scholarly journals Westernization and The Transmogrification of Sailor Moon

Author(s):  
Rhea Ashley Hoskin

Sailor Moon, a Japanese series grounded in manga and anime, began airing translations in the West throughout the 1990s. The series provided what could be interpreted as resistance to dichotomous conceptualizations of sexuality, sex and gender. The focus of this article is the set of challenges presented by the genderqueer characters in Sailor Moon and how Westernization and English translations have worked to erase and re-write queer identities. Arguably, Sailor Moon acts as a site to play out the contextualities and complexities of sexuality, sex and gender identities. To name Sailor Moon characters in Western specific terms would be at the expense of reducing the complexity of their identities to a categorical system whose boundaries detract and limit meaning. Queer characters in Sailor Moon are not translatable into dichotomous Western thought - categories fail us and, through their enforcement, the depth of meaning and the complexities of queer identities/desires are lost in translation. Working within Western binary systems, categories and language, many of these identities appear contradictory and incoherent. Sailor Moon characters offer a re-envisioning of identities that is not limited by Western binaric thought and cannot be easily pegged within the heterosexual matrix.

Author(s):  
Jane Shaw

The churches of the Anglican Communion discussed issues of sex and gender throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Arguments about gender focused on the ordination of women to the diaconate, priesthood, and episcopate. Debates about sexuality covered polygamy, divorce and remarriage, and homosexuality. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, these debates became intensely focused on homosexuality and were particularly fierce as liberals and conservatives responded to openly gay bishops and the blessing and marriage of same-sex couples. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the sex and gender debates had become less acrimonious, the Anglican Communion had not split on these issues as some feared, but the ‘disconnect’ between society and the Church, at least in the West, on issues such as the Church of England’s prevarication on female bishops and opposition to gay marriage, had decreased the Church’s credibility for many.


Author(s):  
Mary Robertson

Growing Up Queer explores what it is like being young and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer (LGBTQ) in the United States today. Using interviews and ethnographic research conducted at an LGBTQ youth drop-in center, it shows how young people understand their sexual and gender identities, their interest in queer media, and the role that family plays in their lives. The young people who participated in this research are among the first generation to embrace queer identities as kids and teens, and Growing Up Queer shows how both sexual and gender identities are formed through complicated, ambivalent processes, as opposed to the natural characteristics one is born with. In addition to showing how youth understand their identities, Growing Up Queer describes how young people navigate queerness within a culture in which being gay is the “new normal.” Using Sara Ahmed’s concept of queer orientation, it argues that being queer is not just about one’s sexual and/or gender identity but is also understood through intersecting identities including race, class, ability, and more. By showing how society accepts some kinds of LGBTQ-identified people while rejecting others, Growing Up Queer provides evidence of queerness as a site of social inequality. The book moves beyond an oversimplified examination of teenage sexuality and shows, through the voices of young people themselves, the exciting yet complicated terrain of queer adolescence.


2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-60
Author(s):  
Gust A. Yep ◽  
Sage E. Russo ◽  
Ryan M. Lescure

Offering a captivating exploration of seven-year-old Ludovic Fabre’s struggle against cultural expectations of normative boyhood masculinity, Alain Berliner’s blockbuster Ma Vie en Rose exposes the ways in which current sex and gender systems operate in cinematic representations of nonconforming gender identities. Using transing as our theoretical framework to investigate how gender is assembled and reassembled in and across other social categories such as age, we engage in a close reading of the film with a focus on Ludovic’s gender performance. Our analysis reveals three distinct but interrelated discourses—construction, correction, and narration—as the protagonist and Ludovic’s family and larger social circle attempt to work with, through, and against transgression of normative boyhood masculinity. We conclude by exploring the implications of transing boyhood gender performances.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Marshall

The study of gendered interaction online grows out of studies of gendered interaction off-line and will probably be found to be a cultural variable changing with off-line gender behaviour in different social groupings. However, this does not dispose of the issues of gender’s influences on online behaviour, or of whether gender behaviour online is transformed in relation to behaviour off-line. The relevance of gender may vary in different contexts: with class, religion, place, proportions, type of online forum, topic of discussion, and so on. These contexts could overwhelm gender identities existing outside them and their effects need to be investigated. Power ratios between people of various genders may also vary within different contexts and cannot be assumed in advance. Gender both enables and restricts behaviour; it is neither merely positive nor merely negative. In the West (at least), gender seems to be constantly in flux and interrogation, and it is not surprising if such interrogations and uncertainties occur online. Despite this interrogation, gender in off-line life seems to be treated as an essential part of a person’s being or identity, and it guides reaction to others.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 1052-1062
Author(s):  
Dan Cassino ◽  
Yasemin Besen-Cassino

AbstractSince the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, men have been consistently less likely to report wearing a protective face mask. There are several possible reasons for this difference, including partisanship and gender identity. Using a national live-caller telephone survey that measures gender identity, we show that men's gender identities are strongly related to their views of mask wearing, especially when gender identity is highly salient to the individual. The effects of this interaction of sex and gender are shown to be separate from the effects of partisanship. While partisanship is a significant driver of attitudes about face masks, within partisan groups, men who report “completely” masculine gender identities are very different from their fellow partisans.


2008 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Tarocco

AbstractThe Treatise on the Mahāyāna Awakening of Faith, an indigenous Chinese composition written in the guise of an Indian Buddhist treatise, is one of the most influential texts in the history of East Asian Buddhism. Its outline of the doctrines of buddha nature (foxing), buddha bodies (foshen), and one mind (yixin), among others, served from the medieval period onwards as one of the main foundations of East Asian Buddhist thought and practice. The Treatise is putatively attributed to the Indian writer Aśvaghoṣa, and its current Chinese version was traditionally conceived of as a translation from an original Sanskrit text. In the course of the twentieth century, however, many important scholars of Buddhism have called into question the textual history of the Treatise. Even if the specific circumstances of its creation are still largely unknown, the view that the Treatise is an original Chinese composition (not necessarily written by a native Chinese) is now prevalent among scholars. Meanwhile, and for more than one hundred years, the text has also become a source of knowledge of Buddhism in the West thanks to a number of English translations. After examining the early textual history of the two existing versions of the text, this article will offer some examples of its modern appropriation by a novel group of readers and interpreters, an appropriation that took place during the first decades of the twentieth century amidst efforts to re-envision Chinese and East Asian Buddhist history and the place of Buddhism in modern society.


Author(s):  
Ana Huber

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the new menstrual terminology in the context of certain principles of Judith Butler's gender theory. Over the last few years, it has been emphasized, in public and academic discourse, that menstruation is not exclusively a feminine question, but it also affects people who do not feel or identify as cis women. It is about trans, intersexual, genderfluid, and non-binary people. Menstrual movements are formed to plead the linguistic reformulation of menstrual terminology and its gender neutrality. We will briefly expose the elements of Judith Butler's gender theory that are relevant to this topic. We will focus on Butler's thesis that sex and gender are socially, performatively constructed categories and that language is the main field of its origin and reformulation. We will study the origins and causes of this terminology, its consequences, and how the new menstrual concepts affect the redefinition of female and gender identities in general, considering the arguments of the trans movement and the arguments of radical feminism.


2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 67-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Johnson ◽  
Steph Lawler

This article explores how romantic love, desire, and social class are mutually influencing factors in the formation and enactment of heterosexual intimate relationships. Using qualitative interview data from a study of heterosexuality and love we analyse some of the ways in which social class structures love relationships and, furthermore, how such relationships are a site in which class is ‘done’. In particular, we explore a central paradox of the heterosexual love relationship: while heterosexuality relies upon the difference it creates in terms of sex and gender one other form of difference - class difference - is understood to be an obstacle to, if not antithetical to, a ‘successful’ relationship. Indeed, as we will show, this form of difference, for some people at least, is one that must be guarded and defended against.


2021 ◽  
pp. 194675672110257
Author(s):  
C Scott Jordan

Love has literally been debated to death by thinkers since time immemorial. This article seeks to reframe the discourse on love to restore life and appreciation for its complex beauty and free it from the hopeless utopian project contemporary times have made it into. Likewise, the over-categorization of Western thought has doomed the concepts of sex and gender. By exploring our increasingly postnormal world, and in light of the recent pandemic, this article seeks to reopen the discussion of love, sex, and gender in our precarious times so that we can better understand our identities and pre-empt future conflicts and plot navigations for other impasses occurring beside and simultaneous to the quest for love. By analyzing the concepts of the Manufactured Normalcy Field and the postnormal tilt, we can open up new opportunities to challenge the conventional definitions and structures that hold back society from attaining more accepting, understanding, and preferred futures.


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