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Gynoids and Male Fantasy in East Asian Film and Anime
The South Korean romantic comedy My Sassy Girl achieved major box offce success at home and throughout East and Southeast Asia, and its success has prompted adaptations in several countries. The adaptations reproduce the film's romance formula but vary the components to accord with local culture and conventions. East Asian adaptations may draw upon other variants of the film's main folktale pretext, which audiences may recognise. In contrast, the tale disappears from remakes in cultures where it is not known. A core thematic concern of My Sassy Girl is cultural stereotyping of gender roles. The affect scripts and schemas associated with masculinity and femininity within the culture are evoked, and in turn evoke comparable scripts and schemas in adapting cultures. The disinhibiting behaviour engaged in by the female protagonist, prompted by alcohol, depression, and bereavement, enable a carnivalesque 'time out' in the frst half of the film and challenge the inhibitory regulation of gendered behaviour. However, in the original and its remakes the 'girl' always returns to a femininity more conventional within her culture. My Sassy Girl questions this return to docility by means of a metacinematic mode that is reproduced in most transcultural adaptations: the self-conscious display of the constructedness of cinematic genres, devices and conventions suggests that the outcome is the product of a cultural assumption which requires female rebelliousness to give way to social normality. Metacinema thus reminds viewers that the pleasure of the ending is a constructed effect of which viewers should remain aware.
To displace a character in time is to depict a character who becomes acutely conscious of his or her status as other, as she or he strives to comprehend and interact with a culture whose mentality is both familiar and different in obvious and subtle ways. Two main types of time travel pose a philosophical distinction between visiting the past with knowledge of the future and trying to inhabit the future with past cultural knowledge, but in either case the unpredictable impact a time traveller may have on another society is always a prominent theme. At the core of Japanese time travel narratives is a contrast between self-interested and eudaimonic life styles as these are reflected by the time traveller's activities. Eudaimonia is a 'flourishing life', a life focused on what is valuable for human beings and the grounding of that value in altruistic concern for others. In a study of multimodal narratives belonging to two sets - adaptations of Tsutsui Yasutaka's young adult novella The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and YamazakiMari's manga series Thermae Romae - this article examines how time travel narratives in anime and live action film affirm that eudaimonic living is always a core value to be nurtured.
Hit-Girl, the ultra-violent eleven-year-old character in the 2010 film adaptation of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s comic book Kick-Ass (2008), strongly resembles the Japanese anime/manga characters known as the sentō bishōjo or “beautiful fighting girls.” A comparison of Hit-Girl with the girl assassins of the Japanese series Gunslinger Girl, in both its manga (2002–2012) and anime (2003–04; 2008) versions, highlights the differences between Western and Eastern responses to violence, innocence, and gender performance. All four texts challenge traditional gender binaries with their representations of nurturing masculine individuals and dangerous female children.
There may be a useful parallel between the intense male cultural interest in and production of girl (shōjo/gyaru) characters in modern Japan, particularly in the last two decades of the twentieth century, and the phenomenon of blackface minstrelsy in the north-eastern states of America in the mid-nineteenth century. Between the 1840s and the 1880s white vaudeville entertainers, including a high proportion of Irish men, blacked up with greasepaint, or burnt cork, and adopted comically outsized ‘Negro’ costumes, in which they performed songs, dances, comic dialogues, japery and narrative skits to white audiences. Staged minstrelsy was accompanied by the circulation of plantation songbooks, minstrel theatrical reviews and classical, abolitionist novels. Critics have suggested that this racial cultural language was integral to the emergence of American popular culture. In Japan, reportage, novels, films, animation, pornography and comics about girls have dominated professional and amateur cultural production and news reportage to such a degree that it is not possible to separate the epochal expansion of the media industries in the 1980s and 1990s from the driving attraction to these cultural caricatures. Most contemporary female impersonation by writers, directors and artists in Japan has been indirect: mediated and reproduced through the press and lens rather than through theatre. This article will use the example of blackface minstrelsy as one means to help us think more about the deeper nature of male cultural production and consumption of girl characters in Japan.
Research in the cognitive sciences, including fields such as psychology, linguistics, and the philosophy of mind, can help foster the development of "postclassical" approaches to the study of narrative. At issue are frameworks for narrative research that build on the work of classical, structuralist narratologists but supplement that work with concepts and methods that were unavailable to story analysts such as Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, A. J. Greimas, and Tzvetan Todorov during the heyday of the structuralist revolution. One such framework, or cluster of frameworks, has begun to take shape under the rubric of "cognitive narratology," and in the present essay I hope to contribute to this emergent area of narrative inquiry by drawing on ideas from social psychology to explore the nexus between narrative and mind. Further, whereas cognitive narratologists have focused for the most part on written, literary narratives, my essay aims to broaden the scope of this research by using as a case study a narrative told in face-to-face interaction. Expanding the corpus of narratives on which narratological theories have been based, and making adjustments in the theories according to constraints imposed by medium, genre, or communicative situation, constitute crucial aspects of the shift from classical to postclassical models for narrative study. Thus, although the present paper foregrounds oral narratives of personal experience, cognitive narratology is transmedial in scope; it is concerned with mind-relevant aspects of storytelling practices, wherever—and by whatever means—those practices occur.
The particular strand of social-psychological research from which my essay borrows analytic tools is sometimes referred to as discursive psychology. Theorists working in this tradition draw a distinction between, on the one hand, "cognitivist approaches to language, where texts, sentences and descriptions are taken as depictions of an externally given world, or as realizations of underlying cognitive representations of that world" (Edwards and Potter 8), and, on the other hand, the discursive approach, which treats "discourse not as the product or expression of thoughts or mental states lying behind or beneath it, but as a domain of public accountability in which psychological states are made relevant" in particular contexts of talk (Edwards, "Surface" 41). Thus, whereas cognitivist approaches treat discourse as "1) the input to, or output from, or categories and schemas used in, mental models and processes; and/or 2) a methodological resource for research into mental states and representations" (Edwards, "Surface" 42), by contrast
The focus of discursive psychology is the action orientation of talk and writing . . . We are concerned with the nature of knowledge, cognition and reality: with how events are described and explained, how factual reports are constructed, how cognitive states are attributed. These are defined as discursive topics, things people topicalize or orientate themselves to, or imply, in their discourse . . . [Such topics are] examined in the context of their occurrence as situated and occasioned constructions whose precise nature makes sense, to participants and analysts alike, in terms of the social actions those descriptions accomplish.
In short, if cognitivist approaches view discourse as a window onto underlying mental processes that form a kind of bedrock layer for psychological investigation, the discursive approach studies how the mind is oriented to and accounted for in systematic, norm-governed ways by participants in talk.
As discussed further in section 3 below, analysts working in the tradition of discursive psychology as well as other, related frameworks for inquiry have sought to make a case for what Rom Harré termed the "second cognitive revolution" ("Introduction"). The first cognitive revolution, coinciding with the emergence of cognitive science in the 1950s as an umbrella discipline encompassing research in such fields as psychology, linguistics, computer science, and philosophy (Gardner), marked a shift away from behaviorism to the study of cognition; accordingly, first-wave cognitive science postulated that "there are mental processes 'behind' what people say and do, that these processes are to be classified as 'information processing,' and that the best model for the cognitively active human being is the computer when it is running a program" (Harré, "Introduction" 5; cf. Harré and Gillett 17–34). Although the second cognitive revolution also accepts that there are cognitive processes, it views them as immanent in...
A good-quality external breast prosthesis and prosthesis-fitting service is integral to recovery post-mastectomy. However, this area of care has minimal information or research available. The aim of this study was to investigate women's experience of the provision, fitting, supply and use of breast prostheses in Ireland. Three national surveys were undertaken with women (n = 527), breast care nurses (BCNs) (n = 32) and retail prosthesis fitters (n = 12). The findings identified the importance of the prosthesis for shape, appearance to self, appearance to others, sense of well-being, self-confidence and femininity. Dissatisfaction with weight, comfort and movement of the prosthesis was identified. Cost and travel distance were found to influence the replacement of the prosthesis. Dissatisfaction emerged with the display and choice of products, and brochure availability at the prosthesis fitting. Women preferred to be fitted for the first silicone prosthesis by a BCN in a hospital setting whereas for the replacement prosthesis they preferred a trained fitter at a specialized prosthesis supplier. BCNs and retail fitters identified the need for service guidelines and increased availability of professional development opportunities in prosthesis-fitting. These findings contributed to the development of standards of care for breast prosthesis-fitting services to benefit women and to provide guidelines for those providing the service.
The Japanese Se!f in Cultural Logic Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press
- Takie Lebra
- Sugiyama
Lebra, Takie Sugiyama: The Japanese Se!f in Cultural Logic. Honolulu: University of
Hawai'i Press 2004.-: Identity, Gender, and Status in Japan. Folkestone: Global Oriental 2007.