When girls draw the sword: Dansō, cross-dressing and gender subversion in Japanese shōjo manga

This article focuses on the representation of FtM cross-dresser characters in Japanese shōjo manga and their gender performances. The first cross-dresser heroine in manga is Sapphire, the main character from 1953s Ribon no kishi. Following this first example, similar characters have continued to appear in shōjo manga, obtaining very positive responses from the audience. While they are seen as rebellious characters challenging stereotypical views on gender in the Japanese society, the narratives where they appear do not always fully explore this aspect. The aim of this article is to investigate the role of cross-dresser heroines in manga as a tool to reinforce the sociocultural patriarchal status quo and as a different gender embodiment outside stereotyped femininity. It argues that the possibility for those characters to occupy powerful positions and succeed is related to masculinity, symbolized by the sword, stressing how ultimately their revolutionary potential is weakened and limited.

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“I Am Not Good at Any of This.” Playing with Homoeroticism in The Arabian Nights

Religions ◽

10.3390/rel12070480 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 12 (7) ◽

pp. 480

Author(s):

Frank G. Bosman

Keyword(s):

Gender Roles ◽

Status Quo ◽

The Self ◽

French Translation ◽

The West ◽

Arabian Nights ◽

Safe Environment ◽

The Subject ◽

Cross Dressing ◽

And Gender

The story collection known in the West as The Arabian Nights or One Thousand and One Nights, is famous, among other things, for its erotic playfulness. This eroticism was (and is) one of the key reasons for its continuous popularity after Antoine Galland’s French translation in 1704. The Arabian Nights includes, besides traditional, heterosexual acts, play, and desires, examples of homoerotic playfulness—even though we must tread lightly when using such Western concepts with an oriental text body such as this one. The homoerotic playfulness of The Arabian Nights is the subject of this article. By making use of a text-immanent analysis of two of the Nights’ stories—of Qamar and Budûr and of Alî Shâr and Zumurrud—the author of this article focuses on the reversal of common gender roles, acts of cross-dressing, and, of course, homoerotic play. He will argue that these stories provide a narrative safe environment in which the reader is encouraged to “experiment” with non-normative sexual and gender orientations, leaving the dominant status quo effectively and ultimately unchallenged, thus preventing the (self-proclaimed) defenders of that status quo from feeling threatened enough to actively counter-act the experiment.

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Attendance and Gender Relations on Grades and Other Aspects

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE TEACHING AND EDUCATION ◽

10.22437/ijolte.v2i3.5907 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 2 (3) ◽

pp. 346-372

Author(s):

Andy Chung ◽

Graham Harding ◽

Joonhong Kim ◽

Koot Van Wyk

Keyword(s):

First Year ◽

Freshman English ◽

First Semester ◽

National University ◽

Table Talk ◽

Gender Performances ◽

And Gender ◽

First Year University ◽

Better Than

Three aspects prompted this study: why are females in first year university in a countryside campus performing better than males as opposed to high school where the reverse is the case? Why are there waves of performance increases semester by semester? Why is there in the second semester always an increase in performance over the first semester? For this matter the researchers took a number of participants in total over the period 2012-2016, namely 3,963 students in Freshman English at a countryside campus (Sangju) for Kyungpook National University as their target. In the year 2016, only the first semester was calculated in this research. Three aspects were considered as far as data is concerned: attendance variables, grade variables and gender. Performances were always better in the second semester over the first and females almost always outperformed the males. What also came up as secondary considerations, are questions whether the environment like nature and the role of ‘table- talk’ of parents reverberating or not the GDP of the country over the period may have had an effect on the students. It was found when the GDP went up the students’ performance took a break but when the GDP is low the students increased their focus and performed better as their grades indicated. These last aspects were just mere observations and should be carried out with further investigation elsewhere. The attendance of females was always showing better attendance results than males for Freshmen at Sangju Campus, South Korea. While the GDP dropped and rose through the years investigated, the attendance of the students did not display a serious rise and fall but remained almost unchanged.

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NURSERY POETICS: AN EXAMINATION OF LYRIC REPRESENTATIONS OF THE CHILD IN TENNYSON'S “THE PRINCESS”

Victorian Literature and Culture ◽

10.1017/s1060150307051595 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 35 (2) ◽

pp. 489-500

Author(s):

Anna Jane Barton

Keyword(s):

Modern Society ◽

Status Quo ◽

Third Way ◽

Men And Women ◽

Contemporary Issue ◽

Cross Dressing ◽

The One ◽

Narrative Poem ◽

Sufficient Stimulus

“THE PRINCESS,”TENNYSON's narrative poem about a radically feminist princess and a cross-dressing prince, framed by an imagined argument between Victorian men and women concerning the role of women in modern society, has, understandably, formed the central text in a number of articles about nineteenth-century gender poetics. Critics have been eager to engage with the fictional authors of the narrative, casting Tennyson as, on the one hand, a bastion of Victorian patriarchy, and on the other a subversive feminist. Donald E. Hall, in an essay, published in his collectionFixing Patriarchy, is the most persuasive advocate for a masculinist Tennyson, presenting “The Princess” as undertaking a project of “subsumption,” in which the words and demands of the women are “ingested, modified and incorporated by the patriarch” (46). In an article entitled: “Marginalized Musical Interludes: Tennyson's Critiques of Conventionality in ‘The Princess,’“ Alisa Clapp-Itnyre provides a representative case for the defence, presenting the lyrics as “pivotal feminist commentaries” that work to interrupt and deconstruct the male narrative (229). Herbert Tucker locates a third way, identifying the poem as a “textbook Victorian compromise” (Tennyson352). He argues that it “avoids taking a position on a hotly debated issue by taking up any number of positions” and characterizes this compromise, not as a commitment to portraying a complex contemporary issue with integrity, but as the result of Tennyson's not caring particularly either way: “neither the rallying of Victorian feminism” he writes, “nor the patriarchal status quo was sufficient stimulus to commitment” (352). In order to open up a new line of enquiry into “The Princess” I would like to look beyond the gender questions that continue to be batted back and forth amongst Tennyson's critics and to offer the figure of the child as an alternative and more powerful cultural, aesthetic and professional stimulus to Tennyson's poem.

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