Reading, writing, and female subjectivity: Gender in Japanese comics (manga) for girls (shoujo)

My dissertation analyzes shoujo manga as one of the dominant literary discourses of gender ideology in Japan. The purpose of this study is not only to examine how this genre has been constructed but also to unveil how the term shoujo has performed to reinforce and disrupt the concept of femininity in both authorship and readership. I examine the evolution of this genre, starting from a period of complicity with the gender ideology through changes resulting from the impact of second-wave Western feminism and continuing into the present.; Shoujo manga emerged in the late 1940s as a category for female readers. In the 1970s, shoujo manga experienced a shift, in which shoujo characters disappeared. This shift offered the dynamic performance of the term shoujo where the concept of "nothingness" appeared as a part of women's existence and strategy to resist the male-dominant code, in contrast to the Western feminist notion which views nothingness as signifying women's absent bodies and silenced voices. Shoujo manga not only introduced male protagonists, but also utilized shoujo's invisibility to disrupt its conventionally gendered textual mode, introducing taboo concepts for shoujo such as sexuality. This disturbs the traditional notion of shoujo as a heterosexual girl without libidinal agency.; The term shoujo in shoujo manga is not the same citation of the same context for every reader and writer. In this respect, I use Judith Butler's concept of gender performativity.{09}Including both normative and taboo subjects relating to shoujo, the term shoujo changes its signification in terms of gender. Japanese teenaged girls are not the only ones who can enjoy shoujo manga: others can also participate in it because they can "act" the term shoujo, by writing it, reading it, or imagining it. Male characters often show us another form of shoujo, not imposing a masculine code upon us but parodying the code. Shoujo in shoujo manga acts like an item of clothing which anyone can wear, but the way of wearing it creates an individuality and sometimes works as subversion, a process which never lets the person look the same as before.