Androgyny, homosexuality and cross-dressing in manga and anime (better seen in 800 x 600)

 

Very often, in anime and manga, we come across a very pretty person, with fine and delicate features, long hair, full lips, soft movements. While we think about how pretty the young woman is and which of the heroes is going to fall in love with her, we are just baffled to hear her voice and find out that she... is a he! How many times didn’t it happen to me (and probably to you too, dear reader)! The first time I saw Shun, from Saint Seiya , Kurama, from Yu Yu Hakusho , Marron and Mirufu-yui, from Bakuretsu Hunter , only to mention a few, I was sure that they were women. But it also happens the other way around: we see some small, lean boy, shorthaired and with big eyes, a resolute expression and quick movements and only later realize that...  it was a woman! One just has to think of Noa in Patlabor or Haruka in Sailor Moon S.And if this is not enough, think of those characters that just have to go cross-dressing? Men who love to dress like women, as Fisheye in Sailor Super Moon S , or women who prefer the comfort of masculine clothes, as Haruka/Sailor Uranus in Sailor Moon S , are relatively common in manga and anime, so that one starts distrusting everyone and everything about the subject.

Fisheye, from Sailor Moon Super S - it is true, he is a boy!

 

After the initial shock, people soon adapt and think "well, they are just like this, let’s just disregard their gender and see what he/she is capable of". But a question remains: what is the matter with those crazy Japanese authors? After all, why do they insist on including those "queer" characters in manga and anime? Can it be that there are so many gay people in Japan?

Well, here it is necessary to distinguish clearly among three different things that, even if they often go hand in hand, are not the same: androgyny, homosexuality and cross-dressing.

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Androgynous is a person who has both masculine and feminine characteristics, that is, you can’t say at first sight whether she/he is a man or a woman. The concept of androgyny exists since antiquity: a Greek legend said that in the beginning the human being was androgynous, neither man nor woman. Later, for some reason I don’t know (err... I did not have time to check this out properly...), it divided itself into two halves, one male and one female. However, each one of the parts now was incomplete, and spent all its life trying to find the other half in order to regain its former wholeness. From this legend come such expressions as "my better half" or "soul mate" and the idea that each one of us has some other person who completes us walking around out there. Besides that, there is also the psychological concept that each person, regardless of gender, has both a feminine and a masculine side in his/her personality.

Seiya Kou from Sailor Moon Stars is a man who turns into a woman when he changes into a Sailor Scout. He sure has made contact with his feminine side!
 

The androgynous being is, therefore, highly intriguing: firstly, we are not sure of how he/she will react, because he/she does not seem to fit into any of the two "basic models" of behavior, feminine and masculine. Besides that, the androgynous person inspires immense curiosity: how will he/she be like under the clothes? How can that person be both a man and a woman? (actually this would rather be the case with hermaphrodites, beings that ARE both masculine and feminine at the same time. However, we currently use the term “androgynous” for a person who just SEEMS to be both, but "anatomically" is either a man or a woman). And in the third place, androgynous people attract both genders equally and seem comfortable with both, being able to flirt with both men or women without really causing great outrage: after all, he/she can assume one or the other gender or none of the two, depending on the situation and what suits it best.

Besides all this mystery and appeal, there are still several other reasons for the significant presence of androgynous characters in manga and anime, and they all have to do with peculiarities of the Japanese culture. Let’s see some of them.

Refinement and beauty

In the Japanese culture, beauty is strongly associated to small, delicate, slender, thin, calm and soft things. Just think about bamboo, rice paper, ceramics, the very small eyes and mouth of gueixa, about their dolls and miniatures, their flower arrangements. Everything beautiful is calm, small and soft. This also applies to people: the ideal of Japanese classic beauty are the gueixa, who are “molded" to be quiet and delicate, and correspond more or less to the basic feminine figure throughout the world (I am not saying that all the world expect women to be like gueixa, but we do use to associate the concepts of "pretty", "small", "delicate", "soft" to the feminine figure).

In manga and anime we have the possibility of “creating” idealized people, just like we want them to be (and therefore many "emotionally half-unstable" people seem only to be able to fall in love with “bidimensional people”, be they the “everything-goes” little dolls from hentai (pornographic) Japanese magazines or the Playboy magazine “babes”, only to mention the most known cases). On these lines, manga and anime characters are drawn to incarnate the virtues (or vices) more important to the unraveling of the plot. If the most important feature of a character is to be strong, he/she can be drawn in a more rustic mode, as for example, Goku in Dragonball . And if a character is supposed to be refined and beautiful, in order to inspire admiration and attraction, he/she is generally drawn in accordance with the Japanese ideal of beauty – that is, with delicate features that strongly approach the feminine figure and, consequently, such male characters tends to androgyny, as it is the case, for instance, of Marron in Bakuretsu Hunters.

Social roles: strength and initiative

In a similar way, the ideas of strength, initiative, leadership and independence tend to be associated with the masculine figure, specially in Japan, where masculine and feminine social roles are still strongly differentiated. Due to an ancient culture of gender segregation, that practically did not interact in public, active women with "aggressive" attitudes still produce a certain astonishment - I also came lately to know that Mônica, a Brazilian comics girl character (a funny little girl with supernatural strength), was once forbidden in Japan many years ago, probably because a girl who goes around beating boys with her plush bunny would be considered "damaging to moral and good customs" (^ _ ^) (Disclaimer: Turma da Mônica stories and comics do not focus on subjects such as homosexuality or cross-dressing. The character was only mentioned here as an example of cultural shock).

But Mônica already shows how women of strong personality and great initiative tend to have "masculine features", such as short hair. The same happens in manga and anime: to accentuate the independence and strength of some feminine characters and/or present them as different from “ordinary women”, the artist often accentuates features that are usually considered “masculine”, specially short hair and a harder facial expression.

Social marks: clothes and hair

Even if some "signs" seem to be universal in the acknowledgment of an individual as man or woman (as already said above, fragility and delicacy associated to women, strength and aggressiveness associated to men), each social group marks these papers (or not) by means of different things, clother among them.

In our Western society, deeply influenced by Christian-European culture, one will not find many differences in clothes of countries so diverse as, for instance, Brazil, Bolivia, Canada, Holland and Italy: we all have clear specifications for which clothes and hairdos can be sported by men in daily life and which by women:

Men are supposed to have short hair and to wear pants (either long or short), shirts or t-shirts, suits or coats, low-heeled shoes and no makeup. Currently more and more men are wearing jewelry, but it is usually very small and discrete; earrings, when worn at all, are usually small rings, spheres or stones, and only very seldom we see big, hanging ones or in both ears (I am talking about the AVERAGE here, folks! Of course there are always people who digress from the “norm”, but they are also socially marked. Just think of how many men have to take off their earrings when they go to work).

“Classic” clothes for women are dresses or skirts and blouses. Despite the generalized use of long or short pants and shirts/t-shirts in everyday life (when, during the work, women have become equal to men), the majority of women “reverts” to dresses when in some party or solemnity, such as weddings, for example. They are almost expected to wear very ostensible jewelry, makeup and high-heeled shoes (and this is also the "uniform" of many working women, depending on the company they work for or the position that they hold). And for the great majority of people, long hair is the ultimate symbol for femininity.

While women have started to adapt and wear masculine clothing and hairdo (since they went into the working market, which was before an exclusively masculine domain), we can see that, in daily life, it is not acceptable that men wear clothes considered feminine (but just think how frequently - and naturally - this happens in Carnival, when usual social rules are revoked). The few attempts of men to wear skirts in the Western world are restricted to Scots and some few male artists or men who want to mark their marginal position concerning the social rules.

Kamatari, from Samurai X/Rurouni Kenshin , says he had always had a female soul and, therefore, he dresses like a woman.

Thus, the idea of “cross-dressers”, or people who wear clothes traditionally associated to the opposing sex, is usually associated with marginality (which, by the way, can be considered either good or bad, depending on one’s attachment to current social values...). This is not restricted to Brazil or to European culture, it happens in all social groups. However, when we have different social marks in a meeting of cultures, understanding difficulties may arise. In Japan, kimono was the traditional classic clothing, which is in fact... a skirt, and it was worn both by men and women. Of course there are big differences between masculine and feminine kimono, but what I want to say is that, for an Westerner, they always look like the same: a skirt. In the humbler classes, when men and women had to work side by side (for example, in the rice fields), both genders wore pants of virtually the same model. Thus we see that Japan does not seem to have such a strong tradition of “skirts for women, pants for men” as we do, and we can imagine that the fact of a man wearing skirts is not so surprising for the Japanese as it is for us. Culturally, Western fashion could be seen by the Japanese as a kind of “fancy dress” they wear when they want to assume roles in Western molds, as in today’s industry society, but it does not necessarily mean that it carries the same value as in Western cultures. Just like our men wear skirts at Carnival and would not be ashamed to wear a kimono in a Japanese restaurant, manga and anime characters do not think of themselves as "perverts" when wearing clothes usually attributed to the opposite sex, either for practicality (as does Haruka in the picture to the side, which we consider normal, since our women also occasionally dress like men), as an artifice to attain their goal (as when Zoicite disguises himself as Sailor Moon to attack Tuxedo Mask or Bado in Patlabor dresses as an odalisque to flee from the country) or just for the fun of it (as does Ruby Moon in Card Sakura Captor – he is really male, but opted to wear the feminine school uniform, dresses and skirts because “they were prettier”). The same goes for hair, since for much time men and women in Japan had long hair (even if there were differences in the way they were done).

Not everything is what it seems

Thus, many of the signs that we receive from characters of manga and anime are read, in our society, as marks of a deviant social (and sexual) behavior. Men are expected to be “rude”, “strong”, to disregard their looks, have short hair, never to wear skirts or makeup, not to come physically close to other men (except when celebrating goals in soccer... (~_^)) and also not to show their feelings. Women are expected to be frantically concerned about their looks, to have long, beautiful hair, to be fragile and timid and to think all the time about how to get a man to protect them. So, when we meet male characters who have long hair, delicate features and gentle behavior (as a symbol of their nature) or short haired women with strong features and aggressive behavior (as marks of their strength of mind) or cross-dressed characters (for whatever reasons), we immediately identify them with what these signs mean in our society - homosexuality - and with all the negative load that this concept has in Western Christian society.

However, even if this impression is often confirmed (because in manga and anime there ARE homosexual characters, in contrast to the immense majority of the corresponding Western stuff), it isn’t always true: most androgynous characters are just... androgynous. But their looks are “dubious”, as a consequence of the representation of their most important characteristic, be it the concern for others’ welfare (as in the side picture,  where Shun hugs Cygnus Hyouga to save his life by heating him with his own body - certainly the scene shocked many people, but Shun is not gay -, actually, I don’t think he even knows what sex is...), the egoistic concern with one’s looks (as Misty or Aphrodite in Saint Seiya), or just because of one’s personality (as Kurama in Yu Yu Hakusho - although Karasu did harass him during the Makai tournament, there was no indication that Kurama would have liked the attention...).

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However, many times the suspicion of homosexuality is openly confirmed, to our surprise and desperation of censors and moral defenders. However, in order to understand the reason for the presence of gay characters in manga and anime, we’ve got to look for the reason for the ABSENCE of such characters in Western comics and cartoons.
  

Well, why is homosexuality so much feared in the Western society? Homosexuality is normally considered an aberration, an illness, and a perversion. The main argument for this point of view is that sex has reproduction as its main function, thus, a homosexual pair would not be "fulfilling its biological function" and therefore it would have to be discouraged. However, recent researches on homosexuality in animal world show that stable homosexual couples exist in some species and that their youngsters are raised as well as those of heterosexual pairs (of course it is clear that, to conceive the youngsters, the contribution of an individual of the opposite sex is necessary, which is sometimes also integrated into the family). Thus, this theory seems to have been proved false.

However, this is the official and fervently defended version of Christian Church. Sex is seen as a "sin" in any form that is not to generate children in a marriage approved and endorsed for said Church. Even contraceptive and other ways of preventing children are totally rejected by radical groups: "if you do not want to have children, do not make sex", seems to be their motto. In fact, it is true. But what to do when one goes into a sexual relationship for love and/or pleasure? One may not be able to raise all the children that would spring of these meetings. And what about barren couples? Would they do not have the right to have sex? (Really, according to the more radical doctrines, a marriage does not have another purpose but to generate children and, thus, such marriages could also be made void).

Well, this narrow vision of sex (and here may radical Christians excuse me, but this is MY opinion, I am not saying that it is the right or best one, but I have a right to it. If you do not like what you are reading, you just have to browse to another page that pleases you more) pronounced as improper any form of relationship that has something to do with sex but does not result in children, such as homosexuality, and that is the cause for this taboo in our current society. A taboo is something that exists, but is not spoken of in public and is hidden to a maximum extent, so that its mere mention would not "corrupt the simple minded". That is why homosexuality simply is banished of everything that has to do with “children” in the media.

However, other, non-Christian societies do not have this preconception  so strongly ingrained. It is clear that homosexual couples were never well seen due to the fact that they do not generate children and, thus, do not contribute with more arms for working and paying taxes, but they are usually better tolerated that in Western society. I have also read once that, in some regions of old China, there were official cases of marriages between male homosexuals, as long as they also kept a “concubine” so that children could be generated. Without the radical position of the Christian doctrine, it is easy to understand why Eastern societies are less prejudiced against homosexuality.
 
 

Moreover, in societies where there is greater gender segregation, homosexuality is naturally more present and, consequentially, better tolerated. We can see it in the case of Ancient Greece: women were confined to the feminine quarters and only very seldom were permitted to mingle with men. Men, in turn, considered women as mere procreators. Social life was really a privilege of men and, consequently, male homosexual relationships (male homosexuality, mind you, since the poetess Sappho from the Island of Lesbos - hence the word “lesbian” – has never been well seen by that society) were the standard to be reached. It was then said that the only true love was the homosexual one, since heterosexual relationships had the sole purpose of generating children! It is incredible as our society kept the myth of the perfection of classic Greek society as the basis for our Western mentality, but has completely purged this aspect from history books...

Well, the important thing here is to show that, as well as in Old Greece, traditional Japanese society also only saw women as breeders and kept them strongly separated from men, and that favored homosexual relationships, as much between men as between women. In a certain way, many a "strong friendship" between people of the same sex that can be seen in many manga and anime really has a deep "platonic homosexual" streak (as in the case of Tomoyo’s admiration for Sakura in Sakura Card Captors ), that is not so badly seen in Japanese society. 

These two reasons are, in my opinion, the strongest to explain the constant presence of homosexual characters in manga and anime. But we can still present two more:

The first one is the fact that manga and anime plots and characters are made to try and identify themselves the most possible with the readers/audience and their reality. Thus, as there really ARE homosexuals in the world (although many people do not to like the fact), they HAVE to be represented in the works so that they can identify themselves with them. And even heterosexuals have gay friends or acquaintances, and their presence in manga and anime contributes so that they recognize, in the stories, the world of which they are part (including the presence, although less common, of lesbians couples, as in Sailor Moon S).

The second reason is related to the manga/anime style known as shoujo, or manga/anime for girls. The great majority of authors and public of this style are women and there are always many gay or androgynous characters in their stories. There may be two reasons for that. The first one, as pointed by Webmistress Lizzard in the text quoted below, is that thus we have pretty but unattainable male characters. This defines their status in the plot, and therefore women can interact more freely with them, without the risk of a love involvement, creating greater dramatic possibilities.  The second reason would be a possibility for identification between the female readers and male gay characters. As I’ve already said before, the expected behavior of a woman in Japan is still strongly marked by passivity and fragility, and that inhibits the presence of more aggressive female characters (just think of the Mônica-problem...). Thus, female readers could also “project themselves” in gay male characters, which would allow them to act in a more active and aggressive manner in the sexual sphere, but also to keep the feminine attributes and to be still attracted to men.

Whatever the reason, the frequent presence of gay characters in manga and anime always has influence on the plot and any modification of this feature ends by depreciating its artistic value.

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Well, those who listen to (or read) me speaking like this maybe think that I am gay. Sorry, folks, I am not. And I am declaring it here because lots of people think that one has to be gay to look at homosexuality with tolerance - another nonsensical prejudice. I should really be against gay people, since they make the competition for a husband harder (^_^), but I have the very bad habit to think about people first as people, and only later as men, women, old, young, from this or another culture, etc. And thus, even if I am not homosexual and do not feel like becoming one, I respect those that had made this option and, since they exist, I think they should be integrated to media products unaffectedly. And it makes me FURIOUS when I perceive that many anime series suffer terrible cuts when shown in Western television, or even worse, when gay characters are brutally forced into a sex change or the occultation of their homosexual relationship, which totally modifies the original artistic conception and the relationships the plot is based upon.

Luckily,  Brazilian television is still more "open minded" about the subject as in many other countries. In the U.S.A., for example the subject of (homo)sexuality in anime series is very problematic, resulting in frequent sex changes or occultation of the relationships, as for example, the fact that Bado in Patlabor and Zoicite and Fisheye from Sailor Moon have been transformed into women, the first one for looking exceedingly girlish, and the two latter because they were openly gay (the Brazilian version followed the American one in the case of Zoicite and Bado, but it respected Fisheye’s “masculinity”).

I will now transcribe a text from the site In Defense of Sailor Moon Super S, where we have a very clear opinion on the problem. On the specific case of Fisheye’s sex change in the American version, Webmistress Lizzard writes:

"Fish Eye is indeed a male. A gay transvestite male, in fact -- or at least someone who gets a kick out of occasionally playing the girl.

Gay characters, especially gay males, are quite common in anime. Shoujo anime is particularly prone to sport droves upon droves of gorgeous but unattainable gay men. This is not to say that the sexual activity is shown. The characters just... are. Sometimes this is used to add drama to the plot, sometimes it is used to comedic effect, and sometimes it's just a character feature, no more nor less important than the color of the person's hair.

In Sailor Moon alone, there are at least four central characters who are gay -- Zoicite, Fish Eye, Uranus, and Neptune. The English translators are having a heck of a time adapting these characters for American television. For the purposes of the dub, they made Uranus and Neptune cousins. The girlish-looking Zoicite was actually turned into a woman. When the Super S dub airs, I bet the same fate will befall Fish Eye. (Note: I was right.)

It's not that Japanese television is extraordinarily progressive. It's that American television is extraordinarily conservative. Homosexuality on American TV is more or less limited to adult hours and adult shows. Very few series actually have recurring gay characters, and those that do tend to die off earlier than they should. Just look at what happened to the sitcom Ellen. The series was canceled not long after the titular character came out of the closet. Was it due to ratings? Was it due to complaints from viewers? Was it due to judgmental television executives who wanted to distance themselves from homosexuality? Probably a little of each. So it should come as no surprise that US television is afraid to depict gays in animated series.

I may not personally find homosexuality disturbing or offensive, but far be it for me to say that American television isn't doing the best it can in the current cultural climate."

 

This does not happen only in the U.S.A.: for example, Kurama was also turned into a woman in the Philippines (poor thing...). I do not want here to censure American TV or any another country’s, I only wanted to show that censorship on sexuality issues in anime does exist and that it is very active. It is difficult to say when the artistic boundaries are transgressed and something deteriorates into bad-taste or “amorality”, or how much cultural characteristics can or should be adapted when artistic products are presented to other cultures. However, we know that most anime series are, in their original context, dedicated to a “all audiences” public, since they are also shown in open TV.  In my opinion, the question of homosexuality in anime series is shown in so “light” a mode (the most explicit scene I’ve ever seen, Fisheye’s kiss in Darien, that you can see in this picture, is not even shown openly), that “children” do not pay much attention to it: they understand that the character in question is “sort of strange”, but usually do not attribute any values to him. And when somebody is sufficiently “adult” to perceive the presented sexual question, well, then it is already time for him/her to think about and to discuss the subject. It is up to each person and to their parents or guardians to talk on the subject in the most convenient way under the point of view of their beliefs, whatever they are. What I cannot passively do is to see that “censors” have previously stolen from the audience the possibility of seen different points of view, culturally diverse from theirs. If the Arabian burka bothers people so much, why does they do not bother about manipulations of their rights to free speech and access to information?

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Origin of the pictures: Kamatari (Rurouni Kenshin/Samurai X) comes from the Brazilian site Lkm RPG. Pictures of Saint Seiya and  Zoicite and Malachite (Sailor Moon) from Stayka's nice site. Haruka and Michiro (Sailor Moon S), from Haruka and Michiru Image Center; Fisheye & Co. (Sailor Moon Super S), from the site Memoirs of a Fish; Seiya Kou (Sailor Moon Stars), from Planets, Sailor Starlights Domain. Noa and Bado (Patlabor), from Babylon Project: The Patlabor Web Site and Patlabor at AnimeLink. Marron (Bakuretsu Hunter), from the site Marron no Miko's Bakuretsu Hunter Hall. The quoted text by Webmistress Lizzard can be found in her site In Defense of Sailor Moon Super S. All mentioned characters and series belong to their respective legal owners. Unless there is indication on the contrary, all text found here belongs to me and thus I expect to get due credit for it if it is used in some other website or printed material. Parts of this text will also appear in the Brazilian site Grupo Studio.

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