Divergence of Gender Representation: Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl Utena

Authors Avatar

Patricia Lo

Topics in Japanese Anime

Paper #1

Divergence of Gender Representation: Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl Utena

        For the past three decades or so, Japanese anime has offered an array of opportunities for analyzing social structures and gender politics, in particular in relation to the changes and trends occurring one after the other in postmodern Japan. Gender roles are often seen as explicit or underlying themes portrayed in Japanese anime, especially in the genre of Shoujo manga, or otherwise also known as girl manga. Shoujo manga first started off as a creative production by female writers for a female audience and traditionally more orientated towards roles of empowerment, romance and emotional growth, particularly pertaining to female roles and characters. There are respectively two series of anime which can be considered to have blown opened the doors of Shoujo manga in the 1990’s, and they are Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl: Utena respectively. Although themes of gender identities are both explored in these two anime, the portrayal of the composition of these identities, whether it is fluid or hybrid, is quite different. I will attempt to explore the respective composition of gender identities in Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl: Utena, and the setting in which it is composed in, specifically concentrating on female identities, and how each of them utilize their respective theme to portraying gradual shifts in social norms or the defiance of social and gender norms in Japanese society.

        It was a common belief in Japanese anime industry that boys would not read shoujo manga, or watch shoujo manga. However, in 1992, the creation of Sailor Moon (sailor-suited super heroines) blew this preconception away and is considered now as one of the forerunners of shoujo manga that succeeded in generating the type of mass circulation or profits of a television series for boys in Japan: Toei’s Rangers. The success is that although Sailor Moon was intended for a female audience, it was able to expand to a wider fanbase, including boys and older men. One major underlying theme of Sailor Moon is its play on stereotypical gender identities, which proves both desirable and likeable by young females nowadays. Traditionally, in earlier shoujo mangas, females are seen to encompass a more fragile, passive, dependent, and submissive role in a romantic relationship and eventually will become the mother and caretaker of her children and her husband’s needs. She obeys her partner willingly and faithfully and makes no decision of her own.  Males possess the power and the capacity to do everything a female is unable to do. However, Sailor Moon attempts to add power to this traditional female role without destroying it, creating a new female identity that encompasses empowerment, but at the same time, reinforcing the traditional female role as well. The identity of these girly heroes are, as described in the paper “ Sailor Moon: Globalizing Fashion Action”, “ less a hybrid (in which multiple traits and girls fuse together)” (Alison 27), and more fluid in nature, where characters are able to move to and fro a spectrum represented by a more feminine and traditional identity at one end, and a more new-age, independent and stronger role of the female on the other end.

Join now!

In short, the story revolves around five ordinary school- girls who have been given the power to transform into girl-fighting heroes who hold the ability and the strength to save the world from evil monsters. The empowerment of the female, contrasted with relatively weaker male role models, provide us with the shift in the portrayal of the traditional female role. The warriors not only gain physical strength when they transform, their bodies also change to that of a more voluptuous and sexy outlook. The girls can be seen to gain sexual power and domination over their male counterparts too, which ...

This is a preview of the whole essay