“But I am still a girl after all”: A Discourse Analysis of Femininities in Popular Japanese Manga Comics

<p>Where progression towards gender equality is concerned, Japan lags behind most other developed countries with its culture which heavily values tradition. However, its traditional gender roles may be changing as the birth-rate declines and women take up the increasing opportunities opening up for them in the workplace. Within the contexts of these tensions between traditionalism and change, this study investigated the constructions of femininity in popular Japanese manga, one of the most consumed forms of media in Japan which also enjoys global popularity. As such, this study approached manga as a potentially important resource for identifying the available meanings of being a young Japanese woman in contemporary Japanese society. To date, little research has examined manga, and much of the available literature has used content analysis or focused solely on superheroine characters and the romantic interest. As a point of difference, this research implemented discursive analyses and sought to identify a range of femininities made available to readers in manga. It examined four titles within two genres of manga: the shounen genre targeted to male audiences and the shoujo manga, targeted at a female audience. The research employed a feminist, poststructuralist framework to identify the ways in which constructions of femininity in manga drew on dominant Japanese discourses of femininity as well as more globally produced postfeminist discourses associated with popular culture. The study found that manga overall produced femininities within both traditional and contemporary postfeminist discourses. Analyses also highlighted the limited meanings of femininity made available to young female audiences of shoujo manga through dominant postfeminist, empty representations of ‘empowerment’ whilst also underlining the problematic dominance of sexist portrayals of young women in shounen manga. Further, the storylines of shoujo manga were found to be replete with romantic narratives, prioritising romance and marriage as a means to happiness. These findings may identify the implications of such femininities on how young Japanese women view themselves, and are viewed by others globally.</p>

“But I am still a girl after all”: A Discourse Analysis of Femininities in Popular Japanese Manga Comics

<p>Where progression towards gender equality is concerned, Japan lags behind most other developed countries with its culture which heavily values tradition. However, its traditional gender roles may be changing as the birth-rate declines and women take up the increasing opportunities opening up for them in the workplace. Within the contexts of these tensions between traditionalism and change, this study investigated the constructions of femininity in popular Japanese manga, one of the most consumed forms of media in Japan which also enjoys global popularity. As such, this study approached manga as a potentially important resource for identifying the available meanings of being a young Japanese woman in contemporary Japanese society. To date, little research has examined manga, and much of the available literature has used content analysis or focused solely on superheroine characters and the romantic interest. As a point of difference, this research implemented discursive analyses and sought to identify a range of femininities made available to readers in manga. It examined four titles within two genres of manga: the shounen genre targeted to male audiences and the shoujo manga, targeted at a female audience. The research employed a feminist, poststructuralist framework to identify the ways in which constructions of femininity in manga drew on dominant Japanese discourses of femininity as well as more globally produced postfeminist discourses associated with popular culture. The study found that manga overall produced femininities within both traditional and contemporary postfeminist discourses. Analyses also highlighted the limited meanings of femininity made available to young female audiences of shoujo manga through dominant postfeminist, empty representations of ‘empowerment’ whilst also underlining the problematic dominance of sexist portrayals of young women in shounen manga. Further, the storylines of shoujo manga were found to be replete with romantic narratives, prioritising romance and marriage as a means to happiness. These findings may identify the implications of such femininities on how young Japanese women view themselves, and are viewed by others globally.</p>

Vocal modulation in human mating and competition

The human voice is dynamic, and people modulate their voices across different social interactions. This article presents a review of the literature examining natural vocal modulation in social contexts relevant to human mating and intrasexual competition. Altering acoustic parameters during speech, particularly pitch, in response to mating and competitive contexts can influence social perception and indicate certain qualities of the speaker. For instance, a lowered voice pitch is often used to exert dominance, display status and compete with rivals. Changes in voice can also serve as a salient medium for signalling a person's attraction to another, and there is evidence to support the notion that attraction and/or romantic interest can be distinguished through vocal tones alone. Individuals can purposely change their vocal behaviour in attempt to sound more attractive and to facilitate courtship success. Several findings also point to the effectiveness of vocal change as a mechanism for communicating relationship status. As future studies continue to explore vocal modulation in the arena of human mating, we will gain a better understanding of how and why vocal modulation varies across social contexts and its impact on receiver psychology. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part I)’.

‘We went from the anonymity of the internet into my private WhatsApp’: Rituals of transition among dating app users in Berlin

This article focusses on the courtship rituals and practices of intimacy among young dating app users, aged between 20 and 33, in Berlin. Dating app users participate in ‘rituals of transition’ as they signal mutual interest and heightened intimacy by moving conversations from dating apps to social media messaging platforms such as WhatsApp. These rituals of transition play a far more prominent role in signalling romantic interest than the matching-mechanisms inherent in the design of dating apps. Drawing on ethnographic data incorporating 36 semistructured interviews and 45 chat interviews across three popular dating apps, Tinder, Bumble and OkCupid, the study finds that users code the apps installed on their smartphones as hosting spheres of varying intimacy. These spheres are substantiated through the infrastructure of notifications on users’ devices. Rather than drastically altering how users communicate across different apps, rituals of transition are a key moment of communication in themselves.

Predicting Romantic Interest during Early Relationship Development: A Preregistered Investigation using Machine Learning

There are massive literatures on initial romantic attraction and established, “official” relationships. But there is a gap in our knowledge about early relationship development: the interstitial stretch of time in which people experience rising and falling romantic interest for partners who have the potential to—but often do not—become sexual or dating partners. In the current study, 208 single participants reported on 1,065 potential romantic partners across 7,179 data points over seven months. In stage 1 of the analyses, we used machine learning (specifically, Random Forests) to extract estimates of the extent to which different classes of predictors (e.g., individual differences vs. target-specific constructs) accounted for participants’ romantic interest in these potential partners (12% vs. 36%, respectively). Also, the machine learning analyses offered little support for perceiver × target moderation accounts of compatibility: the meta-theoretical perspective that some types of perceivers are likely to experience greater romantic interest for some types of targets. In stage 2, we used traditional multilevel-modeling approaches to depict growth-curve analyses for each predictor retained by the machine learning models; robust (positive) main effects emerged for many variables, including sociosexuality, gender, the potential partner’s positive attributes (e.g., attractive, exciting), attachment features (e.g., proximity seeking, separation distress), and perceived interest. We also directly tested (and found no support for) ideal partner preference-matching effects on romantic interest, which is one popular perceiver × target moderation account of compatibility. We close by discussing the need for new models and perspectives to explain how people assess romantic compatibility.

Introduction

The Introduction explores the intertwined histories of romantic criticism and psychoanalysis and considers how Wordsworth might be productively read with and against the legacy of Freud’s writing. It traces the ongoing role of psychoanalytic concepts in romantic criticism, focusing on the particular prominence of trauma. Yet trauma, and its associated methodologies, are precisely what foreclose the notion of unremembered pleasure. By situating Wordsworth’s thinking within a diverse romantic interest in unconsciousness across the nineteenth century, rather than within a genealogy of psychoanalysis, it reads Wordsworth against Freud as a distinct writer of unnoticed experience. By sketching the aesthetic and ethical significance of such experience, it demonstrates the limitations of understanding Wordsworth strictly as a poet of memory. Finally, it considers some questions of terminology and presents an initial account of Wordsworthian retrospection to be developed in subsequent chapters.

Seeing what you want to see: Sexual activation makes potential partners seem more appealing and romantically interested

Recent studies have indicated that activation of the sexual system fosters relationship initiation. In three studies, we expand on this work to investigate whether sexual activation encourages initiating relationship with prospective partners by biasing the way they are perceived. In all studies, participants encountered a potential partner and rated this partner’s attractiveness and romantic interest following sexual activation. Participants’ interest in the partner was self-reported or evaluated by raters. Study 1 revealed that sexual activation led participants to perceive potential partners as more attractive and interested in oneself. Study 2 added to these findings, providing a test of sexual priming rather than more general closeness priming. Mediational analyses in Study 3 indicated that heightened romantic interest mediated the link between sexual activation and perceiving potential partners as more interested in oneself. These findings suggest that sexual activation facilitates relationship initiation by motivating projection of one’s desires onto prospective partners.

Expansive Posture

Much can be gleaned about the affective, cognitive, and motivational states of others by attending to various channels of nonverbal communication. Although there are a variety of ways to organize the body of research on the psychological correlates of nonverbal behavior, researchers in social psychology and communication often distinguish between two dimensions: the hierarchical dimension (status/dominance/power) and the affiliative dimension (liking/romantic interest). Most nonverbal cues have implications for both of these dimensions, and postural expansion is not an exception. Postural expansion includes “enlarging” behaviors such as sitting more erectly, opening up the torso, and extending limbs away from the body. In contrast, postural constriction involves postures that ultimately make an organism appear smaller (such as slumping the shoulders, wrapping limbs around the body, or averting the gaze downward). Numerous researchers have noted the comparative similarity between postural expansion and constriction in humans and, respectively, dominance and submission displays in animals. For example, the bristling of a cat’s fur (piloerection) in response to threat serves to make the animal look larger and more threatening, while the exposure of a dog’s stomach in submission or appeasement serves to make the animal appear smaller, less threatening, or more vulnerable. Substantially more literature has investigated the association between postural expansion and the hierarchical dimension than the affiliative dimension, a bias that is duplicated here. Furthermore, it is important to note that the “hierarchical” literature addresses several related, but unique, questions: (1) How does postural expansion affect perceptions of others’ status/dominance/power? (2) Is postural expansion linked with actual differences in status/dominance/power or other relevant dependent measures? (3) Is postural expansion reliably linked with an important universal nonverbal expression?

Body sway predicts romantic interest in speed dating

Social bonding is fundamental to human society, and romantic interest involves an important type of bonding. Speed dating research paradigms offer both high external validity and experimental control for studying romantic interest in real-world settings. While previous studies focused on the effect of social and personality factors on romantic interest, the role of non-verbal interaction has been little studied in initial romantic interest, despite being commonly viewed as a crucial factor. The present study investigated whether romantic interest can be predicted by non-verbal dyadic interactive body sway, and enhanced by movement-promoting (‘groovy’) background music. Participants’ body sway trajectories were recorded during speed dating. Directional (predictive) body sway coupling, but not body sway similarity, predicted interest in a long-term relationship above and beyond rated physical attractiveness. In addition, presence of groovy background music promoted interest in meeting a dating partner again. Overall, we demonstrate that romantic interest is reflected by non-verbal body sway in dyads in a real-world dating setting. This novel approach could potentially be applied to investigate non-verbal aspects of social bonding in other dynamic interpersonal interactions such as between infants and parents and in non-verbal populations including those with communication disorders.

Blind at First Sight: The Role of Distinctively Accurate and Positive First Impressions in Romantic Interest

Viewing other people with distinctive accuracy—the degree to which personality impressions correspond with targets’ unique characteristics—often predicts positive interpersonal experiences, including liking and relationship satisfaction. Does this hold in the context of first dates, or might distinctive accuracy have negative links with romantic interest in such evaluative settings? We examined this question using two speed-dating samples (Sample 1: N = 172, N = 2,407 dyads; Sample 2: N = 397, N = 1,849 dyads). Not surprisingly, positive impressions of potential dating partners were strongly associated with greater romantic interest. In contrast, distinctively accurate impressions were associated with significantly less romantic interest. This association was even stronger for potential partners whose personalities were less romantically appealing, specifically, those lower in extraversion. In sum, on a first date, distinctive accuracy tends to be paired with lower romantic interest. The potential implications of distinctive accuracy for romantic interest and of romantic interest for distinctive accuracy are discussed.