masculinity from the perspective of the women who primarily author them.
* Others were eliminated because they focused too heavily on humor or were too pornographic in nature to be of value to this study.
o Rather interesting criteria for exclusion. I'd say ideas of masculinity are expressed in any kind of narrative, including those that are purely humorous or relentlessly pornographic. comment by Nele Noppe
* uses a video game, Suikoden, as the source material, and the other four are based off of the popular shōnen manga I examined
o Why include the Suikoden dj? Why not only OP and YYH dj? comment by Nele Noppe
* PG to M
o Maybe a good idea to either not use ratings systems in own work. Everyone understands these differently. comment by Nele Noppe
* Each of the stories analyzed presented, to differing degrees, some form of an alternate masculinity
* Generally tending not to borrow too heavily from events in canon, doujinshi stories are largely set in either domestic settings, or in situations of highly casual and mundane interactions between the characters
o Confirmed in my research comment by Nele Noppe
* In every case it is clear that the story is first and foremost about the relationship, and not really about any canon events that may be occurring at the same time
* This shift of focus from interaction with ‘the world’ and the forces within it to interaction within ‘the relationship,’ represents a shift from the very shōnen perspective of the manga canon to a far more shōjo perspective in the doujinshi, and is the chief device by which doujin compose their ideal of masculinity.
* The predominantly female authors of doujinshi have relocated the characters from their male-authored shonen epics to the private sphere, a traditionally female setting
* A similar rejection of accepted norms of masculinity occurs when the (male) doujin characters are viewed in their own homosocial context, while maintaining the other feminine aspects of the doujin narrative, resulting in a colonization by femininity of the male-only space rather than relocating the men to a feminine-oriented space.
o So, two different main strategies for portraying masculinities in a different light. I wonder if there's a difference in portrayal when male characters are placed in a 'home' space, versus when femininity is injected into a 'traditionally' male-only space? comment by Nele Noppe
* The composition of the subculture changed as growth accelerated in the eighties, as the doujin movement began to be comprised more heavily of amateurs and casual authors just starting out in doujin rather than high-talent artists taking up doujin as an alternative to commercial manga, with the result that far fewer doujin artists were crossing into professional status. This coincided with the rise to prominence of the genre of fan-works, or doujin based on a pre-existing published storyline of some sort.
* This subculture of doujinshi and the people who produce them contains many parallels to the mainstream culture, but exists clearly outside of its boundaries, both legal and cultural, also being distinguished from the commercial industry in terms of demographics: both the authors and target audience of doujinshi are primarily female, while the entire commercial manga market is dominated by shōnen manga, written by and for men.
o There's a grain of truth in both, but this is wording it far too strongly. comment by Nele Noppe
* In general, manga for boys and men dominates the Japanese comic market, collectively holding over 70% of current circulation.
o Okay, the opening makes more sense now that there are some numbers. comment by Nele Noppe
* The expansion of the manga industry in the 1960s created ideal conditions for the creation of the world of doujinshi.
o The whole paragraph is a bit long to quote, but seems to imply (in conjunction with the article's opening statement that the dojinshi world is a mainly female space) that dojinshi first evolved as medium for female expression that found no outlet in the mainstream manga industry with its many rigid rules. Quoting Angel Sanctuary's Yuki Kaori suggests that this characterization of the dojinshi world is still relevant today. comment by Nele Noppe
* The worlds of narrative created by the commercial manga industry and the independent authors and artists of the doujin movement provide rich opportunity to explore the implications of alternative gender concepts as the risk of being stigmatized is dramatically lower than the risk entailed in testing such alternatives in real life.
o Just occurred to me -must look if there's research about comics as a male space vs. fic as a female space. comment by Nele Noppe

OT: This deserves some kind of award for 'Quote Most Likely To End Up In The History Books'

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:57:13 GMT

“We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission", or so says a company that's developing biomass-eating robots with funding from the Pentagon.

Project update: data sets on dojinshi and fanfics now public

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 20:57:08 GMT

The data sets that (will) contain all info extracted from dojinshi and fanfic samples are now publicly available; updates made to them will show up at once. These sets will be the basis for a comparison of Japanese and English-language fanworks later on. Links are in the right-hand menu on the main site.

The data sets are being compiled using Zoho Creator, a spiffy online database application that's easy to use and tweak for non-experts. It also has a good mobile interface, allowing ridiculously easy data input while on the go. (Perhaps not the most useful thing since the wheel, but close enough for me. No more scribbling on the back of beer mats or hands and then wasting time re-typing ideas, when they haven't been lost altogether in that space where loose bits of paper go to die.)

With the data sets out there, this research can finally be called an open notebook science project. Yay :) In very generalized terms, that means all data produced while researching are made public online, in as close to real time as possible, in the assumption that this will speed up the spread of knowledge and help other researchers avoid unnecessarily repeating the work and the mistakes of colleagues. Check out this post at Digital Humanities or Jean-Claude Bradley's UsefulChem blog for more details on the principle. I tried applying it during my first now-dead research project a couple of years back; then, I lacked the knowledge and the time to carry it out properly. Now I've finally managed to both use web tools for absolutely everything research-related and aggregate the data created with those varied tools on one main website. Random research ideas via Twitter, data from samples and glossary lists via Zoho Creator, annotated references via Diigo, project updates and other thoughts via the blog, and assorted information stuffed into the Drupal CMS. It took just about forever to make all that work together in ways that are both sensible and not fatally complicated. The final frontier will be making all that aggregated stuff full-text searchable from one and the same search box.

(Great fun, but the point of all that for other researchers working in the same field as I is debatable, yes. Very few people will have both the time and the inclination to slog through thousands of database entries, blog posts, papers, tweets and annotated bookmarks, particularly this early in the project, when everything is still half-finished at best. Nevertheless, I think the principles behind open notebook science are worth the effort even if the results may not be incredibly usable at once. It's very much a work in progress: these research results can definitely be made more accessible and more useful for more people, and I'll continue to work on that.)

Oh look, there's the point of the humanities

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:09:15 GMT

Via @tinkerbill on Twitter: an organization in Wisconsin is trying to remove a book about a gay teenager from a library and literally burn it, on the grounds that it is "explicitly vulgar, racial [sic] and anti-Christian". Impressive. These concerned citizens clearly have a great deal of experience at speaking out against the racialiminosity that still pervades our culture.

Elsewhere, Avalon's Willow describes how total ignorance about other cultures causes people to completely miss instances of whitewashing and other forms of racism. All too many are incapable of interpreting what happens around them, for no reason other than an utter lack of relevant knowledge about the societies they are a part of.

For all those who like to question the purpose of the humanities, and the humanities people who find it hard to articulate a solid answer: that was it. Students and researchers in the humanities clarify what human beings say, do, and create, in a manner that is understandable for other human beings who belong to a different group. We look for ways to educate people about other people. We translate people so that others will be able to understand them as fellow humans, take an interest in them, and hopefully grasp the importance of learning, learning, and learning all through their lives. It's unfortunate that so many don't see the relevancy of humanities research and study. It's beyond sad that so many of those actually engaged in said research and study don't see the point of what they're doing, either.

(The concept of area studies as "translating" another culture was suggested to me by someone on the racism_101 LJ community during a discussion on cultural appropriation, but I can't find the link anymore. If anyone recognizes his/her words here, please give me a nudge.)

Fic rec: Lunch and other obscenities

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:35:24 GMT

'Lunch and other obscenities' is a delightful Star Trek reboot fic that focuses on how roommates Uhura and Gaila learn to cope with their rather substantial cultural differences. Gaila's portrayal feels incredibly sympathetic and real. She's outgoing, confident, and looks forward to living in a society that's entirely new to her. Soon, the realities of dealing with a set of vastly different customs get to her, and she becomes terribly lonely until she and Uhura figure out how to respect each other.

I'd like every one of our Belgian students who goes to spend a year in Japan to read this fic, or something like it, and read it again once they've actually been there for a couple of months. Most of those students, like others before them, choose Japanese Studies because they love Japan or some aspect of it. The first couple of weeks spent in Japan on a government scholarship are like a dream come true. After a while, the novelty starts to wear off and it becomes obvious that some Japanese customs are so far removed from what we've been taught in Belgium that it's an incredible chore to try and respect them. (It doesn't even have to be anything big; the most insignificant thing can start grating on you after a while. For some reason I truly don't get in restrospect, I found the prohibition on eating while walking too much to handle and deliberately munched potato chips while strolling around in the street as a petty act of rebellion.)

At that point, you need to choose between actively working to understand the mechanics behind these apparently crazy customs that bug you so, or saying "Fuck it" and just enjoying the year in Japan in whatever way works out for you, for instance by associating only with people who won't take obvious offense at a freewheeling attitude. We can afford to do the latter. Most of us study in Japan while supported by one-year government scholarships that won't be terminated if we act up, unless we do something incredibly disturbing. We're more or less untouchable; we're not foreign workers whose livelihood, safety, and home could be compromised if they refuse to conform to 'Japanese' societal norms. For us, conforming or not conforming is a real choice.

It's hard to try and get the hang of a society that, however welcoming, seems completely alien in so many situations. The first couple of months I spent in my university's archery club were very difficult: I was the only non-Japanese there, I didn't understand what the other members were saying three quarters of the time, and I could never figure out the appropriate response to a situation. For example, the others kept inviting me to after-training meetups in a nearby restaurant, but I always refused because my finances wouldn't support eating out almost daily. It took me forever to realize that the older club members always took up the juniors' bill, and that my constant refusal to join in this bonding activity was extremely puzzling to my fellow club members. They kept trying to befriend me, bless them, until we all figured out more or less simultaneously that we were having three misunderstandings per minute and just had to ask each other more questions. The rest of the year was bliss. I cannot thank those patient, patient people enough for all they did for me. But for a long time, I was lonely and miserable and felt like I was 'failing' at living in Japan.

When confronted with the harsh realities of truly living with people whose behaviour and expectations can seem utterly outlandish, we can try to take the easy road and evade the challenge entirely. When first confronted with Gaila's seemingly outrageous customs, Uhura's first response is to try and get herself assigned a new and more acceptable roommate. When we go to Japan as Belgian/European/'Western' foreign students, we find ourselves in the extremely privileged position of actually having the option of evading the challenge without having to fear any kind of retribution.

Let's act like adults and make an effort for once in our generally very privileged lives, okay?

(This goes for all of us, but particularly for the male students whose main aim is to meet Japanese girls at student parties. You know who you are. Guys, I can't begin to enumerate on how many levels that is just plain wrong. You're likable and fun individuals, really, but get a clue.)

Twittering random research ideas, website overhaul

Mon, 25 May 2009 15:05:25 GMT

Two years after signing up and then losing interest after a day or so, I finally found a use for Twitter -recording all the small, maybe-insignificant, not-thought-through-in-the-slightest research ideas that come dropping out of the sky every day but are way to insignificant to blog about. I can never seem to blog about anything unless I have a lot of free time and manage to convince myself that I can say something intelligent and relevant about the topic at hand, circumstances that seem to coincide relatively rarely. Anyone interested in hearing five to ten random thoughts of dubious relevancy about Harry Potter dojinshi per day is very welcome to follow me here.

I also did a partial overhaul of the main website. It's still far slower than I'd like, but slightly shinier and easier to navigate. Using Prezi as a sitemap/visual representation of my research gets more fun every day -try it out for yourself, you won't be disappointed. Tinkering with Drupal is getting easier and easier too. It still takes me hours to figure out how to implement new features and I somehow managed to kill my search function while puttering around with the installation this weekend (fixing it as soon as humanly possible), but I'm learning to Tweak Open Source Software All By Myself To Track And Preserve Everything I Do Online, a goal worth some time and aggravation, I suppose.

Translated erotic dojinshi featuring copyrighted characters "officially" for sale

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:33:28 GMT

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

Cross-posted from the Let's Manga blog. Online store J-List is offering English and French translations of dojinshi by Linda Project (link definitely not safe for work), a circle famous for erotic works featuring, among others, characters from Bleach and Street Fighter.

Since the site, which is based in Japan and ships worldwide, claims in its footer that "J-List only carries legal, legitimate Japanese products that are purchased through normal Japanese distribution channels and/or licensed from the original content creators", I'm very curious about the copyright logistics of this situation.

No matter how well-known Linda Project is, it seems quite unbelievable that they'd have special dispensation from the copyright holders of Bleach to create the kind of material they produce or that J-List has official permission to translate and distribute outside Japan dojinshi featuring Bleach characters. Of course, creating dojinshi without permission from the original copyright holders is nothing special and tacitly condoned. "Legally" distributing "official" translations outside Japan is something else entirely, methinks. I wonder if there's going to be some kind of follow-up on this.

The magical morphing dojinshi paper, part 1: First Version

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 19:00:54 GMT

Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

Late last year I came across a call for papers on fan culture from the most excellent anime and manga research journal Mechademia. It was a bit early in the project for paper writing, but I couldn't resist and wrote up my current theoretical framework and preliminary results on Harry Potter dojinshi and fanfic anyway.

That paper wasn't accepted for publication, but writing it was a great experience: I got large amounts of extremely encouraging feedback from people who'd read the full submission or the part of it I put on LJ and IJ, which helped me uncover several theoretical deficiencies and showed me many fascinating new ways of looking at the results. Many, many thanks to everyone who so graciously took the time to send their comments.

Since my theoretical framework and preliminary results are being fine-tuned at a very fast rate now while I prepare for a large-scale experiment, this paper finished early in January will just end up outdated by sitting on my computer for months until I find another suitable CFP to submit it to. So I'm making the original available for download and will re-post sections from it as I rewrite and improve them. (A wiki page would be good for keeping track of changes made so I'll probably use that as well, but there's a few technical issues to solve first.) Here's the pdf:

James loves Severus, but only in Japan. 'Harry Potter' in Japanese and English-language fanwork

Enjoy.

ETA: everything on the main site of the project is published under a CC license, and so is this pdf.

To read, read and re-read: The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:47:25 GMT

Had two interesting discussions today, one extremely vexing exchange about depictions of women in the media and another far more constructive talk about race (on the ways in which white Japanese Studies researchers may be influenced by their white privilege while studying the Japanese people). Since I'm busy getting a much-needed education about both feminism and racism right now, I ended up revisiting Audre Lorde's "The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House" speech. It's still mind-blowing and I still can't believe I managed to spend so many years in so-called 'higher education' without ever being introduced to anything even remotely like it. The part that speaks to me the most today:

Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance, and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns.

Yes. This. This.

Please excuse lack of lj-cut in last post

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 08:19:02 GMT

My apologies for the lack of a cut in the last post. It's an automated post from Diigo, and while this is a great service usually, it screwed up that post enough to make it resistant against all attempts at inserting a cut. Won't happen again.

Weekly bookmarks and highlights (weekly)

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 23:30:34 GMT

The classification for 攻め[seme] and 受け[uke] « Japanese words of anime fans, by anime fans, for anime fans
Tags: boys_love, dojinshi, terminology
terri_testing: The Keeper of the Keys: Harry Potter meta
Very interesting analysis of Dumbledore's motives, starting from why he sent Hagrid to introduce Harry to the Wizarding World instead of a more dependable and level-headed faculty member. Unlikely that this is how JKR envisioned it, but the analysis makes so much sense and is so well-supported by canon evidence that it sounds far more likely than JKR's own interpretation of Dumbledore. Gives a whole different meaning to 'creating a monster': the author's idea of the character seems far less reasonable than the readers' here, and it's not pretty.
Tags: dumbledore, narrative, characters, hagrid, snape, harry_potter
Bring Forth the Best Robes
Looks at Snape from a very emphatically religious perspective. Not sure what to think of that, personally, but it may give me some good ideas. To buy.
Tags: books, snape, characters, religion, to_buy
Re-read The Sorcerer's Stone Today! An Unauthorized Guide
Has some fun parts/theories, but fans have gone much farther. Will probably just read parts online.
Tags: books, narrative, harry_potter, to_read
Critical Perspectives on Harry Potter
Looks very interesting. Buy instead of hurt eyes staring at screen.
Tags: to_buy, harry_potter, snape, morality, religion
Think Global, Fear Local: Sex, Violence, and Anxiety in Contemporary Japan
by David Leheny, on views of/communication about sexuality in Japan
Tags: academic, books, enjo_kosai, sexual_content, media, manga, law, children
mary_j_59 - 19th-century Mores (yay!)
Tags: harry_potter, snape, race, motherhood, foreigners
- Snape is the head ot Slytherin house, and that house has a foreign taint; while all the other founders of Hogwarts have good Anglo Saxon names, Salazar Slytherin shares a Christian name with a Portuguese dictator. Naturally, Slytherin must be the “evil” house. Then there are the foreign students who participate in the tournament in GOF.
- Worse yet, they have no compunction about "cheating" humans, and have, it seems, started several wars. This picture of the goblins combines several of the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes.
Snapedom - If we carry through on the racism/prejudice equivalency...
Tags: harry_potter, snape, race
- Is that part of what James meant when he said it was that Severus existed? He added "if you know what I mean", which is the nod-nod, wink-wink of a racist, roughly equivalent to the loaded statements characters in Seinfeld used to make about homosexuals
Snapedom - Still Further Thoughts on Prejudice in the Potterverse and Snape's Worst Memory
Tags: snape, lily, race, harry_potter
- Severus was being ABUSED. TORTURED, for crying out loud. Severus broke. And Severus later tried to make amends, only to be kicked while he was down. It is just amazing to me that so many people cannot or will not see that this matters in the moral calculus. And it is a perfect example of why we need to stop viewing this scene solely through the filter of "racism" and all the connotations and baggage that holds for each of us: The prejudice against Severus, based on class, appearance, House affiliation, and so on, exhibited in this scene is just as morally and ethically objectionable as the prejudice against Lily based on her circumstances of birth.
  
  I refuse to blame the young man for breaking under torture.
- To see Lily alone as right and Severus alone as wrong is to miss the bigger picture of multiple bigotries that interweave and permeate the social and relational dynamics at Hogwarts and in the larger wizarding world--and in our own. Racism, sexism, classism, status-ism, affluence-ism, beauty-ism: It's all connected.
Snapedom - October Challenge: Severus and the Marauders
Tags: snape, harry_potter, bullying
- Linguistic violence is never so manifest as in all the corrections, momentary or long-lasting, to which dominated speakers, in a desperate effort towards correction, consciously or unconsciously subject the stigmatized aspects of their pronunciation, their vocabulary (with all the forms of euphemism) and their syntax; or in the confusion which makes them `lose their means', rendering them incapable of `finding their words', as if they had been suddenly dispossessed of their own language.
  (bolding mine)
  
  This is exactly what happens to Snape.
- According to Bourdieu (from the same source as the quote above):
  
  Quote:
  Symbolic domination really begins when the misrecognition (méconnaissance) implied by recognition (reconnaissance) leads those who are dominated to apply the dominant criteria of evaluation to their own practices
  (bolding mine)
  
  Snape succumbs.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of fanfic forensics group favorite links are here.

New bookmarks 02/09/2009

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:30:13 GMT

The classification for 攻め[seme] and 受け[uke] « Japanese words of anime fans, by anime fans, for anime fans
Tags: boys_love, dojinshi, terminology

Posted from Diigo. The rest of fanfic forensics group favorite links are here.

Art: One for the birds, two for the wolves

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 18:42:18 GMT

Drawn for rakina and previously posted in Snarry Swap.

Title: One for the birds, two for the wolves
Pairing: Snarry
Rating: PG-13 for a tiny bit of gore
Warning(s): blood, but not Harry's or Snape's
A/N: Illustration for the opening scene of Rakina's "Into the Green". The moment -the very incoherent and drawn-out moment, in this piece- when the flying you-know-what gets its talons into you-know-who, causing lots of flying blood and shocking our heroes. Picture makes no sense whatsoever if you haven't read the story. Go! Read!

On various kinds of personal fail

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 21:23:10 GMT

Couldn't concentrate on work and ended up reading stuff on fandom_wank all day long. Now now, FW is very educational as well as amusing. Maybe I'd spend less time chewing on my own toes if I wondered "How would this look on FW?" every time I was gearing up to say/do something that might be vaguely significant.

I've spent a lot of time following the racefail debate and realizing how totally clueless I am on pretty much every topic it touches upon. I'm going to go do my homework and not mention this again until I know what I'm talking about. Check it out if you haven't heard of it. rydra_wong has tons of relevant links. Combing through ithiliana 's posts throughout the last few weeks may be a good starting point too -her thoughts on the debate are pretty helpful for understanding what's going on.

And I finally got around to changing my icon; the old one contained an image from a dojinshi, and I kept telling myself I was going to try and contact whoever drew it but never actually did. Bad stupid lazy bad. The crappy new icon's barely legible, but at least ethically created. A big thank you to Anne Rice for her inspiring words of wisdom.