TRAVELING TEXTS, TRANSGENDER LIVES: IMAGINATIVE RESOURCES,
TRANSCULTURAL MEDIA, AND THE GLOBALIZATION OF GENDER
A Dissertation
Submitted to
the Temple University Graduate Board
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
by
Aiden James Kosciesza
May 2023
Examining Committee Members:
Fabienne Darling-Wolf, Advisory Chair, Department of Journalism
Brian Creech, Department of Journalism
Adrienne Shaw, Department of Media Studies and Production
Thomas J. Billard, External Member, Northwestern University
©
Copyright
2023
by
Aiden James Kosciesza
All Rights Reserved
ii
ABSTRACT
This project investigates non-cisgender people’s use of media from outside of
their own cultural location in processes of gender identity formation. I explored questions
of which transcultural texts were important to non-cisgender audiences, what they
thought about gender representation in media that originated both within and outside of
their own cultural sphere, and how these representations mattered to them as they
negotiated their own gender variant identities, through a case study along the U.S.-Japan
axis of media exchange. I conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 44
participants, 21 from the U.S. and 23 from Japan, between June and September of 2022.
Both U.S. and Japanese informants said that transcultural media played an important role
in their discovery, understanding, and ongoing negotiation of their gender identities, but
their interpretations of the same texts diverged significantly. While U.S. informants
praised Japanese media for its transgressive representations of gender fluidity, Japanese
informants called Japanese media stereotypical and regressive, and actively avoided
media from their own local context. My findings point to the ongoing influence of global
power dynamics in which the U.S. is positioned at the “forefront” of global discourses on
gender and equality, and also to the significant role of the Internet and streaming media in
processes of gender globalization. I utilize the concept of imaginative resources—images
and ideas, transmitted through media, that audiences use to (re)imagine themselves and
the world around them—to help explain informants’ negotiation of gender in an
increasingly globalized and mediatized world. Drawing from hybridity theory, I argue
that transcultural media helps audiences access imaginative resources by means of—not
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in spite of—the cultural distance between production and reception. Cultural distance
enables greater polysemy and invites audiences to perform alternative readings of media
texts, creating imaginative resources that they can deploy to trouble existing hegemonies.
iv
DEDICATION
To Kerri, my partner in all things,
who has walked with me on this path
And to Aster, my shining star,
who lights the way forward
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project would not have been possible without the generous gifts of time,
energy, and honesty that I received from my informants. Thank you for sharing your
stories, your struggles, your joys, and your memories with me. I would also like to thank
Tsukumo Niwa, my translator and interpreter, whose patience, flexibility, and expertise
made the Japanese side of this study possible.
Thank you to everyone at Temple University who helped and supported me
throughout this process, including my cohort and colleagues in the Media and
Communication program, who challenged and inspired me; my committee members
Brian Creech and Adrienne Shaw, whose incisive comments and thoughtful feedback
made my work better at every turn; and my advisor Fabienne Darling-Wolf, who guided
and supported me throughout the four years that culminated in this project. Fab, you are
the kind of mentor every graduate student needs and deserves, but few are lucky enough
to have—kind, generous, and encouraging, with high standards and a helping hand to
reach them. I am proud to count you as a colleague and a friend. Thank you also to T.J.
Billard, my external reader, who provided invaluable feedback during the defense.
Finally, thank you to my family: my partner Kerri, who told me to go for it and
was at my side every step of the way, and my child Aster, who was born weeks before I
started coursework and teaches me something new every day.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................... iii
DEDICATION .....................................................................................................................v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. vi
LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................. xi
CHAPTER
1. INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................1
2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK .................................................................................7
3. BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE REVIEW:
GENDER AND THE U.S.-JAPAN MEDIA RELATIONSHIP .................................24
4. METHOD: DUAL-SITE VIRTUAL INTERVIEWS .................................................33
Virtual Interviews ..................................................................................................35
Recruitment ............................................................................................................36
Participants .............................................................................................................41
Compensation ........................................................................................................47
Translation .............................................................................................................49
Data Analysis .........................................................................................................50
5. NON-CISGENDER U.S. CONSUMERS OF JAPANESE MEDIA ...........................52
Alternative Models of Gender Performance ..........................................................52
First Encounters .....................................................................................................56
Transgressive Japanese Media Representations ....................................................59
vii
Androgynous Men .....................................................................................59
Powerful, Complex, and Multidimensional Women .................................63
Gender Bending, Cross-Dressing, and Gender Variance...........................67
Community Among Outcasts and the Pleasures of Transgression ........................70
Negotiating Non-Cisgender Identities Through Media Encounters ......................72
Conclusion .............................................................................................................78
6. NON-CISGENDER JAPANESE CONSUMERS OF U.S. MEDIA ...........................80
Japanese Audiences Don’t Consider Japanese Media Progressive........................81
Bad Representation ....................................................................................82
Lack of Representation ..............................................................................85
Restrictive and Regressive Media Culture .................................................88
Japanese Informants’ Active Avoidance of Japanese Media .....................90
Japanese Informants Were More Comfortable Watching U.S. Media ..................92
More and Better Queer, Trans, and Gender Variant Representation .........94
Casting Actors Who Share Characters’ Marginalized Identities ...............97
Better Portrayal of Women ........................................................................99
More Diversity and More Engagement with Diversity............................103
Alternative Theoretical Schema for Gender Variance .........................................106
Language and Terminology .....................................................................106
English Language Access as Access to Ideas About Gender
Variance .............................................................................................111
Conclusion ...........................................................................................................116
viii
7. THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND THE GLOBALIZATION OF
GENDER ...................................................................................................................119
Accessing Transnational and LGBTQIA+ Media Online ...................................119
Discovering Gender Variance and Learning About One’s Identity.....................127
Internet Access Connecting Marginalized Communities ....................................130
Global Marketplace of Gender: Exchanging Cultural Ideas Around Gender
Variance .........................................................................................................137
8. IMAGINATIVE RESOURCES.................................................................................141
Traveling Texts, Imaginative Resources: Negotiating Non-Cisgender
Identities Through Transnational Media Representations .............................142
The Importance of Transcultural Media to Transgender and GenderDiverse People ...............................................................................................144
The Hybridization of Gender ...............................................................................152
How Representation Matters................................................................................155
Gaps in Representation: Inadequate Resources ...................................................160
Hybridity, Resource Exchange, and the Transcultural Feedback Loop...............165
Conclusion ...........................................................................................................170
9. CONCLUSION ..........................................................................................................175
REFERENCES CITED ....................................................................................................191
APPENDICES
A. PARTICIPANT DATA .............................................................................................207
Table 1: U.S.-Side Informants .............................................................................207
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Table 2: Japan-Side Informants ...........................................................................209
B. RECRUITMENT MATERIALS ...............................................................................211
Item 1: U.S.-Side Recruitment Flyer ...................................................................211
Item 2: Japan-Side Recruitment Flyer .................................................................213
Item 3: English Translation of Japan-Side Recruitment Flyer.............................215
Item 4: U.S.-Side Screening Survey ....................................................................216
Item 5: Japan-Side Screening Survey ..................................................................219
Item 6: English Translation of Japan-Side Screening Survey .............................222
C. SEMI-STRUCTURED INTERVIEW QUESTIONS ................................................225
Item 1: U.S.-Side Semi-Structured Interview Questions .....................................225
Item 2: Japan-Side Semi-Structured Interview Questions ...................................228
x
Table
LIST OF TABLES
Page
1. U.S.-Side Informants…………………………………………….……………...204
2. Japan-Side Informants…………………………………………….…………….206
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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
When texts travel, representations of gender travel with them. Media texts are
both products of and vehicles for imagination; their images, narratives, and characters
both reflect and reshape what is thinkable for the cultures that produce and consume them
(Appadurai, 1996; Darling-Wolf, 2015; Siapera, 2010). Through media globalization,
texts travel far beyond the contexts of their original production, carrying representations
of gender that catalyze the imagination of geographically distant consumers. This project
explores transcultural media consumption and what it means for processes of gender
identification. Employing hybridity theory as its main theoretical lens, in conversation
with Appadurai (1996), Darling-Wolf (2015), and Kraidy (2005), it aims to understand
how non-cisgender people use transcultural media as imaginative resources in gender
identity formation, particularly the role that transcultural media consumption plays in the
formation of transgender and nonbinary identities. Taking a translocal approach, I
explore these dynamics through two points of entry, the United States and Japan. Each
nation’s media is globally influential, yet uniquely situated with respect to postcolonial
power dynamics (Darling-Wolf, 2018a, 2018b; Mirrlees, 2013; Iwabuchi, 2015).
Furthermore, the two cultures operate under distinctively different hegemonic formations
of gender (McLelland, 2003), making Japan and the United States two useful terrains on
which to explore processes of gender identity negotiation through and with transcultural
media. In this work, I seek to center non-cisgender people and their meaning-making
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processes surrounding gender, which take place in a globalizing, highly mediatized
environment.
Transnational feminists have long argued that gender and culture are inextricably
intertwined. Scholars have worked to highlight the positionality of women in
international relations (Enloe, 2014, 2013, 2004), the transnational phenomenon of white
femininity (Shome, 2014, 2011), and women’s participation and representation in global
culture (Darling-Wolf, 2004a; Parameswaran, 2004, 2002b; Parameswaran & Cardoza,
2009), and have centered women’s voices and stories (Abu-Lughod, 2008; Enloe, 2010).
Some works also incorporate analyses of masculinities or queer subjectivities (DarlingWolf, 2006, 2004b; Hedge, 2011; Parameswaran, 2002a), yet their focus remains on
cisgender identities. My work intervenes in these ongoing dialogues by foregrounding
gender fluidity and instability, pressing the deconstruction of stable gender binarism, and
centering transgender, nonbinary, and non-cisgender perspectives.
This project works at the intersection of gender hybridity and cultural hybridity.
In the present moment of increasing visibility for transgender, nonbinary, and noncisgender people, gender is an important topic of study. Despite decades of work in
feminist, queer, and transgender theory, scholarship is still working to understand gender
outside of traditional conceptions of a static gender binary. In my previous work
(Kosciesza, 2022), I demonstrated that leading communication journals—even those that
purport to take a critical approach—continue to publish work that treats gender as binary
and erases the experiences of non-cisgender people. It is imperative that scholarship
continues to challenge the idea that gender is a binary and static quality, and to do this,
we must advance our understanding of what gender is and means. The intersections of
2
gender hybridity and cultural hybridity are presently undertheorized. My work explores
gender through hybridity theory.
This project focuses on the lives and voices of transgender, nonbinary, and other
non-cisgender people, who are too often erased or neglected in research (Namaste, 2000).
I consider non-cisgender people not simply as objects of theorization or terrain on which
to make an argument, but as people living real lives—lives that are materially affected by
discourses around gender. Previous ethnographic work by Valentine (2007), Ho (2021b),
and Cavalcante (2018) has also taken this approach, refusing to abstract gender variance
or even cohere transgender experience into a unified (essentialized) whole. Through
ethnographic research in New York City, Valentine (2007) interrogates the category of
“transgender” itself, pointing out that while legal structures and social service
organizations use this terminology as an umbrella to describe gender variance, the people
whom these organizations would categorize as transgender do not all use this term to
describe themselves. Ho (2021b)’s work in Tokyo draws similar conclusions,
emphasizing the malleability and overlap of categories of gender variance and
foregrounding informants’ lived experience. Likewise working against institutionalized
or academic understandings of terminology that has been applied to trans people,
Cavalcante (2018) rejects the binary of queerness vs. ordinariness, instead melding them
into the concept of the “queerly ordinary,” “a hybrid form of self and life-making that
exists as a little bit queer and a little bit ordinary” (p. 25). Valentine (2007), Ho (2021b),
and Cavalcante (2018) all ground their work in the everyday lives and practices of the
people who participated in their studies, and following these scholars, this is the approach
that I take.
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I do not mean to neglect theory; indeed, the paths walked by people whose gender
experience defies the notion of stable gender binarism are critically important to
theorizing a new formulation of gender. Nonetheless, I am mindful of transgender
theorists who criticize the use of trans identities as simply an analytic tool, useful for
deconstructing gender ad nauseum but without regard for the lived experience of noncisgender people (Keegan, 2020a, 2020b; Radi, 2019). My work aspires to advance
theoretical understandings of gender, but also to tie those understandings back to the lives
of people who experience gender beyond stable binarism. Key to that work is hearing the
voices of non-cisgender people and foregrounding them in research. My work makes
space for trans and nonbinary lives in scholarship, where non-cisgender people remain on
the margins.
By embarking on this project, I too am taking up space. My personal interest in
gender and transcultural media representations originates with my own experience of
discovering my transgender identity. For me, and for others I have known in my personal
life, representations of gender in Japanese media played a catalyzing role in our own
processes of gender identity formation. I noticed the important role that transcultural
media played in gender identification for myself and for people I knew, and I wanted to
follow this thread to explore the phenomenon as a global process. This project is the
result of that desire. I want to unpack the processes that helped form my identity as a
transgender man, and better understand the role of transcultural media in gender
identification both for myself and for my community. I want to highlight non-cisgender
people and our role in troubling hegemonic formations of gender, while also
foregrounding the trouble that role makes for us. I want to place theories of gender firmly
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within the global, and recognize that globalization has facilitated encounters between
gender-variant people from all cultures, who have long histories and deep knowledge and
did not simply spring into being when Time magazine declared the “Transgender Tipping
Point” in 2014 (Billard & Nesfield, 2020; Cavalcante, 2018). I want to center noncisgender people in research, and I want this work to be led by a person who does not
identify as cisgender. Others have highlighted the epistemological and practical
importance of trans work being done by trans scholars (Radi, 2019; Vincent, 2017), and
while I take the position that cisgender scholars can (and should) do research that centers
trans issues, I want non-cisgender people to have a voice in our own scholarly
representation. I hope my voice will be one of many.
This project investigates processes of transcultural influence. Following
Appadurai (1996) and Darling-Wolf (2015), I argue that processes of transcultural media
consumption are processes of transcultural influence. Media texts provide “imaginative
resources” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 52): sparks that open spaces of possibility, that change
what is thinkable. As Liechty (2006) explains,
media products are not simply things to think about, but to think with.
Shared media experiences provide consumers with mirrors or frames of
reference that begin to shape the dimensions of what is possible, or even
thinkable. Media serve as imaginative resources for making sense out of
life and, ultimately, means to interpret and even represent life. (p. 28)
Or as Hall (1988/2016) puts it, “Those people who work in the media are producing,
reproducing, and transforming the field of ideological representation itself” (p. 137).
While media can certainly be used to maintain the status quo, their circulation can also
challenge hegemonic formations. My work asks whether and how transcultural texts
function as part of non-cisgender people’s processes of gender identification, and how
5
encounters with traveling texts trouble hegemonic formations of gender. How do noncisgender people employ transcultural texts in their processes of gender identity
formation, if indeed they do so? What role, if any, do traveling texts play in individuals’
discovery and negotiation of gender identities that challenge prevailing notions of what
gender is and means?
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CHAPTER 2
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
The theoretical concept at the heart of my dissertation is gender. Once treated as a
shorthand or even a synonym for biological sex (De Lauretis, 1987), gender has emerged
as a distinct quality, but one whose meaning remains contested and unevenly understood.
Theorists hailing from feminist, queer, and transgender positions have worked to
deconstruct gender, to unmoor it from traditions that tie anything from a person’s sexual
preferences, social role, or fashion choices to their chromosomes, reproductive organs, or
secondary sex characteristics. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949/2011)
famously argued that “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman” (p. 337)—that
gender is enculturated, and gendered traits, habits, and roles are learned and reinforced
through social interaction rather than biologically imprinted at (or before) birth. De
Beauvoir (1949/2011) rejects the notion that women are “incomplete,” “incidental,” or
“devoid of meaning without reference to the male” (p. 29) and asserts that “woman’s
consciousness of herself is not defined by her sexuality alone: it reflects a situation that
depends on society’s economic structure, a structure that indicates the degree of technical
evolution humanity has attained” (p. 90). For De Beauvoir (1949/2011), men and women
are biologically distinct, but this distinction does not disadvantage women except through
social custom, for example when the burden of pregnancy and child-rearing is placed on
individual women rather than socially shared. Later developments in Black, queer, and
intersectional feminism stress that women’s experiences are not universal, and that
gender roles and expectations are inflected by other identity positions (Collins, 2019;
7
Crenshaw, 1989; hooks, 2015). The notion that gender is equivalent to sexual difference
has been rejected by feminists as not only untrue, but detrimental to the political project
of ending women’s oppression (De Lauretis, 1987).
In her influential and widely cited work Gender Trouble, Judith Butler
(1990/2007) takes aim at the very idea of biological sex, noting that it is variously
conceptualized as a physical characteristic or a genetic trait, but that all definitions of sex
are inextricably tied to socially produced discourse. As Butler (1990/2007) explains,
The task of distinguishing sex from gender becomes all the more difficult
once we understand that gendered meanings frame the hypothesis and the
reasoning of those biomedical inquiries that seek to establish “sex” for us
as it is prior to the cultural meanings that it acquires. Indeed, the task is
even more complicated when we realize that the language of biology
participates in other kinds of languages and reproduces that cultural
sedimentation in the objects it purports to discover and neutrally describe.
(p. 148-149)
In other words, the notion that gender is determined and theoretically stabilized by sex
ignores the theoretical instability of sex itself. As Butler (1990/2007) points out, any
definition of sex relies on discourses that privilege one part of the body over another, and
that privileging comes not from any universal, objective, or prediscursive truth, but from
the hegemonic formation of social practice that has contrived to appear commonsense
and thereby indisputable. This disruption of the idea of sex as a stable, incontrovertible
characteristic further undermines definitions of gender that rely on sex for intelligibility.
Feminist science studies concur, explaining that science is never neutral or
objective, but is always shaped by culture. Keller (2010) demonstrates that scientific
questions and answers are always historically and socioculturally situated, because
prevailing social and cultural understandings shape which questions are asked, with what
8
words, and what those words are taken to mean. Fausto-Sterling (2000) explains that
“scientific investigation involves a process of knowledge construction” because
“scientists construct arguments by choosing particular experimental approaches and tools.
The entire shape of the debate is socially constrained, and the particular tools chosen to
conduct the controversy … have their own historical and technical limitations” (p. 28). In
other words, Butler’s (1990/2007) argument is not merely a philosophical one. As
Fausto-Sterling (2000) goes on to argue, the use of science as supposedly objective
evidence of sexual difference is problematic, because science is not, and can never be,
objective. It is always situated in, constrained, and constructed by its sociocultural and
historical context.
Gender is both social and relational (De Lauretis, 1987), and gender identification
is an ongoing process, not a settled fact. West and Zimmerman’s (1987) “doing gender”
framework regards gender as a routine social action predicated on a constructed schema
of difference, to which individuals are held socially accountable and against which their
actions are assessed. This framework suggests that gender only exists, matters, or is made
meaningful in social formation. Theoretically, if a person were isolated from all social
relations, gender would be meaningless and, indeed, would not exist. But this observation
is itself meaningless, because even the thought exercise of imagining a person outside of
social relations is itself embedded in social relations through the existence of the thinker.
Any interpretation of the isolated person’s gender (or lack thereof) would necessarily be
filtered through the social relations of the observer—both their own experience of gender,
and the historical and power relations in which they are always already situated, the
ideologies of gender by which they are always already interpellated (Althusser,
9
1971/2012). This is what Butler (1990/2007) means by the contention that there is no
“real,” prediscursive, ideal, or utopian gender.
Theories of identity formation—or more accurately, theories of identification,
because identity is never a settled or static thing but is always in motion, always in
process—inform my conceptualization of gender. Taylor (1989) argues that the self is
constantly unfolding, and its travels, reflections, and future plans construct the narrative
of identity. For Taylor, too, identification is relational: “One is a self only among other
selves. A self cannot be described without reference to those who surround it” (1989, p.
35). Proponents of affect and assemblage theory emphasize that identification occurs in
relation not only to other people, but to emotions, technologies, discourses, and
potentialities within the assemblage (Fox, 2015; Lim, 2010; Vila & Avery-Natale, 2020).
As the conditions of the assemblage shift, so too does the articulation of the self within it.
Theorists of the affective turn critique the interior-exterior divide as artificial, drawing
instead on the Deleuzian concept of the “fold” (Rose, 1996). In this conception, the
interior is an illusion that results from an enfolding. The fold is not stable; it is always in
motion, so what seems to be inside at one moment is outside the next. Though it may
appear fixed for a time, the shape of this enfolding depends on the assemblage and on the
flow of affect in a particular temporal moment. Emphasizing temporality and historicity,
Hall (1996) has argued that
identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language
and culture in the process of becoming rather than being: not ‘who we are’
or ‘where we came from’, so much as what we might become, how we
have been represented and how that bears on how we might represent
ourselves. Identities are therefore constituted within, not outside
representation. (p. 4)
10
For Hall (1996), identity is produced through discourse and depends on difference—on
the production of its abject, its other—for intelligibility. He explains identities as points
of suture between interpellation and subjectivity, or in other words, “points of temporary
attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us” (p. 5).
Crucially, though, these points are always shifting; for Hall (1996), as for affect and
assemblage theorists, identification is always in process. Bringing these theories to bear
on the conceptualization of gender emphasizes the fluidity of gender identification. Far
from the fixed stability that has been assumed in binary conceptualizations of gender, I
view gender identification as a continuing process, negotiated through and articulated
within a shifting assemblage that includes, among other things, social relations and media
texts. Media representation is key; we might revisit and paraphrase Hall (1996) above to
say that gender identities are about questions of using the imaginative resources of
history, language, culture, and media in the process of becoming rather than being, not
‘what gender we are’ so much as what gender experience we have had and might have in
the future, how gender has been represented in the mediated discourses that permeate our
lives and how that bears on how we might represent our own genders.
Gender must also be understood intersectionally and within the field of power.
Gender is not discrete, nor is it separate from other aspects of identification or social
perception. Valentine (2007) has shown that both gender identification and gender
interpretation are always already inflected by other social factors, which include but are
certainly not limited to race, ethnicity, class, dis/ability, citizenship, and language. The
intersectionality framework emphasizes the multiplicative harms that occur when various
marginalizations overlap. Crenshaw (1989) has shown that the intersection of race and
11
sex burdens people at the crossroads in ways that are more than simply additive, and
remedies for discrimination have tended to benefit only the most privileged among the
class that is being subjected to discriminatory treatment. As entwined as gender is with
social relations, it is equally entwined with power relations, and feminist, queer, and
transgender theory share a political commitment to resisting gendered oppression (hooks,
2015; Butler, 1990/2007; simpkins, 2016). Transgender theory recognizes that gender
identification, gender expression, gender as perceived by others, and gender experience
(my term for the temporal journey of identifying as cisgender, transgender, nonbinary, or
other configurations of gender variance) are each distinct vectors of marginalization, and
that individuals may be relatively more or less privileged along each of these axes
independent of the others. Radi (2019) notes that the concept of cissexism is a unique
contribution of transgender theory that captures specific power relations that are not
covered by concepts like patriarchy, heteronormativity, homophobia, or misogyny.
Cissexism emphasizes that gender is not confined to cis binaries and describes a dynamic
in which the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy is not simply mapped to (cis)men/
(cis)women (Radi, 2019). My project, which centers transgender, nonbinary, and other
non-cisgender voices but also draws from two distinct sites with differing racial and
ethnic makeups, highlights intersections of gender identity, gender experience, race, and
ethnicity.
Transgender theory emphasizes the materiality of gender and the lived experience
of those who do not identify with a stable gender binary (Keegan, 2020a, 2020b; Radi,
2019). This has led to tension between some trans theorists and queer theorists, like
Butler, who emphasize gender deconstruction. For Butler (1990/2007), gender is
12
performative, meaning that it is produced by the repetition of social acts but has no
underlying essence; “because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the
idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all” (p. 190). The
interpretation of those social acts, and thus the meaning they hold both for the actor and
for others, is restricted by the regulatory frameworks of social practice and the law. Ideas
about gender that have become hegemonic—naturalized, taken for granted, and thus
rendered invisible—become boundaries that discipline not only the expression but the
very idea of gender. In Butler’s (1990/2007) view, the “regulatory fictions” of “[t]he
univocity of sex, the internal coherence of gender, and the binary framework for both sex
and gender” are responsible for the very power dynamics that feminist and queer activists
oppose: they “consolidate and naturalize the convergent power regimes of masculinist
and heterosexist oppression” (p. 46). The “trouble” that Butler (1990/2007) advocates is
the disruption of the regulatory regimes of gender through a process of repetition with
variations, a subversion of gender hegemony taken to the point where the notion of
gender-as-identity is rendered meaningless. Though Butler’s later work in Bodies that
Matter (1993/2011) responds to critiques of Gender Trouble with an emphasis on the
materiality of sex, Butler (1993/2011) argues that materiality is an effect of power and
continues to advocate “a radical rearticulation of the symbolic horizon in which bodies
come to matter at all” (p. xxx).
The total deconstruction of gender, however, remains controversial. While many
feminist scholars advocate deconstruction, Salamon (2010) notes that the discipline of
women’s studies is formulated around the subject position of womanhood; deconstruction
of that position could threaten social worlds or movements that rely on it for coherence
13
(Koyama, 2000/2020) and destabilize the subordination framework upon which the
dominant strain of U.S. feminism is founded (Keegan, 2020b). Thus, total deconstruction
could be seen as a threat to women’s studies and the feminist movement. For some
transgender scholars, too, the aim of gender deconstruction to the point of dissolution is
exclusionary because it neglects the experience of trans people who do identify as men or
women (Radi, 2019). For others, however, deconstructing gender is a trans aim as much
as it is a queer one. Ruin (2016) argues that gender binarism disciplines both cisgender
and transgender people, and that transnormativity, or conformity to gender binarism by
trans people, consolidates and maintains the hegemonic order. Of course, cisgender and
non-cisgender people alike conform to the hegemonic gender order to varying degrees,
for a myriad of personal, social, and strategic reasons; Ruin’s (2016) point is that simply
inhabiting a transgender identity or undergoing a process of gender transition does not, in
and of itself, challenge hegemonic gender binarism.
The key tension, then, is how to navigate the theoretical need for gender
deconstruction alongside the practical need for people to live within actually-existing
regulatory structures. As De Lauretis (1987) puts it:
We cannot resolve or dispel the uncomfortable condition of being at once
inside and outside gender either by desexualizing it (making gender
merely a metaphor, a question of différance, of purely discursive effects)
or by androgynizing it (claiming the same experience of material
conditions for both genders in a given class, race, or culture). (p. 11,
emphasis in original)
Gender exists on both a theoretical and a practical level, and neither can be discounted.
While understandings of gender beyond stable binarism have progressed significantly
since De Beauvoir (1949/2011), her words still resonate:
14
And the truth is that anyone can clearly see that humanity is split into two
categories of individuals with manifestly different clothes, faces, bodies,
smiles, movements, interests, and occupations; these differences are
perhaps superficial; perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain
is that for the moment they exist in a strikingly obvious way. (p. 28-29)
My aim in this project is to center people living non-cisgender lives, to listen to their
experiences and take seriously the materiality of moving through the world as a noncisgender person, while never forgetting the regulatory structures and hegemonic
formations in which those experiences take place.
Gender has no essentialized basis. What we think of as gender is a set of
associations that have sedimented over time and through social practice; gender is not a
direct function of any biological, psychological, or physiological quality. Nevertheless, it
is a material reality that shapes social relations. Following Salamon (2010), I agree that
gender is a social construction, but that this does not diminish its importance or the role it
plays in people’s lives. While, as Butler (1990/2007) asserts, gender is not a “fact” and
has no prediscursive origination, it is rendered factual by people who practice it. In other
words, gender is not intrinsically a “real” thing, but it is made real through social
relations and material effects. Ideas and assumptions about gender permeate social
relations, and social relations have material consequences. Salamon (2010) notes the
emphasis on a “felt sense” of gender by theorists in queer and transgender theory as well
as phenomenology and psychoanalysis, but argues “that one can acknowledge the ways
in which this felt sense is a product of, and also subject to, cultural interpretations without
disavowing or dismissing the persistent importance of this sense” (p. 2-3). Just as, in
affect theory, emotions do things, so too does the felt sense of gender produce material
effects, including the experience of gender variance.
15
Gender variance is a disjuncture between hegemonic formations of gender as a
static binary and the individual experience of a person living under those hegemonic
formations. Gender variance includes identification with a gender other than that assigned
at birth; gender expression or performance that is not aligned with societal expectations;
non-identification with any gender; and identification with, or expression or performance
of, a gender that does not fit within a binary configuration. The Euro-American term
“transgender” is often used as an umbrella term to collect many different types of gender
variance, but as Billard and Nesfield (2020) point out, this term does not capture the
experience or the history of traditions of gender variance in non-Euro-American contexts,
and its use in place of local terms such as hijra in India or Two-Spirit in Native American
and First Nations communities has neocolonial overtones. Even within the EuroAmerican context, there is ambivalence about the term transgender within nonbinary and
genderqueer communities; while some who identify as nonbinary or genderqueer also
identify as transgender, many do not (Darwin, 2020). In this project, I specifically sought
out respondents who identify as transgender or nonbinary, but I also aimed to recruit noncisgender people whose identities do not fit under either of these labels. Recruitment
materials seeking U.S.-based respondents included the terms transgender, nonbinary,
genderfluid, gender non-conforming, and non-cisgender. Recruitment materials seeking
Japan-based respondents included the local term x-jendā (X-ジェンダー; without
gender, outside of gender) alongside transliterated loan words such as toransujendā (トラ
ンスジェンダー; transgender) and the acronyms FTX/MTX (signifying “female to X”
and “male to X”) alongside FTM (“female to male”) and MTF (“male to female”), all of
16
which are used by gender non-conforming people in Japan (Dale, 2012, 2014; Ho,
2021c).
This project sits at the crossroads of gender and culture, but also treats gender as a
culture. Gender is learned and acquired in ways that mirror enculturation (De Beauvoir,
1949/2011). Families provide models and set expectations about gender for children, but
children also learn gender from schools, communities, local practices, and media
representations. Benedict Anderson (2006) famously described nations as imagined
communities—not meaning fabricated or false, but in the sense of imagining connections
to people one has never encountered. Anderson’s (2006) definition of the nation as an
imagined community, a social construction that is the product of collective imagination,
produced in conversation with and in relation to media representations and discourse but
with both material and affective consequences for those who live within it, is similar to
Salamon’s (2010) understanding of the social construction of gender. Salamon (2010)
argues that while the materiality of the body is important and should not be discounted,
the body itself is always already a social construct because “our bodies are always shaped
by the social world in which we are inescapably situated” (p. 76). That social world
includes both interpersonal and mediated communication, but mediated communication is
the primary means by which individuals learn about cultures beyond their everyday
experience.
The imagination of gender communities is enabled by media representations of
gender. Just as one person could never meet all of the people who share their nationality,
so too could they never meet all of the others who purportedly share their gender.
Certainly, gender is accomplished through practice, as both Butler (1990/2007) and West
17
and Zimmerman (1987) argue, but the practices that produce and reproduce gender are
based only in part on the examples of people one encounters in everyday life. Both
Anderson (2006) and Billig (1995) highlight the role of media in producing an imagined
affinity between members of a nation. So, too, do media representations carry images of
what gender is or should be, and these representations serve as resources for the
imagination of gender communities, weaving a sense of “deep, horizontal comradeship”
(Anderson, 2006, p. 7) among people who by and large have never met one another, and
never will.
Like Anderson’s (2006) conception of the nation, gender is also imagined as
inherently limited. Just as members of a nation imagine it with borders, an inside and an
outside, an “us” and a “them,” genders are imagined in relation to what they are not.
Identification as a man or a woman, agender or genderqueer or nonbinary, transgender or
cisgender or gender variant, is predicated on not identifying as something else. Genders
do and must have borders; no one imagines that their gender is all-encompassing, that
there is nothing outside of it, because to do so would render gender monolithic and
thereby meaningless. But borders, too, are imagined, and the shape of gender borders is
as contested as any political conflict between nations. The contestation and negotiation of
gender borders is what leads to conflict—for example, when trans-exclusive radical
feminists (TERFs) police the borders of womanhood and claim that trans women are not
women, or when heteronormativity disciplines gender expression to marginalize
feminine-presenting men.
Just as national borders—which are simultaneously a product of imagination, an
exercise of power for those who draw them, and a material reality for those constrained
18
by them—are routinely crossed by migrants, the boundaries drawn between genders are
crossed by transgender, non-binary, and gender-diverse people, as well as by queer folks
and those with non-heteronormative sexualities. Both Anzaldúa (1987) and Berman
(2017) view the act of boundary-crossing as destabilizing of boundaries themselves.
Much like the “post-” in postmodernism, Berman (2017) argues,
the prefix “trans” has come to stand not for gender or sexual identities that
have moved from one side of a binary field to the other, but rather for
“anything that disrupts, denaturalizes, rearticulates and makes visible” the
links we assume to exist between a sexual body and the social roles it is
expected to play. (p. 222)
This usage, Berman (2017) asserts, “represents a challenge to the normative dimension of
the original entity or space, a crossing over that looks back critically from its space
beyond” (p. 221). Both Berman (2017) and Anzaldúa (1987) see space, culture, and
gender as intertwined, and attend to the “third space” created between two territories
when boundaries are crossed—or, as in Bhabha’s (1994) origination of the term, the
space that is
continually, contingently, ‘opening out’, remaking the boundaries,
exposing the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sign of
difference – be it class, gender or race … – where difference is neither
One nor the Other but something else besides, in-between. (p. 313,
emphasis in original)
For Berman (2017), the focus is on movement, on the act of displacement that challenges
the meaning of place; for Anzaldúa (1987), the focus is on the space of mixing, of
mestizaje, where cultural encounters produce something new. Evoking Anzaldúa,
Koyama (2000/2020) argues that trans people “occupy the borderland where notions of
masculinity and femininity collide,” but stresses that
19
The borderland analogy is not meant to suggest that transsexual people are
somewhere between male and female. Rather, the space they occupy is
naturally and rightfully theirs, as the actual Texas–Mexico borderlands
belong to Chicano/as, and I am calling attention to the unnaturalness of the
boundary that was designed to keep them out. (p. 742)
Conceptualizing transness as a borderland space highlights the fluidity of gender and the
ongoing processes of movement that make up gender identification. It also places gender
and culture on the same conceptual terrain.
The role of borders in trans life is material as much as it is metaphorical. Even as
trans, nonbinary, and non-cisgender people blur the boundaries of masculinity and
femininity, resisting or even subverting the “highly gendered regulatory schemas”
(Butler, 1993/2011, p. x) that produce the materiality of the body and make sex and
gender intelligible, they become targets for state containment and control, curtailing their
ability to cross physical borders between differently-regulated territories. As Fischer
(2019) explains, media framings of trans people as deviant and deceptive, as well as
uneven legal policies that make it difficult for trans people to access cohesive sets of
identity documents, leave them susceptible to anti-terrorism policies enacted in the wake
of 9/11. When “the security state explicitly links gender nonnormativity with its
construction of terrorist behavior” (Fischer, 2019, p. 164), people who do not conform to
gendered, classed, and racialized constructions of model citizenship may be detained,
questioned, and ultimately denied movement across borders. These restrictions on trans
movement take on increased significance when considered in the context of highly
uneven schemas of legal rights and administrative policies that exist in different political
contexts. For non-cisgender people, crossing a border can have enormous implications
for their quality of life and physical safety, including whether they can access health care,
20
what identity documents are available to them, and what treatment they will face in
encounters with the criminal justice system. Notwithstanding Spade’s (2015) call to
eschew an individual rights framework for trans activism in favor of a broader overhaul
of administrative norms that unevenly distribute life chances, differences in the legal
rights afforded on each side of a border have material consequences for non-cisgender
lives. Until gendered systems of regulation are dismantled, we must not ignore the desires
of non-cisgender people to move across borders in search of regulatory schemas that
better accommodate their lives, or to reach for imaginative resources from sociocultural
contexts beyond their own.
Neither cultures nor genders are static; they continually borrow, mix, indigenize,
produce, perform, and renegotiate. In other words, both culture and gender are
productively approached through a hybridity framework. Cultural hybridity scholars
characterize culture as a site of ongoing mixing, in contrast to the cultural imperialism
thesis that sees homogenization (and often, specifically, Westernization) as the global
endgame (Pieterse, 2019). This mixing, importantly, takes place under conditions of
unequal power, and must be discussed with attention to sociocultural contexts, including
postcolonial conditions and the globalization of neoliberal capitalism (Kraidy, 2005). Yet
the hybridity framework leaves room for disempowered actors to contest large-scale
forces, including through subversive or resistant performance (Butler, 1990/2007;
Muñoz, 1999), and hybridity scholars note the integral role that media representations
play in processes of cultural hybridization and transcultural imagination (Darling-Wolf,
2015; Kraidy, 2005). Approaching gender through the lens of cultural hybridity, I ask:
When non-cisgender people “migrate” through processes of gender (re)identification,
21
what parts of their assigned gender or their lived experience remain with them through
that transition? What role does media play in non-cisgender people’s gender
identification processes? And how do non-cisgender people contend with media
representations that replicate hegemonic frameworks of static gender binarism? In short, I
am interested in how non-cisgender people use media texts in the imagination,
negotiation, and enactment of new gender possibilities.
Imagination is central to my theoretical approach. Following Anderson (2006), I
see imagination as integral to the creation of community and comradeship; following
Darling-Wolf (2015), I note that the imagination of the global largely takes place in and
through media. With the advent of modernity and the acceleration of globalization,
imagination has taken on an increasingly important role in social life. Appadurai (1996)
explains that the proliferation of mass media, “which present a rich, ever-changing store
of possible lives,” expand imaginative horizons such that “[m]ore persons in more parts
of the world consider a wider set of possible lives than they ever did before” (p. 53). This
represents a shift from a paradigm in which imagination and fantasy functioned primarily
as forms of escape to one in which they have become integral to the “fabrication of social
lives” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 54); put differently, rather than “antidotes to the finitude of
social experience” (p. 54), imagination and fantasy have become resources for realizing
new possibilities. Yet Appadurai (1996) notes that this dynamic is not so simple as an
individual seeing a media representation as a model for a different kind of life and then
replicating that model. Instead, “[t]he importance of media is not so much as direct
sources of new images and scenarios for life possibilities but as semiotic diacritics of
great power” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 53). In other words, media function as imaginative
22
resources not just for pathmaking in individual lives, but also for challenging existing
hegemonic frameworks.
23
CHAPTER 3
BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE REVIEW:
GENDER AND THE US-JAPAN MEDIA RELATIONSHIP
Japan and the United States are both globally influential media producers, and
their historical positioning and relationship to one another invite closer analysis. The
United States is a global media powerhouse, exporting entertainment media, journalism,
and communication technology around the world, and U.S.-based transnational media
corporations (TNMCs) control the majority of the world’s major entertainment flow
(Mirrlees, 2013). The global influence of the United States is so widely discussed that
“McDonaldization,” a reference to a U.S. transnational corporation, is used as a
shorthand term for the cultural homogenization paradigm of globalization (Pieterse,
2019). Yet as Appadurai (1996) points out, in terms of fears of cultural imperialism, U.S.
influence may be less threatening than the influence of regional cultural powers, such as
Japan in Asia. For its part, Japan has been globally influential in the realms of culture, art,
technology, and media at least from the early modern era, and has strategically
renegotiated its global position in the wake of its World War II defeat (Darling-Wolf,
2018b). Iwabuchi (2015) explains that in the 1990s, Japan embarked on a strategic
nation-branding campaign of “‘soft’ nationalism” (p. 26) in the form of the “Cool Japan”
policy, in which Japanese cultural forms were exported globally through a market-driven
logic that prioritized national pride. In short, both the U.S. and Japan produce media texts
that travel globally, and neither country’s political actors are insensible to the cultural
influence that these texts can exert.
24
Global media flows occur within historically situated relationships of exchange.
In addition to being globally influential each in their own right, Japan and the U.S. have a
special relationship to one another. This relationship arguably began with the 1853 arrival
of American Commodore Perry, who enforced Western demands for trade with Japan
with military might, but intensified with Japan’s WWII defeat and postwar occupation by
U.S. forces. As Yoda (2006) explains, in the wake of the U.S. occupation, proponents of
neoliberalism in Japan used globalization as a rationale for national reconfiguration
according to “global” (read: U.S.) standards and practices. Desire for consumer goods
and economic prosperity—modeled, at least in part, by the U.S. occupying forces and the
cultural goods they brought with them—clashed with anti-U.S. sentiment and postwar
resentment of Japan’s semi-colonized status (Harootunian, 2006; Harootunian & Yoda,
2006). In the U.S., in turn, the memory of Pearl Harbor and wartime resentments
coexisted uneasily with a wave of Japanese technocultural products, like the Sony
Walkman, that marked Japan’s postwar economic rise. By the late 1990s, however, U.S.
popular discourse exploded with the popularity of Japanese media, particularly video
games and animation (Darling-Wolf, 2018a), an arguable triumph of the “Cool Japan”
strategy (Iwabuchi, 2015). McKevitt (2010) notes that anime was part of the globalizing
process for people in the U.S., presenting “an opportunity to participate in a global
community that fostered local cultural difference” (p. 894). Contemporary Japan and the
United States remain political and military allies as well as sites of transcultural media
exchange.
The U.S.-Japan media relationship affords unique and specific opportunities for
gender negotiation and non-cisgender identification. The marked “Japaneseness” of
25
media texts that travel from Japan to the U.S. is key to my investigation of these texts’
use as imaginative resources for gender identity formation. As McLelland and Dasgupta
(2005) explain, Japan has provided “an endless supply of exotic and enticing images” (p.
1) for Euro-American media ever since the Japonisme boom of the late 1800s. Daliot-bul
(2014) argues that “[t]he interest in Japanese popular culture … can be interpreted as the
result of the high symbolic value placed on cultural otherness in late capitalist societies”
(p. 76). These observations stand in contrast to Iwabuchi’s (1998) position that it is the
mukokuseki quality, or “cultural odorlessness,” of Japanese cultural products that affords
them such success in global markets. McKevitt (2010) has argued that the U.S. anime
boom of the 1990s was in fact the result of fans demanding more “authentic” anime—in
other words, more direct translations, without the localization and adaptation that
distributors assumed were necessary for the U.S. market. As McKevitt (2010) explains,
The Japan that fans encountered on television or in club gatherings was a
highly mediated one that crossed the Pacific after passing through the
mukokuseki [culturally odorless] filter. Still, cultural odor is relative to the
nose of the smeller, and what seemed denationalized to a prominent anime
director could smell a lot like Japan to a young person in California. It was
this complicated intersection of production and consumption, the mingling
of Japanese and Western aesthetics, genres, and racial and gender
categories, that permitted anime to be a truly hybrid global product. (p.
900-901, emphasis added)
It is no accident that McKevitt mentions race and gender as aspects of Japanese media’s
cultural otherness. Other scholars have highlighted the “gender and sexually ambivalent
characters” (McLelland & Dasgupta, 2005, p. 7) featured in Japanese popular media,
particularly in manga, anime, and fiction aimed at or created by women and girls
(Hemmann, 2020). These (implicitly or explicitly racialized) representations of gender
26
are key to my investigation of transcultural media’s productive power in the realm of
gender identification.
Studies both in the U.S. (Kornfield, 2011) and in other countries (Lilja &
Wasshede, 2016; Martin, 2012) have reported that transnational consumers of Japanese
media find the “otherness” of Japanese media representations of gender productive in
their own negotiations of gender and sexuality. Kornfield (2011) argues that consumption
of the “Gender Bender” genre of Japanese manga in the U.S. produces “cultural slippage”
and “creates a space where gender-as-a-construct is more apparent than in mainstream
U.S. entertainment” (p. 214). Kornfield (2011) stresses that neither U.S. nor Japanese
culture “is more equitable or has more flexible gender norms than the other,” but rather
that the difference between them, the otherness that consumers see in traveling texts,
“makes gender performances visible and demonstrates that different cultures approach
gender norms and roles in different manners” (p. 219). Martin (2012) found that
Taiwanese readers of Japanese homoerotic Boys’ Love (BL) manga “use the BL texts to
imagine a geo-cultural world and reflect on their relation to it—that is, to create an
imaginative geography of a ‘Japan’ that is characterized by sex-gender
ambiguity/fluidity/non-conformity” (p. 378). Far from mukokuseki, Martin (2012) argues
that the Japanese “odor” of BL texts, its perceived distinctiveness from Taiwanese
readers’ own cultural context, facilitates discussions and negotiation of gender and
sexuality, and suggests that “it is precisely the differentness of BL’s fictional worlds from
the Taiwanese readers’ own life-worlds—at the level of both gender and national-cultural
identification—that makes them such fertile ground for imaginative and affective
appropriation” (p. 377).
27
In their study of Swedish readers of BL manga and the related, but more sexually
explicit, Yaoi genre, Lilja and Wasshede (2016) found that these texts have “produced
images of Japan as ultra-modern, exotic and sexually free … as well as resulted in
performances of alternative queer subject positions and sexual practices” (p. 285) outside
of Japan. While the Swedish consumers interviewed by Lilja and Wasshede (2016) “both
implicitly and explicitly described [Sweden and Swedishness] as open and positive
towards women and homosexuality” (p. 294), they also “argued that Swedish girls and
young women consume, produce and love BL/Yaoi because of the possibilities it opens
up regarding sexual self-development and sexual agency” (p. 298). Though these readers
did not interpret the real Japan as reflective of the “exotic, wonderful, mysterious world
were [sic] gender bending and sexuality are twisted and open to negotiations” (p. 294)
that was presented in manga, the manga representations “enable[d] Swedish young
women to explore their own identifications and desires” (p. 300). There is thus ample
evidence of transnational consumers identifying unique and specific qualities of genderbending and fluidity in Japanese media texts and drawing on the perceived otherness of
these texts in their own negotiations of gender and sexuality. However, the intersection of
Japanese media texts with specific processes of gender identity formation for nonJapanese, non-cisgender people has not yet been studied. My work addresses this gap.
Investigating processes of gender identification and negotiation through
transcultural media calls for a multi-sited study. Hybridity theorists emphasize that
cultural flows are not unidirectional; they are asymmetrical and uneven, taking place
within historically situated relations of power, and there is always some degree of
mixing, of give and take (Darling-Wolf, 2015; Kraidy, 2005; Pieterse, 2019). Japan has
28
certainly been influenced by U.S. media and culture, perhaps most intensely in the
postwar period, both during and in the wake of U.S. occupation (Ames, 2016;
Harootunian, 2006; Harootunian & Yoda, 2006). Japan’s television development suffered
economic setbacks after its WWII defeat, and U.S. television stepped in, with many
series imported and dubbed or adapted into anime versions (Davis, 2016). U.S. media and
consumer goods were associated with economic prosperity and became objects—though
not uncomplicated ones—of Japanese desire (Ames, 2016). U.S. cultural products
became, and remain, part of Japanese daily life. It is thus reasonable to ask whether the
consumption of U.S. media in Japan has implications for Japanese processes of gender
negotiation and identification.
Discourses around gender, feminism, and transgender identification in Japan have
taken place in the context of postwar reconstruction, globalization, and international
activism. Japan’s U.S.-imposed postwar constitution (Berkofsky, 2010) “guarantees ‘the
essential equality of the sexes’” (Frühstück, 2020, p. 80), a framework that continues to
shape Japanese law and policy. As Ho (2021b) explains, there exists “a progressive
narrative in which US.-inflected trans activism, institutionalization, and legal and
medicalized frameworks tend to be regarded as the model of rights and citizenship for all
gender-variant individuals in Japan and elsewhere to follow” (p. 15). The complex and
sometimes overlapping categories of identification around gender and sexuality in Japan
do not neatly map to those used in the U.S., leading to ambivalence around identification
as toransujendā (トランスジェンダー; transgender), “a modern term originally
imported from the United States and adapted by local [Japanese] LGBT (Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual, Transgender) activists” (Ho, 2021b, p. 3). Yet this term and other transliterated
29
loan words such as gei (ゲイ; gay), rezubian (レズビアン; lesbian), and LGBT—and by
extension a U.S.-inflected model of gender variance and sexuality—are part of the
discursive environment in which Japanese people negotiate gender, sexuality, and gender
identification.
U.S. media representations play a role in Japanese gender frameworks. DarlingWolf (2004c) found that notions of masculinity and femininity were constructed in
discursive formation by their Japanese informants, who compared both the reality and the
media representation of Japanese men and women to that of so-called “Western” men and
women. Yet McLelland (2003) notes that Western and, specifically, U.S. media
representations that travel to Japan enter into a significantly different sociocultural
environment surrounding gender and sexuality. As McLelland (2003) explains, gender
malleability has a long history in Japanese culture, and the Christian-moralistic and
pathologizing discourses that have profoundly shaped the U.S. cultural environment for
LGBTQ+ people did not establish as firm a hold in Japan. The difference, he writes, is
that “[w]hile in Anglophone societies sexual minorities are often viewed as inherently
dangerous and degenerate, in Japan, they are seen more as institutionally awkward,”
acceptable in the world of entertainment but not beyond (McLelland, 2003, p. 226).
Indeed,
Absent in Japan, compared with the US, is the anxiety that the gender free
for all in the entertainment world will have a debilitating effect upon
people’s gender performances in “real life.” US gender-benders such as
Marilyn Manson are very popular in Japan, too, but there are no Christian
or parents’ organizations campaigning to have such performers banned
because they are a bad influence on young people. (McLelland, 2003, p.
225)
30
In other words, performances of gender bending signify differently in different cultural
contexts, and the Japanese and U.S. contexts diverge distinctively. Taken together, the
work of Ho (2021b), Darling-Wolf (2004c), and McLelland (2003) demonstrates that
U.S. discourses around and media representations of gender are meaningful to Japanese
negotiations of gender, but that any analysis of these relationships must attend to the
specificity of Japanese and U.S. cultural contexts.
While scholarship has addressed transgender, queer, and gender-variant cultures
in Japan (e.g. Dale, 2014, 2012; Frühstück, 2020; Ho, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c, 2020;
McLelland, 2003; McLelland & Dasgupta, 2005) and the transnational consumption of
queer and gender-bending Japanese media (Kornfield, 2011; Lilja & Wasshede, 2016;
Martin, 2012; Suter, 2013), to date, I am aware of no English-language scholarship that
addresses the use of U.S. media by non-cisgender Japanese consumers in the negotiation
of gender identification. My project addresses this gap, but also places focus on
transcultural processes of gender identification with and through media. By approaching
these dynamics with a dual-sited study, rather than one focused on a unidirectional flow, I
acknowledge the essential hybridity of transcultural media exchange. Furthermore,
centering this project on the U.S.-Japan media relationship highlights the specific history
of transgender, nonbinary, gender-variant, and non-cisgender identification happening
along this axis of exchange. The U.S. anime boom of the 1990s occurred during a
formative period for people who are presently in their 30s and 40s, and had a lasting
influence on U.S. media and culture, influencing later artists and creators (Hemmann,
2020). In Japan, the 1990s saw the introduction of the English loan word toransujendā
(トランスジェンダー; transgender) by way of the U.S. queer rights movement,
31
although as Ho (2021) notes, this term is seldom used “at the everyday level” (p. 5), even
by those whom it purports to describe—echoing Valentine’s (2007) work on the category
of “transgender” in the U.S. My project asks: How did these cultural exchanges shape the
negotiation of gender for Japanese and U.S. media consumers? How has the complex
geopolitical relationship between Japan and the U.S., including legacies of war and
occupation, fascination and exoticization, soft power, nation-branding, and strategic
appropriation, played out in individual processes of gender identification, as consumers
gather imaginative resources via transcultural media texts?
This chapter has detailed the historical relationship between Japan and the United
States that makes the U.S.-Japan axis of media exchange a fruitful site for the study of
gender globalization. I have discussed the cultural differences between Japan and the
U.S. in terms of gender norms, frameworks of gender theory and gender scholarship, and
gender transgression. I have also briefly reviewed the existing literature on reception of
Japanese texts among transcultural audiences and the particular importance of these texts
to queer people. Seeking to extend and complicate this existing scholarly discourse, I turn
now to my own study, which breaks new ground by considering both U.S. consumption
of Japanese media and Japanese consumption of U.S. media in a dual-sited study, and
also by focusing specifically on non-cisgender people’s media use. In the next chapter, I
describe the methods I employed and the participants who took part in this research.
32
CHAPTER 4
METHOD: DUAL-SITE VIRTUAL INTERVIEWS
My project looked at traveling texts, the resources they provide for non-cisgender
people, and the imaginative work that is central to global processes of gender
hybridization and bound up with cultural identification. I seek to understand how
transcultural texts might be used in processes of identification, in negotiation of the
boundaries between self and other, and in the imagination of both the other and the self.
To explore these dynamics, I spoke to people in two sites, the United States and Japan.
My research was guided by the following questions:
1) How do non-cisgender people in Japan and the U.S. engage with transcultural media
along the U.S.-Japan media axis?
a) What types of U.S. media and which specific media texts are consumed by noncisgender people in Japan?
b) How do non-cisgender people in Japan access U.S. media?
c) What reasons do non-cisgender people in Japan give for consuming U.S. media?
d) What social activities, if any, do non-cisgender people in Japan perform in
connection with their consumption of U.S. media?
e) What types of Japanese media and which specific media texts are consumed by
non-cisgender people in the U.S.?
f) How do non-cisgender people in the U.S. access Japanese media?
g) What reasons do non-cisgender people in the U.S. give for consuming Japanese
media?
33
h) What social activities, if any, do non-cisgender people in the U.S. perform in
connection with their consumption of Japanese media?
2) How do non-cisgender people in the U.S. and Japan interpret representations of
gender along the U.S.-Japan axis of transcultural media flows?
a) How do non-cisgender people in the U.S. interpret representations of gender in
Japanese media?
b) How do non-cisgender people in Japan interpret representations of gender in U.S.
media?
3) What role, if any, does transcultural media consumption play in non-cisgender
people’s processes of gender identification?
a) Do non-cisgender U.S. consumers of Japanese media identify such media as part
of their processes of gender identity formation? If so, what role does such media
play in processes of gender identification?
b) Do non-cisgender Japanese consumers of U.S. media identify such media as part
of their processes of gender identity formation? If so, what role does such media
play in processes of gender identification?
4) How, if at all, does transcultural media consumption shape non-cisgender people’s
ideas about gender?
This study was conducted primarily through semi-structured, one-on-one
interviews. Interviews were preferable to surveys for this project because they are more
detailed and personal, providing the opportunity to build rapport between researcher and
informant, and because two-way communication allowed for follow-up questions. Unlike
a standardized survey, a semi-structured interview gave me the flexibility to adapt in the
34
moment to informants’ answers and the information they shared. This was particularly
important in my work with a mixed group of non-cisgender people. While subsets of my
informants did share identification with certain labels—like “transgender” or
“nonbinary,” for example—my goal was to learn about each person’s unique experiences,
and having two-way conversations was the best way to follow that thread. I chose
interviews rather than participant observation because the subject of my research, gender
identification, is internal and cannot be observed directly. Since people are the best and
only authorities on their own genders, I chose to directly engage with research
participants and ask them questions about what I wanted to know.
Virtual Interviews
My research took place during the summer of 2022. During that time, travel to
Japan was restricted due to the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic, which meant that I
was unable to travel to Japan to conduct interviews. Due to this limitation, I decided to
conduct all interviews virtually, using the Zoom videoconferencing platform. Virtual
interviews enabled me to reach Japanese informants whom I would not have been able to
meet in person due to travel restrictions and also made the interview process safer for all
informants and for myself, in terms of the potential spread of COVID-19. Conducting
interviews virtually rather than in person also meant that I could interview informants in
any geographic location, rather than confining my sample to a physical research site. I
was able to speak with informants in a variety of time zones, including one U.S.
informant who was living in Japan and one Japanese informant who was living in the
United States. Using the Zoom platform also made data analysis faster and easier,
because for English-language interviews, I could correct Zoom’s auto-generated
35
transcripts rather than starting my transcription from scratch, and for Japanese-language
interviews, I could generate a separate audio file for each participant to avoid the effects
of cross-talk on automated transcription. The use of virtual interviews rather than inperson interviews did limit my sample to those who had access to the required technology
and felt comfortable enough to use it (although I did have one 66-year-old Japanese
informant whose child sat off-screen and helped them navigate the Zoom settings). At the
same time, the use of virtual interviews allowed me to recruit participants from a wide
geographic area and enabled me to include Japanese participants and thus conduct my
planned dual-sited study during a time when it was not possible for me to physically
travel to Japan. Recruiting and interviewing participants online mirrored the Internetbased methods by which transnational media is often consumed.
Recruitment
Although my broadly-constructed research sites of Japan and the United States
were purposively selected to explore the cultural, historical, and transnational media
exchange dynamics between these two contexts, the specific locations of my informants
were determined largely by availability, logistics, and the recruitment process. I am based
in Philadelphia, PA, U.S.A., and began my search for informants from this location; my
contacts in Japan are based in Tokyo and Shizuoka Prefecture, thus my search for
Japanese informants began in those locations. My goal was to reach a broad diversity of
people who identified as transgender, nonbinary, or non-cisgender, and who used
(watched, read, played, or listened to) media produced in the target location; that is, U.S.based respondents had to use Japanese media, and Japan-based respondents had to use
U.S. media. I began my search by posting recruitment materials in a variety of online and
36
offline locations, either myself or with the help of collaborators, and then expanded my
reach through snowball sampling.
My recruitment materials targeted non-cisgender users of transnational media.
Respondents had to be 18 years old to participate. At the U.S. research site, my gender
identification diversity targets were to interview at least 5 people who identified as
transgender; at least 5 who identified as nonbinary; at least 4 who identified as women,
feminine, femme, or MTF (“male to female”); and at least 4 who identified as men,
masculine, masc, or FTM (“female to male”), noting that all of these identifications may
overlap. At the Japanese research site, my gender identification diversity targets were to
interview at least 5 people who identified as toransujendā (トランスジェンダー;
transgender); at least 5 who identified as x-jendā (X-ジェンダー; without gender,
outside of gender) or nonbainarī (ノンバイナリー; nonbinary); at least 4 who identified
as josei (女性; women), onnarashī (女らしい; feminine), MTF, or related feminineinflected identifications; and at least 4 who identified as dansei (男性; men), otokorashī
(男らしい; masculine), FTM, or related masculine-inflected identifications; noting again
that all of these identifications may overlap. The recruitment survey asked all participants
to self-describe in terms of gender.
I prepared PDF flyers, which could be printed out and posted or placed in
physical locations and could also be shared digitally using email, online message boards,
and social media. Recruitment language in English included the following target identity
words: transgender, nonbinary, non-cisgender, gender variant, gender fluid, and gender
nonconforming. Recruitment materials in Japanese included the following target identity
words: toransujendā (トランスジェンダー), x-jendā (X-ジェンダー), FTM, MTF,
37
FTX (“female to X”), MTX (“male to X”), and seidōitsuseishōgai (性同一性障害;
Japanese translation of Gender Identity Disorder or GID). These terms were designed to
recruit informants whose gender experience roughly correlates to what is called
transgender or nonbinary in English (Dale, 2012; Ho, 2021b; Lark, 2019; Yuen, 2021),
although as Billard and Nesfield (2020) point out, local understandings of gender may
differ from those carried by global, Anglo-American terminology. Recruitment flyers
also advertised interviewee compensation in the amount of $20 USD for U.S.-based
participants or ¥2000 for Japan-based participants. Compensation is discussed further
later in this chapter. Copies of recruitment materials, including flyers and screening
survey in both English and Japanese, are included in Appendix B.
I received IRB approval for my English-language materials earlier than for my
Japanese language materials, and thus I began with recruitment of U.S.-based
participants. On June 3, 2022, I took the English-language screening survey live on
Qualtrics and posted my recruitment flyers online. I shared the English recruitment flyer
on my personal Facebook and in two Philadelphia-based, queer-related Facebook groups
of which I am a member (Queer Exchange Philly and Philadelphia Family Pride). I also
posted it in Discord groups in which I am active: two related to the Society for Cinema
and Media Studies (SCMS) and one related to Temple University’s Klein College of
Media and Communication. I emailed a copy of the flyer to a contact at Harvard
University and asked them to share it with their nonbinary listserv.
After collecting responses through Qualtrics, I looked through survey results to
decide which respondents I should email to request an interview. I noticed a number of
responses that struck me as suspicious. These were responses that did not provide any
38
details about the transcultural media they said they enjoyed (listing only words like
“manga” or “anime”), or in which there was a mismatch between the geographic location
associated with the IP address that completed the survey and the time zone in which they
respondent said they lived. I suspected that these responses came from people who did
not fit the selection criteria for the study but who were attempting to claim the advertised
compensation. In sifting through the survey responses, I had the following questions in
mind while deciding whom I should ask for an interview:
1. Did the respondent write something specific or extensive about the Japanese
media they enjoyed?
2. Did the respondent describe their gender identity in detail (e.g. “nonbinary
transmasculine” rather than simply “transgender”)?
3. Did the respondent’s self-identified ethnicity contribute to the diversity of my
sample?
4. Did the respondent’s self-identified gender identity contribute to my gender
diversity targets?
I contacted respondents in batches of about five and offered a range of interview times
and dates. In a few cases, respondents’ reply emails showed a drastically different time
zone than the one they had claimed to be in; to avoid potential scammers or malicious
actors, I did not pursue interviews with those respondents. As I conducted interviews, I
asked informants to suggest ways that I could contact other potential study participants,
and requested that informants share the link to the screening survey with their networks.
Using this technique, I expanded my sample and met my U.S. gender diversity targets.
39
Once I obtained IRB approval for my Japanese language materials, I reached out
to contacts in Japan and asked for their help distributing the recruitment flyer. A
collaborator at Temple University Japan agreed to post my flyer on campus in Tokyo,
and Qualtrics data showed that a few respondents reached the survey using the QR code
from that flyer. I also recruited one Japan-side participant whom I had interviewed and
intended to hire as a translator and interpreter for this study, but who was ultimately
unable to accept the job due to schedule conflicts. After our interview, this person
reached out to other non-cisgender people known to this person and encouraged them to
take part in the study. This key informant helped me to reach more Japanese informants. I
continued to ask informants for suggestions on how to reach more participants, and
decided to post the recruitment link on Twitter. I used Japanese text in the recruitment
tweet and included the tags #FTM, #MTF, #FTX, #MTX, #X ジェンダー (x-jendā), #ト
ランスジェンダー (#toransujendā, #transgender), #LGBTQ さんと繫がりたい
(LGBTQ-san to garitai, want to connect with #LGBTQ people), #LGBT さんと繋がり
たい (LGBT-san to garitai, want to connect with #LGBT people). I avoided recruiting
on Twitter for the U.S. side of this study because of a previous experience in which my
recruitment survey for a transgender-related project was flooded with hundreds of spam
responses. While I did receive some seemingly spam responses to the Japanese
recruitment survey via Twitter, the number was manageable, and the responses did not
seem to be driven by bots, as had been my previous experience. Tweeting the Japanese
recruitment survey connected me to another key Japanese informant, an independent
manga creator with a sizeable following on Twitter. After our interview, this person
tweeted about my study with a link to the recruitment survey. This significantly expanded
40
my sample and enabled me to reach my numeric and gender identity targets for Japanese
informants.
Because identification as non-cisgender was a central and necessary criterion for
participation, I concentrated my recruitment efforts in spaces where I expected to find
non-cisgender people. This included spaces that specifically welcomed LGBTQIA+
people, like the queer Facebook groups, but also spaces that catered to young adults, such
as the Temple University Japan campus. Studies have shown that young people are more
likely to self-identify as transgender, and overall numbers of transgender-identified
people are on the rise (Flores et al., 2016; Herman et al., 2017), leading me to target
young adult spaces as part of the recruitment process. However, I did not limit my sample
to young adults. When extending invitations to interview, I consciously selected for age
diversity, which in this case meant that I actively pursued interviews with older
respondents (in their 30s, 40s, and 60s), prioritizing them over younger respondents (1829) during later phases of recruitment.
Participants
Between June and September 2022, I conducted 44 semi-structured interviews
with self-identified non-cisgender participants—21 U.S.-side informants, and 23 Japanside informants. Tables listing informants’ pseudonyms and other demographics,
including pronouns, self-described gender identity, age, ethnicity, and the language
spoken in Japan-side interviews, are included as Appendix A. Seven Japan-side
interviews (30%) were conducted in English, while 16 (70%) were conducted in Japanese
with the assistance of a professional interpreter. Data on age and ethnicity came from the
screening survey. The youngest informant was 19 and the oldest informant was 66. The
41
average age of Japan-side informants was 29.91, while the average age of U.S.-side
informants was 28.86. The participant tables also list the duration of each interview. The
shortest interview lasted about 45 minutes, while the longest lasted 2 hours and 21
minutes. The average duration of U.S.-side interviews was 1 hour and 19 minutes, and
the average duration of Japan-side interviews was 1 hour and 16 minutes.
While the screening survey also asked respondents both to self-describe their
gender (open-ended text box entry) and to select gender identities that applied to them
from a list (checkbox entry, multiple responses possible), I used these survey responses
only to screen for possible interview participants. At the end of each interview, I asked
informants to describe their gender identity in their own words, and this is the response
that I included on the participant table. I have spelled “nonbinary” without a hyphen in
this text, but for informants who wrote “non-binary” with a hyphen on their screening
surveys, I have preserved this choice and identified them as “non-binary” with a hyphen.
In the case of Japanese speakers’ self-described gender identities, I have provided
English translations on the participant table. For Anglo-American-derived terms like
transgender and nonbinary, I have not included Japanese translations or transliterations
(e.g. トランスジェンダー, toransujenda for “transgender”). For Japanese terms that are
not commonly used by English speakers, I have provided an English translation, but I
have also included a parenthetical translation and transliteration (e.g.ニューハーフ,
nyūhāfu for “new-half”).
Pronouns and pseudonyms were obtained during interviews. Before asking any
questions, I asked each informant to choose a pseudonym that would represent them in
any written work or presentations resulting from this study, and I asked them to tell me
42
which pronouns they use. If an informant gave two sets of pronouns, for example
she/they, I explained that I would list both pronouns in the data table, but asked the
informant to choose one pronoun for the written text in order to provide consistency for
the reader. Two Japanese informants asked me not to use any pronouns, and to instead
repeat the informant’s name each time I referred to the informant. While this construction
may sound awkward in English, it is quite common and unremarkable to refer to a person
by name only—without using any pronouns—in Japanese. In each case, I have honored
the informant’s wishes with respect to pronoun use. Throughout this manuscript, I have
identified informants by their pseudonyms, and have given the informant’s demographic
details parenthetically the first time I refer to that informant. This information takes the
following format: Pseudonym (pronouns, gender identity, age, ethnicity, national
grouping). For example: Blueberry (she/they, nonbinary, 41, white, U.S.). At the start of
each new section, I repeat the informant’s demographics for the reader’s benefit.
I grouped participants as either U.S.-side or Japan-side informants based on the
cultural context in which they grew up. Since my analysis focused on how informants
came to identify as some non-cisgender identity and the role played by media originating
outside of the informant’s cultural context in processes of gender identification, the
informant’s cultural experience as a young person was more relevant to the study than
where they were currently living, where they were born, where they had traveled, or what
citizenship they held. I did not base national grouping on the participant’s ethnicity. Thus,
several ethnically Japanese informants are included in the U.S. national grouping,
because they grew up in the United States: Mimi (it/its, she/her; nonbinary, pseudo trans
femme, neutrois or agender; 29; East Asian, Japanese, Ryūkyūan; U.S.), Alex Rowan
43
(they/she; a person first, biologically female sex organs, not a boy or girl; 36; white,
Japanese; U.S.), and Leo (he/him; FTM trans, trans guy; 32; Japanese; U.S.).
The pseudonyms chosen by my Japanese informants reflect the diversity of
written language used in Japan. The Japanese language is written using three systems:
hiragana, a phonetic syllabary used for Japanese words and word endings; katakana, a
different syllabary for the same phonetic system, which is used for foreign loan words;
and kanji, pictographic characters that may be read as one or more syllables and may
form words either on their own or in compounds with other characters. The Roman
alphabet, known as romaji in Japanese, is also widely known in Japan; instruction in
English is mandatory in the Japanese school system, many businesses and marketing
materials incorporate English words, and of course, Internet addresses are written in
Roman letters. This linguistic mélange means that Japanese speakers have many options
when choosing how to write their names. When my Japanese informants were choosing
their pseudonyms, I asked them to both say their pseudonym aloud and to type it using
the chat feature on Zoom. I did not give any guidelines for pseudonyms, other than to
specify that this should not be a name the informant had used anywhere else, like an
online handle or a username. This led to a mixture of name styles and writing systems.
Some Japanese informants gave full, Japanese-sounding names, but wrote them in
Roman letters. Some gave single-word or even single-letter names, also written in Roman
letters. Others used kanji or hiragana to write their pseudonyms. In each case, I have
preserved informants’ pseudonyms in the same writing style in which they were given to
me. When informants used Japanese writing systems for their pseudonyms, I have added
parenthetical transliterations in Roman letters.
44
Almost all informants were living in the country with which they are associated in
this study at the time of the interview. Two exceptions were 竹 (Take; they/them;
everything out there, pangender; 35; Japanese; Japan), a Japan-side informant living in
California, USA, and Leo (he/him; FTM trans, trans guy; 32; Japanese; U.S.), a U.S.-side
informant living in Tokyo, Japan. Both of these informants were recruited through the
Japanese screening survey, were ethnically Japanese, and spoke English during their
interviews. 竹 (Take) grew up in Japan before moving to the U.S. around age 18, and at
the time of our interview, had spent about half their life in each country. Leo grew up in
the U.S., but traveled to Japan regularly throughout his childhood to visit extended
family. At the time of our interview, he had just made a permanent move to Japan for a
new job. Although 竹 (Take) was living in the U.S., I categorized them as a Japanese
informant because they had grown up with Japanese media and in a Japanese social
environment. Likewise, although Leo reached the interest survey through the Japan-side
link and was living in Japan, I categorized him as a U.S. informant because he had grown
up with U.S. media and in a U.S. social environment.
In terms of racial and ethnic diversity, my target at the U.S. site was for no more
than 10 of my informants to identify as white. My final sample, unfortunately, did not
meet this target. Out of 21 U.S.-side informants, 13 (62%) identified only as white. The
remaining eight (38%) identified as non-white or with a mixture of racial and ethnic
identities, including informants who identified in whole or in part as Japanese (n=3),
Latinx/o/a (n=2), Black (n=1), Hispanic (n=1), Indigenous (n=1), Ryūkyūan (n=1),
Southeast Asian (n=1), East Asian (n=1), and European (n=1). Informants’ full
demographics, which better illustrate the overlap of these identities, are listed in the
45
participant table in Appendix A. While I did prioritize recruitment of survey respondents
who identified as non-white, many did not respond to my email requests for interviews,
and several who did respond did so with email timestamps that did not reflect the time
zone in which they said they lived. When I replied and explained that people outside the
U.S. were not eligible for the study, most did not respond further. I did follow through
and interview one potential informant who identified as Black, despite some red flags in
their survey responses that made me suspect they might be providing inaccurate
responses in hopes of collecting the monetary compensation I had advertised. That
interviewee could not provide detailed answers to my questions about Japanese media,
and when pressed, talked about characters of whom I could find no record in follow-up
research. Their interview responses were generally vague and contradictory, and
ultimately, I decided to exclude that interview (#9) from the study.
In comparison to the United States, Japan is much more homogeneous in terms of
race and ethnicity, with an estimated 97.9% ethnically Japanese population in 2017
(Central Intelligence Agency, 2022); thus, at the Japanese research site, I did not set any
specific racial or ethnic identity targets. I did, however, hope to recruit some participants
who identified as non-ethnic-majority Japanese, for example those with Ainu, Ryūkyūan,
Korean, Chinese, or Brazilian heritage. Ultimately, only two out of 23 Japan-side
informants (9%) identified as some ethnicity other than Japanese; one identified as
Japanese, East Asian, and Taiwanese, while the other identified as Japanese and East
Asian. One Japan-side informant did not respond to the screening survey question about
race or ethnicity. The remaining 20 informants (87%) identified only as Japanese.
46
Compensation
As advertised in my recruitment materials, I provided monetary compensation to
all interview participants. Material compensation is important both for ethical and for
practical reasons. Ethically, asking marginalized communities to contribute their
expertise and share their lived experience with a researcher without compensation is
extractive, and perpetuates the idea (often exemplified by higher education committee
assignments) that marginalized people should work on diversity, equity, and inclusion
work “for their own good,” or at least for the greater good of the community. It also
devalues the vital expertise possessed by people in marginalized positions. Non-cisgender
people face multiple, interlocking oppressions that place them in positions of material
disadvantage (Drydakis, 2017; Movement Advancement Project et al., 2013). Their
marginalization on the basis of gender identification or presentation may have cost them
job opportunities, and has likely forced them to pay costs that are not charged to
cisgender people, such as fees for legal name and gender changes or costs associated with
trans-related medical care. Yet the intimate knowledge of non-cisgender life possessed by
the people who live it—the experts on gender variance—is too often requested by
researchers without offering any material recognition of this expertise. In short, noncisgender people routinely occupy the intersection of systematic discrimination, material
disadvantage, and expert knowledge, and yet are asked to provide their knowledge free of
charge for the scholarly and material gain of researchers. If I ask non-cisgender
informants to share personal details related to their gender identities, I feel ethically
bound to offer material compensation for their expertise.
47
Furthermore, from a practical standpoint, Vincent (2017) notes that failing to
provide compensation limits any sample to those who have the resources to participate
for free. Like unpaid internships, which are accessible only to students who are supported
by other means, unpaid research studies may either be hard to justify or simply
unavailable to working-class or economically disadvantaged people. Transgender,
nonbinary, and other non-cisgender people are, again, more likely to be precariously
employed or struggling with material survival (Drydakis, 2017; Movement Advancement
Project et al., 2013). I did not want to limit my sample to upper- or middle-class people
for whom an hour of time is a disposable resource. Thus, it was not only ethically but
also practically necessary to offer compensation to all informants.
The amount of compensation should be high enough to respect the informant’s
time and expertise, but not high enough to motivate fabricated answers or insincere
participation from ineligible or disinterested participants. I offered $20 USD to each
U.S.-based interview participant and ¥2000 1 (similar purchasing power to $20) to each
Japan-based participant, provided in the form of gift cards to either Amazon.com for
U.S.-based participants, or Amazon.co.jp for Japan-based participants. I chose Amazon
because it is widely accessible in both countries and offers a range of items that would be
attractive to participants of different income levels, including both basic needs items (e.g.
housewares, toiletries, food, paper goods) and leisure items (e.g. electronics, books,
movies and video games). The amount of compensation ($20 USD and its rough
The exchange rate between U.S. dollars and Japanese yen fluctuated significantly over the course of the
design, data collection, and analysis phases of this project. When I designed the study in April 2022, ¥2000
was roughly equivalent to $17.40 USD; in December 2022, its value was about $14.49 USD. I paid for
each ¥2000 Amazon.co.jp gift card using a U.S. credit card, and was charged between $14.30 and $15.15
USD for each one.
1
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equivalent in Japanese yen) is slightly higher than a basic wage for one hour of work and
could be used to purchase several basic items or put towards the purchase of more
expensive luxury goods. In short, this compensation was designed to signal grateful
recognition of the informants’ time and expertise, but not to serve as primary motivation
for participation.
Translation
In order to conduct interviews and analyze data from the Japanese research site, I
employed a professional interpreter/translator. While I have studied Japanese and am
conversationally competent at the basic to intermediate level, I am not fluent, and thus
sought language support to prepare study materials, interpret real-time interviews, and to
transcribe and translate the data. While my study was undergoing the IRB approval
process, I conducted a hiring process and selected an interpreter/translator. Before
conducting any interviews, I had the recruitment materials, screening survey, and semistructured interview questions professionally translated. Recruitment materials and
screening survey are included as Appendix B and semi-structured interview questions are
included as Appendix C. The same translator provided sequential interpretation during
Japanese-language interviews, and participated in some English-language interviews as
language support for those who spoke English as a second language. Japanese speakers
had their choice of being interviewed entirely in English, with no interpreter present;
being interviewed in English with the interpreter available as backup; and being
interviewed in Japanese with sequential interpretation. After the interviews, I used
automatic transcription service Happy Scribe to produce rough transcripts of the
informants’ responses, which I gave to the translator. The translator then prepared precise
49
translations of the Japanese interviews, which I used in my analysis. During analysis, I
occasionally had questions about the translation, and consulted with the translator to
refine the translations of Japanese interviews.
Data Analysis
I used Atlas.ti, a qualitative data analysis program, to code my data. I did not use
any automatic coding tools, although these features are present in the software; instead, I
read the transcripts and coded them manually, using Atlas.ti’s interface to create, revise,
combine, and search codes. For English-language interviews, I used uncorrected,
automatically-generated transcripts for initial coding. Where the automatically-generated
transcripts were not intelligible, or where I needed to check precise wording, I corrected
the transcripts using the video or audio recordings of the interviews. Later, when
choosing quotations to include in this manuscript, I reviewed the recordings and prepared
precise transcripts of the sections I intended to quote. For Japanese-language interviews, I
used the translated transcripts provided by the translator I hired. Occasionally, I reviewed
the recorded interviews to check an informant’s tone of voice.
During initial coding, I took a grounded approach and generated codes that
matched the language of the informants. I also coded mentions of specific media texts or
platforms for easy searchability during later analysis. As themes began to emerge, I
created new codes to reflect them, and iteratively returned to transcripts I had previously
coded to apply new, thematic codes in addition to the initial, in vivo coding. Through this
method, I generated and refined the themes that I discuss in the following chapters.
This chapter has described my research questions; the methods I used to recruit
participants, conduct interviews, and analyze interview data; and the participants who
50
took part in this research. In the following two chapters, I present qualitative data from
my interviews. The next chapter, Chapter 5, focuses on the U.S. informants in this study,
who said that Japanese media was a source of transgressive gender portrayals that
became important to their discovery of their own non-cisgender identities. In Chapter 6, I
turn to the Japanese informants, who found Japanese media regressive, stereotypical, and
painful to watch. They turned instead to U.S. and other Anglophone media, where they
said they found more diverse and respectful portrayals of gender variant people. These
two chapters highlight the importance of cultural distance to informants’ experiences of
transcultural media.
51
CHAPTER 5
NON-CISGENDER U.S. CONSUMERS OF JAPANESE MEDIA
Some of my earliest memories are Studio Ghibli movies. And [in
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind] here was a girl who was going out and
shooting things and protecting her people and all of this, and I was like,
oh, no! That’s what I should do! [laughs] So that was, I think, was my first
idea, was like— you know what, girls don’t have to be like they are
around here [in rural Kentucky]. So, yeah that was probably a big part of
it. You know it’s like thanks, Japan, for teaching me that I can do other
things, other than this! [laughs]
(Blueberry, she/they, nonbinary, 41, white, U.S.)
The U.S.-side informants I interviewed said that Japanese media had been sources
of inspiration while they were growing up and discovering, coming to terms with, or
negotiating their non-cisgender identities. U.S. informants said that Japanese media
offered representations of gender that were unlike anything available to them in U.S.
media during their youth—a time period that, for my informants, roughly covered the
1980s through the early 2000s. In this chapter, I discuss informants’ experiences with
Japanese media, their impressions of how Japanese media differed from
contemporaneous U.S. media, and their stories of how encounters with Japanese media
helped them to arrive at their own non-cisgender identities. U.S. informants saw Japanese
media as distinctive and described Japanese representations of gender as more fluid and
transgressive than U.S. media representations. These qualities were important to U.S.
informants as they navigated gender norms, especially during their youth.
Alternative Models of Gender Performance
Compared to the local media they grew up with, U.S. informants said that they
saw a greater variety of gender portrayals in Japanese media. When asked about the
52
Japanese media they consumed, U.S. informants mostly talked about anime (animated
television shows and movies) and manga (Japanese comics), but some also discussed
video games, live-action TV dramas, or pop idols. Throughout Japanese media,
informants said, there were more options for masculinities and femininities, and there
were more and higher-quality representations of gender bending compared to what was
available in the U.S.
According to U.S.-side informants, Japanese media featured multiple
masculinities, as opposed to what they perceived as U.S. media’s portrayals of men as
stereotypically muscular action heroes. This included “pretty boys” (Marcel; they/she;
feminine non-binary; 24; white, Latinx/o/a; U.S.), androgynous characters, and “very soft
men” (Alois, he/they, nonbinary transmasculine, 27, white, U.S.). Leo (he/him; FTM
trans, trans guy; 32; Japanese; U.S.) said that in Japan, “there’s a greater degree of
acceptability for more feminine forms of masculinity” than there is in the U.S. In
Marcel’s view, “Western men” were expected to be physical, aggressive, “muscular,” and
“outgoing or headstrong,” in contrast to the “effeminate men” they saw portrayed in
“Eastern media.” For Margo Vintner (she/her, fey/fem; genderqueer trans woman, both a
dyke and a faggot, bigender; 29; white; U.S.), however, the Japanese multiplicity of
masculinities went beyond effeminacy. Margo pointed to the body shapes featured in
bara, a genre of Japanese erotic comics featuring gay men, which broke with the tradition
of “triangular body shapes” she saw “in Western drawn erotica” to present “a broad
variety of body types […] in bara it’s like, here’s some fat, here’s some like […] core
musculature that is actually like useful for lifting things and moving them around.” This
was important to Margo, who explained that
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Especially as a little gay boy who was fat and uh, figuring out very
quickly that I was going to have to develop some way to be like— uh, to
develop a positive self-image, […] there was a lot in bara to sustain me.
Overall, U.S. informants said that there were more options for masculine gender
presentation in Japanese media than there were in U.S. media.
U.S. informants also saw multiplicity in Japanese media representations of
women. Unlike U.S. media, where informants said women characters were often
tokenized as “the girl” (Margo) in a cast otherwise composed of men, Japanese media
texts frequently featured multiple women characters. Women in Japanese media could be
“powerful” (Morrigan; they/them; queer trans nonbinary/agender; 29; white, Hispanic;
U.S.), but also “proudly feminine” (Lu Stein, they/them, nonbinary, 27, white), and they
often saved others, rather than always being the ones who needed saving. U.S. informants
pointed to shōjo, a genre of Japanese anime and manga that is targeted at adolescent girls
and features predominately women and girl characters, as a source of multiple
femininities and representations of womanhood. There was no equivalent, they said, in
U.S. media and especially in the animated cartoons they watched as children, which
predominately targeted young boys.
Japanese media was also seen by U.S. informants as a space for gender bending
and flexibility. For TK (they/them, non-binary, 30, white, U.S.), anime was a genre they
thought could “push the boundaries” and where they saw “a lot more gender fluidity” in
comparison to “Western cartoons” when they were growing up. Informants pointed to the
plethora of Japanese media texts that featured cross-dressing, gender bending, gender
swapping, gender role reversals or reimaginings, and non-heterosexual relationships, such
as Hana Kimi, Sailor Moon, Ruroni Kenshin, Ranma 1/2, Revolutionary Girl Utena, and
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Ouran High School Host Club, and struggled to name examples of U.S. media texts
available during their youth that included similar themes.
Across all of my interviews, U.S. informants agreed that the types of gender
representation they saw in Japanese media had no equivalent in the U.S. media that
surrounded them when they were growing up. Japanese media, the “other body of
animation,” (Margo) provided alternative depictions of human bodies, which broke with
the conventional depictions of gender that informants saw in U.S. media. As Alex Rowan
(they/she; a person first, biologically female sex organs, not a boy or girl; 36; white,
Japanese; U.S.) said in reference to the “incredibly homoerotic” anime Neon Genesis
Evangelion, “You know in 1998 like, we weren’t getting that sort of thing […] So it just
seemed like they were sort of like next level with that.” Throughout my interviews, U.S.
informants positioned Japanese media as a space where gender was being done in what
felt, to them, like new ways—gender presentation seemed more fluid, gender roles less
rigid and binary, and body types more varied than in U.S. media. These depictions
resonated with informants’ non-cisgender identities and, in many cases, offered an
imaginative spark that helped informants discover, articulate, or understand their own
genders. As TK explained, “there was like an element of just uh, seeing people act in a
way that was outside of my expectations and understandings that people who I assumed
had to fit a certain role […] could behave in those ways.” Seeing characters in Japanese
media texts break with what U.S. informants understood as established gender roles
offered inspiration for informants to break with the societal roles that they had been
assigned, catalyzing their processes of non-cisgender identification.
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First Encounters
Many of my informants said that Japanese media was the site of their first
encounters with queerness or gender variance. They recalled seeing depictions of gender
bending, cross-dressing, alternative gender roles, or queer relationships for the first time
in anime or manga, and said that this was distinctively different from the U.S. media they
remembered from their childhoods in the 1990s and 80s. Alois (he/they, nonbinary
transmasculine, 27, white, U.S.) talked about “different like gender portrayals in like
anime that were like, something I’d never seen anywhere else,” including a “main
character [who] is genderless, like explicitly. Like physically and mentally like gender
and sexless,” characters in homosexual relationships, cross-dressing, and “very soft
men.” Six (they/she, genderqueer, 25, white, U.S.) said that Japanese media “was really
my first exposure” to cross-dressing. Ron Guy (they/them; nonbinary/don’t subscribe to
the idea of traditional gender; 29; Black, Latinx/o/a, Indigenous; U.S.) recalled an early
encounter with gender variance in Pokémon, a children’s anime that was broadcast on
U.S. television when they were young:
There was an episode where there’s a swimsuit contest, and uh James
from Team Rocket just got a boob job. […] I remember seeing it as a kid
and like, oh. […] And um, that was like one of my first times seeing that
in anime. It was just like James just like, I’m going to get a boob job so
I’ll win the bikini contest.
This episode stuck with Ron as an example of gender bending. When I asked whether
they thought they would have seen something like that in the U.S. media of the time, they
responded with a clear “No.” For many U.S. informants, including Ron, Six, and Alois,
Japanese media was their first encounter with representations of queerness, and these
encounters became important touchstones in their own identity journeys. Alois repeatedly
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said that Japanese media encounters were “the first time” he saw these types of queerness
or gender bending. These texts stayed in his memory, becoming part of his trans origin
story. The gender-bending characters he saw “left a big impression” and, as Alois entered
adolescence and began to negotiate his own nonbinary transmasculine gender identity,
these portrayals helped him to imagine gender differently. This was a common theme
among U.S. informants, who credited Japanese media with helping them discover their
non-cisgender identities.
Japanese media’s matter-of-fact approach to themes of cross-dressing and genderswapping was part of what made it important to U.S. informants. Ron contrasted
Pokémon’s comical but matter-of-fact portrayal of gender-swapping surgery with the
spectacle and sensationalism that they vividly remembered from U.S. talk show Maury,
where “you gotta guess if it’s a man or a woman […] just like, stigmatizing people just
for straight up gain.” Ron wanted to see trans and queer characters represented matter-offactly in media, and Japanese anime was the first place where they remembered that
happening. Arrow (they/them, transmasc nonbinary, 31, white, U.S.) and Six both said
that Japanese manga Hana Kimi was an important text for them because it didn’t “make a
big deal” (Six) out of cross-dressing. When I asked Arrow if they could think of any U.S.
media they’d consumed as a child that featured similar gender bending, they struggled to
come up with an example, finally naming Mulan, the Disney film about a girl who
dresses as a boy to spare her father from a military draft. But for Arrow, Hana Kimi’s
portrayal of cross-dressing was distinct from those in U.S. media, because the protagonist
“didn’t mind, it was never like a conflict for her that she was dressed up as a guy, or it
was never like a conflict that she had to act like a guy.” This was the kind of accepting,
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matter-of-fact portrayal of gender variance that informants first encountered in Japanese
media, when contemporaneous U.S. media either sensationalized trans people as objects
to be gawked at or ridiculed, or did not portray gender variance at all.
Japanese media was also a site where U.S. informants first saw gender roles
upended. Alex Rowan (they/she; a person first, biologically female sex organs, not a boy
or girl; 36; white, Japanese; U.S.) 2 and Blueberry (she/they, nonbinary, 41, white, U.S.)
both said that Japanese anime showed them “a different way of like, of being like,
female” (Alex). Alex described their childhood frustration with U.S. media, where “there
weren’t a lot of like female characters that I really related to” because whenever a woman
character
was like a super badass or something, […] there was, always had to be
some kind of like heterosexual— Like, like you know, male gaze on it in
some way. It’s like you know, like you know, if she’s like tough it’s
because it’s so hot. You know. To like, men. And that really bothered me.
For Alex, Japanese manga and anime provided more complex and developed women
characters and offered some respite from “the male gaze, this hyper masculine like you
know bullshit which is like what really turned me off about like American comics.”
Blueberry credited early memories of Japanese animated films in which women were
represented as protectors with her realization that “girls don’t have to be like they are
around here [in rural Kentucky].” Japanese media was Blueberry’s first encounter with
the idea that women could be powerful and didn’t always need saving, and she
incorporated this inspiration into her own identity. “Thanks, Japan, for teaching me that I
can do other things, other than this!” she said. For many U.S. informants, Japanese media
As explained in Chapter 4, I grouped informants on the U.S. or Japan side of this study according to the
cultural context in which they grew up, not their ethnicity. Alex Rowan reported both white and Japanese
ethnic heritage, and was born in the U.K. but grew up largely in the U.S.
2
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was the spark that prompted them to reimagine gender roles, their own performance of
gender, and ultimately their gender identities.
Transgressive Japanese Media Representations
U.S. informants found Japanese media representations of gender transgressive in
ways that they said U.S. media from the same period was not. For my informants,
transgressive media portrayals were those that either broke with prevalent gender
stereotypes—“like, the manly men and the like cute sexually attractive women” (Arrow,
they/them, transmasc nonbinary, 31, white, U.S.)—or that represented gender as fluid,
changeable, or outside the binary. U.S. informants said that transgressive media
portrayals were more available in Japanese media than in contemporaneous U.S. media,
even though they said that not all Japanese media was transgressive. U.S. informants
thought of Japan as socially conservative, organized by “strict striations of society” (Alex
Rowan; they/she; a person first, biologically female sex organs, not a boy or girl; 36;
white, Japanese; U.S.), but said that there was more room for Japanese media to depict
contestations of those social boundaries. As Matt (he/him, trans and male, 24, Southeast
Asian, U.S.) put it, “Japanese media simultaneously seems to have a lot of like strict
concepts of what men and women should be like, um but at the same time it seems more
comfortable than the West transgressing those ideas.” These transgressions were sources
of inspiration and pleasure for non-cisgender U.S. informants.
Androgynous Men
U.S. informants said they frequently saw androgynous men in Japanese media,
and that this was an important difference from U.S. norms. Many informants said that the
anime they enjoy “have very like effeminate men in them” (Arrow, they/them, transmasc
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nonbinary, 31, white, U.S.). Informants described slim bodies, long hair, softness,
prettiness, and short stature as features of Japanese media masculinities, in contrast to
U.S. media masculinities that emphasized rugged builds and lots of muscles.
Androgynous men provided a more relatable form of masculinity to informants on the
transmasculine spectrum. Alois (he/they, nonbinary transmasculine, 27, white, U.S)
pointed to a Japanese practice of casting people with relatively higher vocal registers to
voice boys and men, which he said created a “character type,” a “third gender” that
resonated with him. “Most of the [men] characters that, especially when I was a teenager
that I latched on to, were like voiced by women,” he said. Florence (he/him; dude guy;
25; white, European; U.S.) and Leo (he/him; FTM trans, trans guy; 32; Japanese; U.S.)
both said that they could see themselves in men of shorter stature, whether that meant
anime protagonists who were drawn “short, um and like exaggeratedly so […] like half
the height of everyone else” (Florence), or “K-pop male idols and J-pop male idols
because these are Asian men who have smaller bodies like me” (Leo). It was important to
these transmasculine informants to see representations of masculinity that more closely
aligned with their own embodiments.
In Japanese media, U.S. informants said, physical traits that would be associated
with femininity in the U.S. were instead represented as part of the spectrum of
masculinities. As Jake (he/they; nonbinary and transmasculine, an effeminate guy and
also kind of a dyke; 27; white; U.S.) explained,
For me as an American, like seeing someone with long hair, that is like an
immediate cue in like American media, like ah, that is someone who is
feminine, if not a woman. But in [Japanese anime] Revolutionary Girl
Utena, I— yeah, like near, nearly all of the main, main like male
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characters have like very long hair, but it is not associated in the writing
with, kind of, femininity.
This decoupling of physical traits from the gendered associations that were common in
informants’ local culture opened space for reimagining gender possibilities. U.S.
informants saw Japanese media as providing more varieties of or possibilities for
masculinity in comparison to U.S. media, and particularly to U.S. media available during
their childhood years, which fell between the 1980s and 2000s. Six (they/she,
genderqueer, 25, white, U.S.), who was 25 when I interviewed them in 2022, said that “at
least in the [Japanese] media that I’ve seen and consumed, men seem to have more of a
spectrum.” Six gave Ouran High School Host Club, which they described as a
“cornerstone of queer anime” and a “queer awakening” for them personally, as an
example, explaining that it featured multiple archetypes of masculinity.
Although informants generally did distinguish between Japanese society and
Japanese media, taking care to note that what was acceptable in media representations
might not be socially accepted in daily life, several U.S. informants did say that Japanese
society had more room for masculine androgyny. Marcel (they/she; feminine non-binary;
24; white, Latinx/o/a; U.S.) explained the prevalence of “pretty boys, androgynous
characters, and […] just androgyny in general” as a difference in culture:
I notice that in Eastern media— and it’s not limited to Japanese media,
specifically, but there is a more, acceptance towards what Western people
would consider effeminate men. And men who are not muscular men who
are not more outgoing or headstrong like we would expect Western men to
be. It’s a different culture […] it’s a lot more or about the mind, it’s a lot
more about the spirits and intelligence […] And they’re just, there seems
to be uh, this disconnect between um. Between the kind of aggressiveness
and the um, the physical differences that we would attribute male and
female, in these Asian cultures.
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Speaking from an outsider position, Marcel distinguished between what “we”—that is,
folks from the U.S.—“would expect Western men to be,” which they defined as physical,
aggressive, and “headstrong,” and the cultural expectations of masculinity “in these
Asian cultures.” Here, Marcel moved seamlessly from observations about media to
observations about culture, implying that the spectrum of masculinities in Japanese and
“Eastern media” were reflective of a range of masculinities that were accepted in
Japanese daily life.
Informants with first-hand, insider knowledge of both Japanese and U.S. culture
agreed that Japanese standards of masculinity had more room for traits that would be
considered feminine in the U.S. Leo (he/him; FTM trans, trans guy; 32; Japanese; U.S.),
an ethnically Japanese transgender man who had been raised in the U.S. but had recently
moved to Japan, explained,
I feel like a lot of things that is still considered masculine and attractive
here [in Japan], if I brought, if— I think bringing that back to the U.S., I
feel like they— like it would be called you know gay or like— like, like,
too feminine. But, for me, I think it’s, it’s worked in my favor because
[…] even being three years into transition, I still get called ma’am and
whatever back in the U.S. […] and then as soon as I’m here, I’ve never
gotten misgendered once. And I think it’s because there’s a greater degree
of acceptability for more feminine forms of masculinity.
Transmasculine Leo felt more comfortable in Japan and experienced fewer instances of
misgendering because Japanese standards of masculinity encompassed “more feminine”
traits. In a mirror of Leo’s observations, Japanese informant 竹 (Take; 3 they/them;
everything out there, pangender; 35; Japanese; Japan), who had moved to the U.S. as an
adult and had lived about half their life in each country, said,
The Japanese character 竹 (Take) means “bamboo” and is pronounced tah-kay. It has no relationship to
the English verb “take.”
3
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So like I remember like when I first moved here [to the U.S.], people often
said, like, like Japanese man like— yeah, it’s bad to say those terms but
like, you know, they’re very gay, they’re so like, like woman. […] In
American media they’re just like, my, look at my muscles! Or like, rrngh!
[imitates flexing, laughs] So masculine. […] Whereas like in Japanese,
men has a little bit more range. Or like from Americans’, Americans’
looking viewpoint they are probably more, more feminine, but you know,
that range is little bit, like, to the feminine side, I think. But I don’t know
if I should call it feminine because like, that was just like, [laughs] how
Japanese men are.
For 竹 (Take), the broader range of masculinities available in Japanese media and culture
mirrored a broader range of femininities available in U.S. media and culture. “Gender in
Japan is like maybe a little bit more on the feminine side and in the U.S., maybe it’s more
on the masculine side,” they speculated. In line with 竹 (Take)’s observations, for U.S.
informants, media representations of effeminate men were in shorter supply than
representations of masculine women. Thus, the androgynous men in Japanese anime and
manga represented a significant transgression of U.S. cultural norms. Leo’s experience
underscores the importance of Japanese performances and standards of masculinity—
normative in Japan, but transgressive in the U.S.—to U.S. folks on the transmasculine
spectrum.
Powerful, Complex, and Multidimensional Women
A common theme among U.S. informants who talked about portrayals of women,
girls, and femininity in Japanese media was a greater prevalence of strong, complex, or
interesting women characters as compared to U.S. media. Informants contrasted women
in Japanese anime and manga with women in the U.S. media they grew up watching
during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. For Alex Rowan (they/she; a person first,
biologically female sex organs, not a boy or girl; 36; white, Japanese; U.S.), Japanese
manga and anime provided more complex and developed women characters and offered
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some respite from “the male gaze, this hyper masculine like you know bullshit which is
like what really turned me off about like American comics.” They said that Japanese
media offered a “a different way of like, of being like, female” in comparison to U.S.
media that tokenized or stereotyped women characters, or typecast them as victims. For
Morrigan (they/them; queer trans nonbinary/agender; 29; white, Hispanic; U.S.),
Japanese anime presented women who were powerful and didn’t need saving, even as
they were also positioned as objects of desire. Informants said that Japanese media
featured more women characters and a greater variety of women or girls within the same
media text. A single series might feature “three girls, who are all friends, all have
interesting things going on, and must be differentiated. None of them is ‘the girl.’”
(Margo Vintner; she/her, fey/fem; genderqueer trans woman, both a dyke and a faggot,
bigender; 29; white; U.S.). This made it easier for U.S. informants to find relatable
feminine characters in Japanese media than in U.S. media.
Representations of powerful women appealed to U.S. informants who grew up in
rural or culturally conservative environments, where they either received pushback or felt
unsafe expressing a transgressive gender or sexual identity. Morrigan said,
it was really cool to see, especially having grown up in such a gendered
and religious environment, right, to see women being able to just be—
take charge, and to see femininity be able to be portrayed in that form of
like— in that powerful of a context.
Japanese media offered those powerful representations when U.S. media did not.
Recalling the video rental stores where she accessed Japanese media in her youth,
Blueberry (she/they, nonbinary, 41, white, U.S.) said,
you can find shelves upon shelves upon shelves of a man saving a woman
and a man saving a woman and a man saving a woman. You might find
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like, in an entire selection of 100 pieces of media in Western media, you
might find y’know, 98 men saving women.
In Japanese media, by contrast, “you don’t always just have one kind of person […] who
needs saving,” she said. For Lu Stein (they/them, nonbinary, 27, white, U.S.), who had
lived “for a number of years” in Idaho (which they described as “obviously a very red
conservative gender role rigid state”), Japanese media was a place where they could see
not only powerful women, but representations of femininity as power. They spoke fondly
of the Sailor Moon anime and its core cast of teenage girl characters, who
all grew up and had a real sense of camaraderie and friendship, but also
the— the idea of them liking boys and being interested in girly things
wasn’t ju— wasn’t something to rebel against, it was something to
embrace, and it was a source of power for the girls. Like one of my
favorite things about Sailor Moon is that things like lipstick and brooches
and earrings are all symbols of power. Literal arcane might. And I love
that.
Not only were the girls of Sailor Moon “very visibly, proudly feminine” while “they’re
still fleshed out characters and they’re doing cool things,” their femininity itself was
represented as powerful. Lu Stein identified this as a feature of the magical girl genre of
Japanese anime and manga, which could be categorized more broadly under the umbrella
of shōjo, a genre targeted at preteen girls and young women.
Kathryn Hemmann (2020) has argued that the women creators of shōjo manga
like Sailor Moon “are able to rewrite gendered tropes in a manner that overturns sexist
notions of femininity while still appealing to a broad and diverse audience” (p. 40).
According to Hemmann (2020), the shōjo genre was shaped by a generation of women
artists known as the Year 24 Group, whose “iconic shōjo manga of the 1970s introduced
many fascinating stories of gender bending and gender fluidity […] and protagonists
defying social expectations to forge their own unique identities while following their
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dreams” (p. 8). As Shamoon (2018) notes, similar genres of romance comics aimed at
girls were popular in the U.S. and Britain between 1950 and 1970, but have since
vanished; in the contemporary mediascape, shōjo manga “has few equivalents in other
countries” (p. 69). U.S. informants’ identification of Sailor Moon and other shōjo titles as
offering multiple, diverse versions of femininity that were not available to them in U.S.
media aligns with scholarly literature on the role of shōjo manga in global media culture.
U.S. informants expressed frustration with the limited options for femininity that
they saw represented in U.S. media, and contrasted them with the variety of femininities
featured in Japanese shōjo media. As Margo explained, “in a lot of American cartoons,
because they are broadcast, because they are intended for a mixed gender audience or an
audience of boys, there is a girl”—a singular, tokenized representation of femininity. By
contrast, shōjo allowed Margo to imagine “different ways to be a girl” as she was
exploring her gender:
Shōjo presented me with: Girls can be lots of things. Not necessarily
feminist things, not always, or not very often, to be honest— like it’s
mainstream media, it’s just mainstream media from Japan. But like, girls
can look different ways. And that ended up being something I was not
getting from American media.
For Margo, Lu, Morrigan, Alex, and Blueberry, imported Japanese media offered a
variety of ways to be a woman, whereas local U.S. media featured fewer girl and women
characters and cast them in stereotypical roles. These informants did not connect with the
women and girls in U.S. cartoons and movies. To find women and girl characters who
resonated with them, they turned instead to Japanese media.
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Gender Bending, Cross-Dressing, and Gender Variance
Another representation that non-cisgender U.S. informants reported finding in
Japanese media was depictions of gender bending. Many U.S. informants said that the
Japanese media they consumed as kids featured cross-dressing and gender variance in
ways that they didn’t see happening in contemporaneous U.S. media. Types of gender
bending included characters wearing clothing that did not conform to gendered
stereotypes prevalent in the U.S., androgynous character designs, animated men and boys
voiced by women actors, queer and gender-ambiguous or genderfluid characters,
characters who cross-dressed as the ‘opposite’ gender, and expressions of trans longing.
In manga, “there would be characters saying things like you know I wish I had been born
a girl, or like I feel like I’m a girl” (Matt, he/him, trans and male, 24, Southeast Asian,
U.S.). Informants said that in Japanese media, “there’s so much more fluidity in at least
the fictional characters, where it’s so much more common for like the cross dressing”
(TK, they/them, non-binary, 30, white, U.S.). Anime characters “were so like you know
lovely and like, um, androgynous,” (Alex Rowan; they/she; a person first, biologically
female sex organs, not a boy or girl; 36; white, Japanese; U.S.), and that style of drawing
was distinctly different than other media U.S. informants could access at the time.
The “gender fluid characters” (Alex) of Sailor Moon were important to many U.S.
informants, who recalled even the broadcast version—which had been censored for U.S.
audiences, with dialogue changed to cast women romantic partners as cousins instead of a
couple—as transgressive and unprecedented. As Florence (he/him; dude guy; 25; white,
European; U.S.) recalled,
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Florence: Haruka, Sailor Uranus from Sailor Moon, um, like the episode
where she’s introduced, um, like, all of the Sailor Scouts think she’s a
dude. [laughs] Um, and everyone has a crush on her. And that’s like,
they’re like, trying to impress this new hot guy and then at the end of the
episode it’s like, surprise! She’s a woman! Um. [laughs]
Aiden: And that wasn’t something that you were seeing in—
Florence: [shakes head] No. That wasn’t something I was seeing anywhere
else.
A breakout hit of the 1990s, Sailor Moon was many U.S. informants’ first experience
with Japanese media, and it remained important to them years later.
Many informants pointed to Japanese media representations of cross-dressing as
transgressive gender-bending that they did not see anywhere else. In anime and manga,
“you have like okama, you know men who cross dress as women and might be called you
know, transsexuals in certain translations, and you have like girls constantly dressing like
boys, like Haruki from Ouran [High School Host Club]” (Matt). Informants readily listed
anime and manga series in which cross-dressing featured prominently, and for several,
these series were instrumental in their discovery of their own gender-transgressive
identities. Arrow (they/them, transmasc nonbinary, 31, white, U.S.) recalled that as a
teenager, cross-dressing manga series Hana Kimi was “my favorite thing ever.” Matt
retrospectively traced “some of that like looseness of thinking in terms of gender”
underpinning his identity as “trans and male” back to the manga he read growing up.
“Within these like stories, like you know there’s, there’s a lot of like— sort of
transgression and such, and I liked that a lot,” said Alex Rowan. Japanese media was
important to U.S. informants because it showed them gender possibilities that were
different, distinct, and unavailable in U.S. media.
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It was important to U.S. informants that Japanese media representations of crossdressing and gender bending were simultaneously nuanced, matter-of-fact, and not
sensationalized. When U.S. informants were able to give examples of U.S. media from
their youth that featured these themes, they compared the U.S. examples unfavorably to
Japanese media. As TK explained, “there’s like a very explicit difference between like a
trans person and a cross dresser and […] there’s so much more kind of self understanding
that I’ve seen in that [Japanese] media.” For TK, it was not only the availability of crossdressing and gender bending narratives in Japanese media that made it appealing, but also
the “understanding” of different, distinct gender identities and practices under the
umbrella of gender bending. Japanese media presented both a greater number of stories
featuring cross-dressing characters and also a different kind of portrayal, one in which the
cross-dressing character “was just living her best life” (Arrow) and did not act
uncomfortable or distressed. These Japanese media representations of gender bending
were more comfortable for U.S. non-cisgender informants to watch than
contemporaneous U.S. media representations with similar themes.
Several nonbinary informants also spoke about the absence of gender as a form of
gender variance, one that they saw more in Japanese media than in U.S. media. Ron Guy
(they/them; nonbinary/don’t subscribe to the idea of traditional gender; 29; Black,
Latinx/o/a, Indigenous; U.S.), who in addition to identifying as nonbinary was “pretty
sure I’m intersex,” recalled,
I actually identified with fucking Pokémon. The Pokémon themselves.
Um, because they ain’t have no gender. Um, that was it. Like it wasn’t
nothing else. It was like Pokémon, Transformers— robots don’t got no
junk, you know. No junk, no gender. Like I literally was like, the
Pokémon are cool, I want to be the Pokémon.
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Out of all the media that surrounded Ron, the only characters with whom they could
identify were the non-gendered, non-anthropomorphic monsters of Pokémon and the
shape-shifting robots of Transformers. Mechanical characters that displayed traits
associated with human gender, but who were nonetheless inhuman and genderless, were
also important touchstones for Mimi (it/its, she/her; nonbinary, pseudo trans femme,
neutrois or agender; 29; East Asian, Japanese, Ryūkyūan; U.S.) and Blueberry (she/they,
nonbinary, 41, white, U.S.). Blueberry empathized with mechanical and nonhuman
characters like the Transformers and KITT, the AI robotic car featured in the 1980s U.S.
TV series Knight Rider. “I wanted to be the car,” she said. “The car had a male voice, but
the car was a car, the car was not a man, the car was not a woman, the car was a car. I
wanted to be that.” Citing both Transformers and Chobits—“where it’s like, female
bodied androids who don’t really have a gender but you’re just kind of referring to them
as female”—Mimi explained, “that sort of like, uh, not transhuman but like— android
sort of stuff, that was very important to me in terms of seeing myself in things.” These
nonbinary informants found resources of resonance and identification in the inhuman,
non-gendered characters of Japanese media.
Community Among Outcasts and the Pleasures of Transgression
Transgressive gender fluidity made Japanese media characters relatable and
enjoyable for non-cisgender U.S. informants, and they found community with other fans
who sought out Japanese media. Many U.S. informants noted an overlap between queer
communities and Japanese media fan communities and said that there was a connection
between the two. Alex Rowan (they/she; a person first, biologically female sex organs,
not a boy or girl; 36; white, Japanese; U.S.) called the “transgression” in anime and
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manga “sort of like natural catnip to like you know someone like on a— On a, you know,
not um. You know, not cisgender whatever.” Fortune (she/her, transgender woman, 25,
white, U.S.) not only pointed to “similar media preferences” among trans people, but also
identified a pattern of allies “sympathetic” to trans issues among fans of Japanese media.
This suggests both thematic interests shared by trans folks that are satisfied by Japanese
media texts and also a culture of acceptance that thrives in Japanese media fan spaces.
For many U.S. informants, Japanese media fan spaces served as unofficial safe
havens for queerness or gender variance. Such spaces “tend to be more inherently queer
or queer aware” (Six, they/she, genderqueer, 25, white, U.S.) and enabled “this meeting
of like, gay people of various stripes” (Margo Vintner, she/her, fey/fem; genderqueer
trans woman, both a dyke and a faggot, bigender; 29; white; U.S.). Six described both
queerness and Japanese media fandom as forms of “otherness,” and said that the
connection between them had less to do with any inherent gender bending or sympathetic
themes in Japanese media, but instead came from the shared social position of
marginality. Six explained that when they were growing up, anime fans were ostracized
and stereotyped, and that this led anime fan spaces to be more accepting of other forms of
social transgression:
when you have that otherness, even if you’re not necessarily queer, that is
a queerness within itself, right. So— I think that that opens up to, even if
you’re not necessarily queer yourself, you’re gonna find people who are
also other in another way, right, and you have to be— able and willing to
understand and coexist, if not love these people to stay in that kind of
space, or you’re gonna— kkrt [points thumb backwards over shoulder] get
the boot pretty quickly, right.
For Margo, Six, and other U.S. informants, the shared experience of marginalization
made queer people and anime fans natural allies.
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Although solidarity in the face of social stigma may partially explain the overlap
between queer communities and Japanese media fan communities, the gender-bending
and transgressive qualities of Japanese media also played a role. In these texts, U.S. fans
enjoyed representations of gender and sexuality that were entirely outside of their
experience and that had no equivalent in contemporaneous U.S. media. Fan communities,
where audiences could discuss and appreciate characters and plotlines or creatively reimagine texts through practices such as writing fanfiction, creating fanart, or role-playing,
became “a gender play space for lots of people” (Margo) and offered the opportunity to
explore gender beyond the binary. In these creative spaces, anime fans and sexual and
gender minorities could come together, not only to bond over shared experiences of
marginalization, but to encounter other ways of being that were not visible in mainstream
society and, in those encounters, to find personal transformation. For example, in
Margo’s experience, the “thin, androgynous” body types in yaoi were “very appealing”
and indeed proved “transformative” for some folks who came to identify as trans men.
U.S. informants drew on the body types, relationships, and gender roles depicted in
Japanese media during the process of discovering, negotiating, or affirming their noncisgender identities.
Negotiating Non-Cisgender Identities Through Media Encounters
Engaging with Japanese media and its transgressive, gender-bending characters
helped U.S. informants to consider their own genders and, ultimately, to arrive at noncisgender identities. Japanese media representations of gender—which U.S. informants
saw as both more fluid and more transgressive than what was available in U.S. media—
served as examples, prompting U.S. informants to imagine different ways to be gendered.
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Many informants said that the connection between Japanese media and their own noncisgender identities became clear to them only in retrospect, as they looked back on
media influences from their youth and identified gender-bending themes in the anime,
manga, and Japanese video games that had been important to them. But for others,
Japanese media characters provided clear inspiration that enabled them to discover and
embrace their gender identities.
Some U.S. informants said that their processes of gender discovery were directly
catalyzed by Japanese media encounters. Florence (he/him; dude guy; 25; white,
European; U.S.), for example, shared that he’d struggled to connect with masculinity
before discovering masculine anime characters who did not fit the toxic mold he had
come to expect from U.S. culture. “I thought being a man was immoral,” he confessed,
“and that you know, like— there is no like— yeah. Um. Version of men or masculinity
that is like, not terrible.” In Japanese media, however, Florence found that he connected
with Atem, the short-statured antihero of manga and anime Yu-Gi-Oh! who “learns how
not to murder people” from the bullied boy he cares for and wants to protect. Florence
explained,
I’d be like you know who’s cool? Atem. I want to be Atem. [laughs] He’s
five feet tall, I’m five one. Um, you know. I think that’s truly the
masculinity I strive for. [laughs] […] And [I] was like yeah, I think I’m a
dude actually.
For Florence, masculinity did not seem viable until he found the media example of
Atem—a character Florence identified with both physically, since they are both of short
stature, and emotionally, since Atem’s human connections helped him turn away from
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violence. Japanese media helped Florence to imagine and embody a masculinity that was
“not terrible.”
Japanese media texts were important to U.S. informants’ processes of gender
discovery even when they found those texts problematic. A number of informants said
that they saw stereotypes or sexism in Japanese media, but that they were still able to find
resources in these texts that helped them discover or connect with their own gender
identities. Several informants identified yaoi, a genre of Japanese media “that
thematically focus on the romantic love between two men, often in a sexually explicit
way” (Zsila et al., 2018, p. 1) and typically features “little or no plot” (Kroon, 2014), as
an important resource for reimagining gender. Marcel (they/she; feminine non-binary; 24;
white, Latinx/o/a; U.S.) said that yaoi had been important to their process of gender
questioning, but acknowledged that the genre could be problematic because it tended to
portray gay men in unrealistic or stereotypical ways. Margo Vintner (she/her, fey/fem;
genderqueer trans woman, both a dyke and a faggot, bigender; 29; white; U.S.) identified
problematic age gaps between sexual partners in yaoi-inspired slash fanfiction and
speculated that her consumption of this “pedophilic” fanfiction could be linked “in the
trauma chain” to her later experiences of “being groomed online in the, in the slash scene,
[and] having sex with much older men.” Jules (they/them, genderfluid nonbinary trans
person, 26, white, U.S.) said that they were “ashamed” to “have spent a lot of my life
reading” yaoi and related genres BL (Boys’ Love) and shonen ai, largely because they
associated that media with “that specific kind of female yaoi fan that’s really cringey and
really fetishising.” Yet Marcel, Margo, and Jules all said that yaoi and related genres
were important to them and to their personal processes of gender identification.
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These media, despite their problematic representations, were sites of first
encounters with queerness and became instrumental in my informants’ reflexive practices
of gender questioning, gender identity formation, and self-discovery. While
acknowledging that yaoi “was stereotyping these real gay men,” Marcel said “it was a
great outlet for me to explore gender and start to break away from what is traditional.”
Margo Vintner pointed to yaoi-related fanfiction and its surrounding community as “a
very fluid space […] where you can get feedback and participate with other people in
these discourses of gayness that allow you to imagine any number of things.” For Marcel,
“As controversial, that’s the word, as controversial as yaoi as a genre is, it did really
speak to me as a younger person, because that was where I discovered queer media and
queer representation.” Problematic or not, these texts and their surrounding fan
communities were sites of U.S. informants’ first encounters with queerness and gender
diversity.
For some informants, the stereotyping or problematic representations within these
texts contributed to their utility as imaginative resources. Jules said that the very fact that
BL’s representations of queerness were problematic helped them to think more deeply
about gender, sexuality, and society. “A lot of how I started thinking about queer issues
came from reading BL and being like, wow, people have some really whack ideas about
queerness,” Jules explained. “It does inform my whole worldview.” Problematic
representations were not only useful to my informants, but could be more useful than
media that conscientiously tried to represent queer or trans people in respectful,
progressive, or positive ways. As Margo explained,
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In terms of fictional media representations of transness or gayness, like a
lot of it has, uh— Not gotten at what I needed it to get at. And a lot of
times things that are like explicitly homophobic, or where this is a subtext,
have the stuff I need in them. […] Like, Red vs Blue if you’ve ever
watched that. […] Remember Donut? He was assigned pink armor and
then that sort of like, force-gayed him. And they spent a lot of time talking
about uh his soft delicate feminine hands by talking about all the hand
creams he owned. That is more useful to me than a lot of very didactic gay
representation because it’s like, oh, this is what straight people believe
about gay men. This is how they construct that effeminacy, is in terms of
like, soft and delicate and smells nice like a girl. […] Like it, that’s, that
tells me something about how effeminacy is constructed in a way that less
homophobic media doesn’t always.
For Margo and Jules, seeing stereotypical media representations of queerness helped
them to understand, and then to question, the construction of queerness in mainstream
society. Japanese yaoi and BL media offered them vast genres of queer and genderbending content that were not available in U.S. media; even if these representations fell
into stereotypes or activated tropes with which they did not agree, my U.S. informants
still found these texts invaluable as they navigated their own gender identities.
The idea that media objects categorized as “bad” can have something to offer to
the populations who are being represented “badly” is advanced by Cáel M. Keegan.
Keegan (2022) revisits films that he says have been labeled as “‘bad’ trans objects” (p.
32)—media texts that portray trans people in stereotypical or fetishizing ways or that
position trans identity as a source of humor—and argues that these “bad” texts “point to
possibilities that ‘good’ trans objects typically fail to explore” (p. 29). According to
Keegan (2022), purportedly “good” trans objects function by assimilating trans people
and identities into hegemonic systems of gender normativity. In contrast, bad trans
objects “[threaten] the very stability of sexual difference itself” and thus “offer an entry
into questions about sex and gender deeper than those posed by most of today’s
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mainstream ‘good’ transgender media” (Keegan, 2022, p. 29). Key to Keegan’s argument
is the notion that so-called bad representation can prompt audiences to think deeply about
and engage critically with the ideas underlying the text. This is how the “controversial”
(Marcel), “cringey” (Jules), and “explicitly homophobic” (Margo) representations in yaoi
and related media functioned for Marcel, Margo, and Jules. Just as the “whack ideas
about queerness” that Jules saw in BL media helped them to “[start] thinking about queer
issues” and the “super problematic” tropes that “permeate […] anime slash fiction”
created a “gender play space” for Margo, as Keegan (2022) argues, “political resources
can be discovered, however unexpectedly, in bad places” (p. 29). For my informants,
even texts that they recognized as “bad” representation served as important touchstones
for gender negotiation.
The new imaginative possibilities that informants uncovered through their
engagement with Japanese media occurred not because these texts’ representations of
gender were necessarily “better” than those in contemporaneous U.S. media—though
many informants said that Japanese representations were better—but because they were
different. For Marcel, Margo, and Jules, Japanese media and the fan spaces surrounding
those texts might be problematic, but they were also distant and distinct from U.S. media
representations, and that made them useful. Whether “good” or “bad,” Japanese media
disrupted my informants’ ideas about gender, opening space for them to explore new
possibilities. Their first encounters with queerness and gender variance, mediated by
Japanese texts, stuck in their memories and served as catalysts for their own critical
(re)negotiations of gender.
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Conclusion
For non-cisgender U.S. informants, Japanese media was a site of transgressive
gender portrayals that provided alternative modes of gender performance—
representations that informants said they could not find in contemporaneous U.S. media
texts. U.S. informants said that in Japanese media, gender was more fluid and open to
interpretation. There were more androgynous characters, gender-bending and gendernonconforming characters, and more cross-dressers. For many U.S. informants, Japanese
media was the site of their first encounters with queerness, gender bending, or gender
transgression, leading them to question their own gender identity or sexuality and
eventually formulate queer or non-cisgender identities for themselves. In Japanese media,
informants saw androgynous men, powerful and multidimensional women, and gender
variant characters, all of which they said were absent from U.S. media at the time. They
also participated in fan communities around Japanese media, finding acceptance and
solidarity among communities of outcasts. Both direct encounters with Japanese media
texts and participation in Japanese media fan communities helped U.S. informants to
negotiate their own non-cisgender identities. They encountered new possibilities for
gender identity and expression that had not been modeled in U.S. media, and they found
space to experiment with gender among Japanese media fans.
Overall, U.S. informants saw Japanese media as a site of gender transgression and
imaginative possibility. Japanese media texts became catalysts for informants’
(re)negotiation of their own gender identities and social roles, providing imaginative
resources that helped informants to (re)imagine what gender was or could be.
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They drew clear contrasts between the local U.S. media that was prevalent while they
were growing up and the imported Japanese media that they encountered. As Blueberry
(she/they, nonbinary, 41, white, U.S.) put it,
They escape a lot more through their media than we do. Or at least that’s
how I see it, because Western media seems to want to see things as taken
further into these [gender] ideals. Meanwhile Japanese media wants to be
like, ideals? What’s an ideal? I’m going to open the window and throw the
ideal out and we’re going to play with everything. They seem to be a lot
more free about it.
For my informants, Japanese media provided the raw material that helped them imagine
possibilities outside of the cisgender binary and beyond the expectations of traditional
gender roles. They used these imaginative resources to negotiate their own gender
identities in and through media.
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CHAPTER 6
NON-CISGENDER JAPANESE CONSUMERS OF U.S. MEDIA
After I went to the States people told me so many like, Oh, there— you
know the queer, you know Sailor Moon, blah blah blah, and I was like—
Queer? In Sailor Moon? Cardcaptor Sakura? Do we have it? It’s like you
don’t really see like it, um, non normative in Japan, while a lot of people
outside of Japan are like, hype for like, oh Japan anime have so many
queer, like, [laughs] things that we don’t have in the States, and I was kind
of so shocked. So those things I learned in the States, um, that oh,
Japanese anime has so many— Okay. [laughs] While in Japan it’s pretty
normal, kind of. And then, people didn’t read it as, as queer.
(Yu Sakamoto; no pronouns; gender nonbinary; 26; Japanese, East Asian,
Taiwanese; Japan)
While U.S. informants in this study sought out Japanese media as a source of
progressive and transgressive representations of gender and queerness that they couldn’t
find in U.S. media, Japanese informants criticized and avoided Japanese media. As S
(they/them; no thoughts about gender, nonbinary; 23; Japanese; Japan) said, “I don’t want
to be hurt by seeing like, very stereo, stereotypical like queer person. And so I don’t, ah, I
don’t choose Japanese media.” Instead, Japanese informants sought out U.S. and other
Anglophone media, such as British TV series, where they said they saw more characters
with explicitly queer or trans identities. Informants also said that U.S. media cast actors
whose identities matched the characters they portrayed, while Japanese media continued
to cast cisgender actors in the few transgender roles available. Many informants criticized
Japanese media for making transgender media personalities or gender variant characters
“the butt of the joke” (Sora; they/them; agender, more broadly, nonbinary and
transgender; 21; Japanese; Japan) and subjecting them to ridicule. Most Japanese
informants agreed that U.S. and Anglophone media provided more and better
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representation of queer, trans, and nonbinary people as compared to Japanese media.
They situated their assessments of LGBTQIA+ media representation in a linear
framework of “progress,” in which the U.S. was imagined at the forefront of gender
discourse, and Japan was positioned as perpetually behind.
Japanese Audiences Don’t Consider Japanese Media Progressive
In contrast to my U.S. informants, who said that Japanese media provided
transgressive and subversive portrayals of gender and sexuality that were not available in
U.S. media, my Japanese informants did not consider Japanese media progressive. For
many U.S. informants, Japanese media was their first encounter with queerness or gender
bending, and that encounter proved transformative. The U.S. informants I spoke to all
said that Japanese media helped them realize their non-cisgender identity or break with
gender roles that were prevalent in their local community. However, the texts the U.S.
informants cited as instructive, eye-opening, or transformational were some of the same
texts that Japanese informants considered regressive, stereotypical, or inadequate. For
instance, many U.S. informants pointed to 1990s anime Sailor Moon as a site of gender
bending and queer discovery. However, Japanese informant Yu Sakamoto (no pronouns;
gender nonbinary; 26; Japanese, East Asian, Taiwanese; Japan), who had studied abroad,
said, “After I went to the States people told me so many like, oh, there— you know the
queer, you know Sailor Moon, blah blah blah, and I was like— Queer? In Sailor Moon?”
For Japanese informants, texts like Sailor Moon that imply queerness or gender bending
but don’t explicitly feature queer or trans identities were not considered transgressive. As
Yu said, in Japan, “People didn’t read it as, as queer.” Japanese informants said that
“Japanese media is not really good at like queer representation” (竹 [Take]; they/them;
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everything out there, pangender; 35; Japanese; Japan) and judged the Japanese media
environment, on the whole, as regressive. Even though several informants thought that
Japanese media was making progress in terms of gender and LGBTQIA+ representation,
as Kazuki (they/them; neither female nor male, human; 66; Japanese; Japan) said,
“Compared to America or Europe, though, we are still behind I think.”
Bad Representation
Japanese informants criticized Japanese media for portraying queer, trans, and
nonbinary characters in stereotypical ways, positioning sexual and gender minorities as
“comic relief” (Luna, they/them, nonbinary, 26, ethnicity not reported, Japan) or “the butt
of the joke” (Sora, they/them; agender, more broadly, nonbinary and transgender; 21;
Japanese; Japan) and generally producing and enabling sexist content. Sora said that in
the Japanese TV shows they watched growing up, “queer and transgender people were
represented with horrible stereotypes. That has given me bad influence, I think.” 雨木
(Ameki; they/them; x-gender, queer, and genderfluid; 25; Japanese; Japan) said that
Japanese media was sexist and did not portray feminists or feminism in a positive light.
Informants said that when Japanese media did feature gay or transgender characters or
media personalities, they were either portrayed as “unfortunate” (Mai; she/her; AMAB,
woman; 24; Japanese; Japan), connected with stigmatized activities like “drug usage”
(Luna), or subjected to ridicule. Sora said that in Japanese media, “Trans women are
treated as men in women’s clothes, and vice versa […] they would not respect people’s
own identities. Some people were teased by being misgendered.” These portrayals proved
uncomfortable for my informants; 雨木 (Ameki) said that Japanese media was “difficult
for me to watch.” A common complaint was that Japanese media continued to cast
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cisgender actors in transgender roles. For Mai, these casting choices meant that “I can’t
expect much” from those portrayals of transness. 雨木 (Ameki)’s critical assessment of
Japanese media was that “they are not quite there in their portrayal of queerness, if they
have any. […] They are so close, but they are not there.”
It was common for Japanese informants to explain their dissatisfaction with
Japanese media by contrasting it unfavorably with U.S. or Anglophone media. As A
(he/him, transgender man, 32, Japanese, Japan) said, “Compared to Japanese ones, they
[media from outside Japan] do not feel as stereotypical.” 雨木 (Ameki) agreed that U.S.
media “tend to have a lot more representations that challenge stereotypes.” Sakura
Miyajima (she/her; woman, specifically a trans woman; 26; Japanese; Japan) said that
even though “lately it’s getting better,” queer representation is still “kind of abysmal in
Japanese media.” Sakura was not wholly uncritical of American media. Many of my
informants, both on the Japanese side and the U.S. side, were careful to qualify their
assessment of the transcultural media they consumed. They often pointed out that they
specifically chose media that was queer- or trans-friendly, or that had been recommended
to them by trusted sources; as 雨木 (Ameki) said, “I choose what I watch from American
media, so my view may be skewed.” Nonetheless, 雨木 (Ameki) and Sakura both judged
American media representation to be better than Japanese media representation. As
Sakura explained (in English),
Not to say like in America they are great, but, yeah. Yeah I mean, always
lately [in Japanese media] they’re um, kind of trying to learn not to use
queer characters as comic relief. I mean America media had the same
problem before, you know, like. You know. Still we are learning about
that, so.
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Sakura’s use of “we” here is suggestive of a larger narrative that situates “the West” (and
chiefly the United States) as more progressive than “the East” (including Japan). While
she rhetorically distances herself from the Japanese media producers implied by “they,”
who are still “trying to learn” how to represent “queer characters” in a way that aligns
with Sakura’s idea of good representation, the “we” in her last sentence implies a Japan
of which she is a part. Although she is careful to point out that U.S. media representations
are not “great,” the contrasting verb tenses—the U.S. “had the same problem,” past tense,
while Japan is “still […] learning about that”—suggest a linear timeline of “progress” in
which the U.S. is further along and Japan is lagging behind. This is in keeping with
globally circulating narratives which cast the U.S. as a beacon of progress for other
nations to emulate.
My Japanese informants participated in this global narrative to varying degrees.
Some, like Sakura, were simultaneously critical of U.S. media while uncritically
accepting the framework of linear progress. Others, like S (they/them; no thoughts about
gender, nonbinary; 23; Japanese; Japan), praised U.S. progress on gender issues while
pointing out enduring racism in U.S. media. Overall, although they recognized that their
knowledge of U.S. media was partial and situated, my Japanese informants had favorable
views of U.S. media representation as compared to Japanese media representation.
Several Japanese informants said that the bad representation they encountered in
Japanese media was an impediment to the discovery, development, or expression of their
non-cisgender identity. In contrast with U.S. informants like Arrow (they/them,
transmasc nonbinary, 31, white, U.S.) and Six (they/she, genderqueer, 25, white, U.S.),
who were inspired to explore their gender identity by Japanese media featuring cross84
dressers, Japanese informant Luna said that “cross dressers in the media is not really
positive representation” and that it would have been “difficult to choose” to dress
differently than was expected of their sex assigned at birth “because there is no role,
positive role model.” Luna said, “It was very hard to find myself in the media […] it
wasn’t really good resource to find out my gender.” Sora said that transphobia in
Japanese media “delayed my understanding of my identity, and made my life more
difficult for myself as a result.” Sakura Miyajima said that Japanese media’s hyper-focus
on gender dysphoria, which she said was “really portrayed as the core part of transness in
Japan,” kept her from identifying with trans characters and delayed her recognition of her
own identity as a trans woman. As Sakura explained, Japanese media representations
really focused upon like, really focused on people who know that they’re
trans from the beginning. And um, I was like, Hmm. I don’t feel trans. I
feel like myself. I don’t feel like a, a woman trapped in man’s body. Like.
Like. Yeah, I was like, I wish I was trans so I could transition, but too bad
I’m a guy. [laugh]
This, again, is not simply a contrast but is the inverse of my U.S. informants’
experiences. As discussed in Chapter 5, U.S. informants considered Japanese media
transgressive and subversive, and said that these representations facilitated their
discovery of their own non-cisgender identities. When consumed globally, by U.S.
audiences, Japanese media served as a catalyst for gender identity formation; when
consumed locally, by Japanese audiences, the same media operated as a barrier to gender
discovery.
Lack of Representation
Japanese informants often told me that there was no representation of queer,
transgender, or nonbinary people in Japanese media. They said that they did not see
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characters or media personalities who fell outside cisheteronormative frameworks. Saba
(they/them, gender non-conforming, 26, Japanese, Japan) said that the U.S. reality show
Queer Eye attracted their attention because “It’s a show with four gay men—which is
quite rare to see in Japan. We don’t see gay men in the first place.” Other informants
agreed that LGBTQIA+ representation was hard to find in Japanese media: “major
movies are usually not made by trans or non-binary people, and do not have non-binary
or transgender characters” (Sora; they/them; agender, more broadly, nonbinary and
transgender; 21; Japanese; Japan); “there aren’t many queer or LGBTQ+ related shows,
either. I assume that the stories are cishet— cisgender and heterosexual” (けい [Kei], no
pronouns, transfeminine, 20, Japanese, Japan); “there was no queer relationships in the
[Japanese] media at all” (Luna, they/them, nonbinary, 26, ethnicity not reported, Japan).
None of the Japanese informants I spoke to said that Japanese media regularly featured
LGBTQIA+ characters or identities.
Yet as we talked, it became clear that for most informants, the lines between “bad
representation” and “no representation” were blurred. The same informants who told me
that there was no LGBTQIA+ representation in Japanese media also raised criticisms of
LGBTQIA+ representation in Japanese media, often in the next sentence. For example,
right after telling me that in Japan “we don’t see gay men” in the media, Saba explained
that “gay representations in Japan tend to be mixed with transgender as well” and said
that Queer Eye provided “the positive gay images that I don’t see in Japan” (emphasis
added). In other words, for Saba, blurring the lines between gay and trans identities did
not amount to “positive” media representation, and a lack of “positive” representation
was recounted to me as no representation. Similarly, directly after Luna told me there
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were “no queer relationships in the media at all,” they explained, “And even it was
depicted as like for examples a famous gay, like famous singer, male singer, was gay, and
then, but that gayness was kind of quirky for everyone and then not really accepted.”
Again, for Luna, seeing gayness depicted but “not really accepted” amounted to no queer
representation at all. There was no affective difference for these informants between
representation that they considered unacceptable and a lack of representation altogether.
Many Japanese informants specified that Japanese media lacked explicit
representations of LGBTQIA+ identities. They criticized Japanese media for presenting
characters who might be queer-coded or who might suggest a trans or nonbinary identity,
but who were never identified as such outright, either within the media text or in
paratexts such as online character profiles or production-side interviews. This may
explain the gulf in perception between U.S. informants, who sought out Japanese media
because they said they saw much more LGBTQIA+ representation there than in U.S.
media, and the Japanese informants in this study. For example, U.S. informants talked
extensively about the prevalence of same-sex relationships in Japanese media, including
in the Boys’ Love (BL) genre, which they said had no equivalent in U.S. media. But for
Luna, the BL genre was not an adequate source of representation because the characters
did not explicitly embrace non-heterosexual identities. As Luna explained,
There are many bisexual men are depicted in Japanese and Thai Boys’
Love, but they don’t really say “I’m bisexual,” and then like they say,
“Well, I like you, and it doesn’t matter”— like, gender doesn’t matter, and
then— maybe like if he, if they are pansexual maybe it is true, but it is
always a kind of excuse to be following with the guys.
What Luna criticizes here is BL characters’ refusal of an explicitly transgressive
collective identity—in this case, bisexual—in favor of an individualized, isolated,
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depoliticized affection for a same-gender character. For Luna, the appearance of two men
in a romantic relationship does not amount to queer representation. Many Japanese
informants felt similarly, either criticizing Japanese media for merely suggesting rather
than outright declaring characters’ LGBTQIA+ identities, or praising U.S. and
Anglophone media for featuring explicitly gay, trans, nonbinary, or otherwise
transgressive characters. As Jin (they/them; nonbinary, transmasculine; 21; Japanese;
Japan) said, “Even if they [trans characters] appear [in Japanese media], they are only
hinted at, or they are side characters that appear very little.” This was not enough for
Japanese informants.
Restrictive and Regressive Media Culture
In addition to criticizing specific portrayals of LGBTQIA+ identities (or the lack
of such portrayals) in Japanese media, Japanese informants spoke of a repressive media
culture, one that emphasized conformity and consumption and left little space for
transgression or transformation. 竹 (Take; they/them; everything out there, pangender;
35; Japanese; Japan) said that in Japan, “gender related things are very bad” because
“they always conform to, you know, like this is how women should be, men should be.”
In the media, 竹 (Take) said that “Japan likes to, like you know, hide queer people,”
confining LGBTQIA+ representations to “nighttime program[s],” a practice that would
both limit the reach of those representations and also stigmatize queerness as something
inappropriate and hush-hush. Sora (they/them; agender, more broadly, nonbinary and
transgender; 21; Japanese; Japan) said that the repressive Japanese media environment
affected their own relationship to gender transgression. “When I was younger, I think I
internalized transphobia and such that was shown in the media,” Sora said. “I was just
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absorbing all the values that were represented in media.” Because they were surrounded
by “transphobic” media, Sora said they had a hard time discovering their own gender
identity, which they described in broad terms as nonbinary and transgender. This direct
link between a regressive media environment and Sora’s personal struggle to realize a
non-cisgender identity underscores the importance of media representation to noncisgender people.
Japanese informants described the Japanese media environment as capitalistic and
resistant to criticism. Saba (they/them, gender non-conforming, 26, Japanese, Japan)
criticized Boys’ Love (BL)—a genre that has been identified as transgressive and
transformative both by my U.S. informants and by other research with global audiences
(Kornfield, 2011; Lilja & Wasshede, 2016)—as focused on profit rather than on queer
people’s representation needs. As Saba explained, gay representation in Japan “is mostly
for consumption […] The focus is really not about how these people are living their lives
and how they express their gender, but rather about which men or women would be
consumed better.” While some of my informants on the U.S. side linked consumption to
positive changes in LGBTQIA+ media representation—as U.S. informant TK (they/them,
non-binary, 30, white, U.S.) said, more queer content is getting made because producers
and content executives “are finally realizing that not only do queer people exist, they
want to spend their money on this stuff”—Japanese informant Kuwai (they/she,
demigender and questioning, 20, Japanese, Japan) was skeptical that market forces could
prompt representation changes in Japan. Kuwai said that in Japan, “criticisms are
considered to be bad, and a lot of people try to shut down criticisms,” resulting in a
failure to move past bad representation. As they explained,
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For example, let’s say someone says this representation in this film is
misogynistic or stereotypical. Then, someone else would say it’s not okay
to say anything bad about what came out from official channels. That’s
where the discussion stops, and the same discussion happens all over again
with a new movie. I see that loop a lot in Japan. There could have been
more progressive representation, but the fans cannot continue the
discussion to make it happen, so we don’t move forward.
In Kuwai’s view, the repressive environment surrounding Japanese media, in which
producers and “official” sources are shielded from consumer criticism, creates a “loop”
that limits the scope of discussion and change. While Kuwai was the only one to tie this
observation directly to fan discourse, my Japanese informants generally agreed that what
progress they had seen in Japanese media representation had been slow and small.
Japanese Informants’ Active Avoidance of Japanese Media
Many Japanese informants I spoke to told me that they actively avoided Japanese
media. Wilmot (he/him, male, 26, Japanese, Japan) said that Japanese media that
objectify and sensationalize fat bodies or that portray women as stereotypically “demure”
were “difficult for me to consume.” Those media portrayals, which Wilmot said
“definitely didn’t represent me,” were “something that I tried to get away from. Actively
tried to get away from.” A (he/him, transgender man, 32, Japanese, Japan) said that a
well-known depiction of a transgender man in the Japanese TV drama San-nen B-gumi
Kinpachi Sensei [Mr. Kinpachi in Class 3B] 4 portrayed being trans as “so sensational”
that “It made me feel like I had to be that grim, and it was supposed to be a huge deal.
San-nen B-gumi Kinpachi Sensei [Mr. Kinpachi in Class 3B], often called simply Kinpachi Sensei, is a
Japanese television drama that ran, off and on, for 8 seasons over the course of 32 years (1979-2011). The
storyline featuring a trans character, student TSURUMOTO Nao / 鶴本直 (played by UETO Aya / 上戸彩)
takes place in Season 6. Informants Saba (they/them, gender non-conforming, 26, Japanese, Japan), とわ
(Towa, they/them, no gender, 37, Japanese, Japan), Kai (he/they; transgender FTM or FTX, but closer to
FTM; 23; Japanese; Japan), and A (he/him, transgender man, 32, Japanese, Japan) mentioned Kinpachi
Sensei as an important part of transgender media history in Japan, with A calling the show one of the first
places where he learned about gender identity.
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That was different from where I was.” A worried that the widely popular show could
make it more difficult for people to understand his identity. “I didn’t want others to be
watching the rerun and think that I was like that character,” he said. Similarly, Mai
(she/her; AMAB, woman; 24; Japanese; Japan) said that she couldn’t relate to Japanese
media representations of transgender people, both because trans women were often
played by cis men and because “they portray these transgender characters as if they are
unfortunate, which is very different from how I feel about myself.” Mai said that she was
uncomfortable with those portrayals, and “that’s why I avoided watching shows and films
with transgender characters, even when I knew that they exist.” Casting also played a role
in media selection for たに (Tani, they/them, nonbinary, 32, Japanese, Japan). They said
that Japanese media seldom featured “representation by those that actually identify as
such,” and pointed not only to “gender and sexuality” but also to “disability, race, and
other identities.” It was important to たに (Tani) that characters with marginalized
identities be portrayed by actors who shared those same identities, but they said “those
representations are missing in Japanese media, and that’s why I have been avoiding them.
Then, I’d flip over to American and other media.” Here, たに (Tani) articulates a
specific, considered choice to avoid Japanese media in favor of “American and other
media,” a choice made on the basis of representational adequacy. Because Japanese
media continued to cast majoritarian actors in minoritarian roles—a practice that has
come under scrutiny and provoked backlash in the U.S. media environment—たに (Tani)
refused to engage with their local media, and sought out global media instead.
Many Japanese informants cited bad representation of queerness as the specific
reason why they had disengaged from Japanese media. For Sora (they/them; agender,
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more broadly, nonbinary and transgender; 21; Japanese; Japan), realization of their
identities as agender, nonbinary, and transgender caused them to notice “just how terrible
the representations were on TV.” As a result, Sora said, “I don’t watch TV anymore,” and
they had also started “to avoid Japanese YouTube, too.” Like Wilmot and Mai, Sora felt
uncomfortable with the way that Japanese media portrayed people who shared (or were
purported to share) their identities. S (they/them; no thoughts about gender, nonbinary;
23; Japanese; Japan) summed up the decision-making process, saying
I don’t really feel there is a possibility or, um, good representation— ah,
good representation for queer people in Japanese media in this moment.
So I don’t want to be hurt by seeing like, very stereo, stereotypical like
queer person. And so I don’t, ah, I don’t choose Japanese media.
For S, avoidance of Japanese media was a way to avoid being hurt. Japanese informants
had become familiar with the tropes of Japanese media representation and did not trust
Japanese media to produce portrayals of queer and trans people that were sensitive to
these identities as my informants understood them. Rather than exposing themselves to
potential emotional harm, they proactively disengaged from the Japanese media
environment.
Japanese Informants Were More Comfortable Watching U.S. Media
When Japanese informants turned away from Japanese media, they sought out
foreign media instead, including U.S. and Anglophone media. My Japanese informants
said that they felt more comfortable watching media from global sources rather than their
own local media. In contrast to the Japanese media environment, where representations of
queerness and gender variance were few and “cringe-worthy” (Saba, they/them, gender
non-conforming, 26, Japanese, Japan), U.S. and Anglophone media were safer spaces for
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Japanese informants to identify with media characters and feel seen and heard in their
own non-cisgender identities. Unlike my U.S. informants, who frequently reported that
Japanese media provided the first imaginative spark that led to their process of gender
discovery, Japanese informants often said that they sought out foreign media after
discovering their non-cisgender identities. In general, U.S. media more often affirmed
Japanese informants’ non-cisgender identities rather than catalyzing gender identity
formation.
Japanese informants drew stark contrasts between Japanese and non-Japanese
media. Saba said, “When I watch movies about sexual minorities made by Netflix Japan,
it makes me sick. […] Watching foreign […] shows and Netflix series from America
make me feel more at ease.” Jin (they/them; nonbinary, transmasculine; 21; Japanese;
Japan) said that U.S. documentaries on trans topics give “a lot more information” than
Japanese documentaries, and added that “America has gone through a series of debates
on trans discrimination and microaggression in the ways that Japan hasn’t yet, so it’s less
troublesome to watch.” Kazuki (they/them; neither female nor male, human; 66;
Japanese; Japan) said,
My image of Japanese shows is that they are superficial, loud, making fun,
and light. English and American media have more depth in their contents.
There are things I can learn from them, and they often let me imagine
what things could look like. Japanese shows don’t have that, and that is
why I don’t want to watch any.
Kazuki, who was my oldest Japanese informant at 66, contrasted contemporary Japanese
media with memories from their youth. “In the past, Japanese comedians used to study a
lot,” they said. “I don’t sense that from anyone these days. They are just loud.” While
Kazuki’s critiques centered on the producers of Japanese media, Kuwai (they/she,
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demigender and questioning, 20, Japanese, Japan) focused on fan discourses. Kuwai said
that they encountered the practice of queer reading “through watching English contents”
and reading fan reactions online. Kuwai said, “English speakers would watch something
and would do a queer reading on it—whether or not the characters were considered to be
queer. I like that kind of stance from fans, and it saved me.” For Kuwai, queer readings of
media texts provided a way for them to “project myself onto those characters” and feel
“empowered,” even “saved”—but because Kuwai saw the practice of queer reading
performed only by English-speaking fans of Anglophone media, they chose to consume
mostly U.S. and other foreign media.
More and Better Queer, Trans, and Gender Variant Representation
Japanese informants resoundingly agreed that non-Japanese media featured more
and better representation of LGBTQIA+ identities and characters. S (they/them; no
thoughts about gender, nonbinary; 23; Japanese; Japan) said that in foreign media,
“compared to Japanese media, I think almost all the dramas or all the movies, somehow
there are queer person in the drama or movie.” とわ (Towa, they/them, no gender, 37,
Japanese, Japan) said that “trans representation is still few in foreign media, but there are
many gay or ’bian [lesbian] representations.” Japanese informants generally agreed that
while there was still progress to be made, they were better able to find diverse
representations of gender and sexuality, as well as disability and neurodivergence, in U.S.
and Anglophone media. Notably, several Japanese informants (as well as several nonwhite U.S. informants) pointed out a lack of racial diversity in U.S. media, and
particularly an absence of queer Asian representation. This will be discussed further in
Chapter 8.
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Japanese informants said that they preferred representations of queer and trans
people in U.S. and Anglophone media over those in Japanese media. They said that nonJapanese portrayals were more respectful, more natural, and more positive. Many
informants had the sense that the U.S. media environment was more progressive and less
tolerant of hurtful or stereotypical queer and trans representation than the Japanese media
environment. As Sakura Miyajima (she/her; woman, specifically a trans woman; 26;
Japanese; Japan) said, “I mean, not to say American media are perfect. […] But you
know, like, you guys don’t really make, like, an Ace Ventura in 2022, at least, so.” Ace
Ventura: Pet Detective is a 1994 American comedy film that features the title character
stripping off a woman’s clothes and exaggerated reactions of “nose-holding disgust”
(Manjoo, 2016, para. 2) when a bulge in the woman’s underwear suggests that she was
assigned male at birth (AMAB). The film is widely regarded as transphobic in
contemporary U.S. discourse (Manjoo, 2016). Sakura’s reference to Ace Ventura
demonstrates her familiarity with U.S. media culture and also suggests her comparatively
negative assessment of Japanese media culture, implying that she could imagine Japanese
media green-lighting “an Ace Ventura in 2022.” As Sora (they/them; agender, more
broadly, nonbinary and transgender; 21; Japanese; Japan) said, Japanese media tends to
equate transgender people with cross-dressers, whereas “American movies respect those
identities as they handle the characters.”
It was important to Japanese informants that trans and queer identities be treated
as natural, everyday topics rather than sources of shame, strife, or misery. Rather than
portraying trans people as “sensational” (A, he/him, transgender man, 32, Japanese,
Japan), or their lives as “grim” (A) and their stories as “tear-jerkers” とわ (Towa),
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informants said that in U.S. media, queer and trans identities were “just normal” (Wilmot,
he/him, male, 26, Japanese, Japan), “so normal that it wouldn’t be a huge topic” (Saba,
they/them, gender non-conforming, 26, Japanese, Japan), “depicted naturally” (とわ
[Towa]), “naturally existing” (Saba), “part of our daily lives” (A), and “just a part of the
story” (A). These descriptions echo discourses in U.S. media in which producers have
pre-emptively fended off anticipated criticism of media featuring transgender characters
by appealing to normative, apolitical concepts like realism and storytelling (Kosciesza,
2023). This similarity suggests some interplay between cultural discourses taking place in
the U.S. around gender, sexuality, and representation and the media consumption choices
of non-U.S. audiences, especially those who identify as gender or sexual minorities.
Further work is needed in this area to explore the influence of cultural discourses on
transnational media consumption.
Japanese informants sought out media that affirmed and uplifted their identities,
and said that they found this in U.S. and Anglophone media, not in Japanese media. A
said that he felt affirmed in his identity as a transgender man when U.S. and Anglophone
media depicted queer and trans characters in positive ways. He said that British TV series
Heartstopper “was really the first media to affirm that identity in a long time.” For A, the
“cheerful” atmosphere cultivated in Heartstopper and in American TV series Glee was
“able to make me happier.” Sakura Miyajima didn’t mind seeing representations of
transness that were less “cheerful” and positive as long as they were also realistic. She
said that a scene in the U.S. TV series Euphoria in which a trans girl “hooked up with
some weird random guy” resonated with her own experience. “I was like, shit, I’ve done
that,” she said, laughing. “Yeah, like, like, fucking some random old dude just to feel the
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gender affirmation.” For Sakura, realistic depictions of trans lives were important
because “if it got really accurate representation, that means like, someone cared.” A also
wanted to see trans and queer characters in realistic situations, such as facing
discrimination, but it was important to him that the media text presented an environment
in which those characters received support. In U.S. media, he said, “Even if the person
with that identity cannot, the others around them mention and fight discrimination. I like
that the others are affirming actions like that.” Overall, Japanese informants wanted to
see media portrayals that integrated queer and trans people into wider society and
affirmed the identities of gender and sexual minorities. They did not find those portrayals
in Japanese media, and thus turned to U.S. and Anglophone media instead.
Casting Actors Who Share Characters’ Marginalized Identities
A specific difference between Japanese and non-Japanese media that Japanese
informants cited in their decision to turn away from Japanese media was the prevailing
standards for casting actors in the roles of marginalized people, and especially the casting
choices for transgender roles. Japanese informants said that in Japanese media, “if there
is a trans woman character, it is often played by cisgender men” (Sora; they/them;
agender, more broadly, nonbinary and transgender; 21; Japanese; Japan). Japanese
informants said that they wanted to see trans actors in trans roles, and that seeing
cisgender actors portray trans characters was uncomfortable and unpleasant. Japanese
informants agreed that it was much easier to find trans actors playing trans roles in U.S.
and Anglophone media, and they could recall few or no examples of this in Japanese
media. Kai (he/they; transgender FTM or FTX, but closer to FTM; 23; Japanese; Japan)
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said that in Japan, “I have never seen actual transgender people play transgender
characters on mainstream, popular movies or popular TV channels.”
It was important to Japanese informants that media producers showed respect for
trans identities—the characters’ identities, the actors’ identities, and the audience’s
identities. Creators could show respect for characts’ and actors’ identities by casting trans
actors in trans roles. While they knew that historically U.S. media had cast cisgender
actors to play trans characters, Japanese informants saw U.S. media making significant
progress in this area. Kai gave the example of Elliot Page, who came out as trans between
the second and third seasons of U.S. TV series The Umbrella Academy, an adaptation of
the comic book series of the same name. Page’s character is not trans in the comic, but
transitions in the third season of the TV series, allowing the actor “to be able to play
someone of his own gender” (Sudborough, 2022, para. 4). As Kai explained, “So he, he
played as actress, but after that he change that he’s, uh, character from the female to…
from cisgender actress to transgender actor.” The producers’ decision to adapt Page’s
character to mirror the actor’s own identity and transition was clearly meaningful to Kai;
though he spoke Japanese throughout most of our interview, he switched to English here
in order to tell me directly that “the American movies’ attitude is changing” towards
transgender people.
As audiences, informants in this study were attuned to the signals producers were
sending about their respect for trans identities through their portrayal of trans characters.
As discussed above, informants wanted to see representations of trans characters that
were uplifting, affirming, and non-stereotypical—in other words, trans characters written
in ways that were comfortable for trans people to watch. Informants often talked about
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the realism and sensitivity that trans and queer creators brought to trans and queer media
characters, and Japanese informants said that there were more trans and queer creators
working in U.S. media production than there were in Japanese media production. All of
these factors—representation, casting, and the presence of trans and queer creators—were
important to たに (Tani, they/them, nonbinary, 32, Japanese, Japan). As they explained
in a follow-up email after our interview,
I said that the reason why I watch American (and other foreign) media is
because of representation issues. I watch foreign media because they are
more concerned about the people with the exact identities play the
characters, and that there are more actors and creators that have come out
than there are in Japan. When I’m able to encounter non-cisgender
characters in such media, I get to know that there are real non-cisgender
actors, creators, and people that accept non-cisgender people.
For たに (Tani), media representation offered a connection to “real” non-cisgender
people and their allies. When producers cast “people with the exact identities” to play
non-cisgender characters, that gave たに (Tani) a touchstone—trans characters who were
no longer purely fictional, but instead offered a sense of real community for audiences of
trans experience. For たに (Tani), as for many other Japanese informants, seeing trans
actors in trans roles was a major reason to seek out U.S. and other non-Japanese media.
Better Portrayal of Women
Japanese informants frequently said that they chose U.S. or Anglophone media
because its portrayal of women was better than what they could find in Japanese media. I
heard this from informants of all gender identities and experiences—assigned female at
birth and assigned male at birth, women and men, transgender and nonbinary. As noncisgender people, informants in this study were conscious of gender stereotypes and the
representation of gender in media, even when the particular gender being represented was
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one with which they did not identify. Japanese informants said that the women in U.S.
and Anglophone media were “strong” (Mai; she/her; AMAB, woman; 24; Japanese;
Japan) and “powerful” (Luna, they/them), that they could “talk back to men” (Mai), “they
voice up, and they don't give up their dreams” (Luna, they/them, nonbinary, 26, ethnicity
not reported, Japan), and they could simultaneously “fight for themselves, have some
feminine side, and be very fierce if need be” (Kai; he/they; transgender FTM or FTX, but
closer to FTM; 23; Japanese; Japan). My informants said that they felt empowered and
affirmed by portrayals of women in non-Japanese media. Luna said that when they saw
the ways women were depicted in “American and Western media,” “then I thought, okay,
so, this is the way it should be.” Mai agreed; she said, “I believe there is something off
about Japanese gender norms and gender roles. When I see women that are beyond those
Japanese norms, it makes me feel that it’s okay to be that way.” For these informants,
U.S. and Anglophone media provided a spark that helped them to imagine something
beyond local gender norms.
Japanese informants roundly criticized Japanese media representations of women
and compared Japanese media unfavorably to U.S. and other non-Japanese media. Sakura
Miyajima (she/her; woman, specifically a trans woman; 26; Japanese; Japan) called
representations of gender in Japanese media “patriarchal.” Kai said, “With Japanese
media, I often felt like women can only cry or scream.” Luna contrasted “Western media”
with the “traditional feminine image of quiet, obedient, not bold” that they saw in
Japanese media. Mai said,
In Japanese movies, I see a lot of norms around gender binary, cisgender,
heterosexual, and heteroromantic. There are so many things tying them up.
[…] In Japan, the social climate often doesn’t allow women to talk back to
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men. But that is not the case [in foreign films] and women can talk back
naturally.
Here, Mai begins by talking about Japanese media, then shifts to talking about the “social
climate” in Japan more generally. This suggests that in Mai’s view, as was the case for
many other Japanese informants in this study, the social norms of Japan both constrain
and are reflected in Japanese media.
The criticisms raised by Japanese informants about Japanese media portrayals of
women stood in stark contrast to U.S. informants’ impressions of Japanese media. As
discussed in Chapter 5, U.S. informants said that Japanese media featured more women
and a greater diversity of roles for women and girls than they saw in U.S. media. U.S.
informants Blueberry (she/they, nonbinary, 41, white, U.S.), Alex Rowan (they/she; a
person first, biologically female sex organs, not a boy or girl; 36; white, Japanese; U.S ),
Morrigan (they/them; queer trans nonbinary/agender; 29; white, Hispanic; U.S.), Lu Stein
(they/them, nonbinary, 27, white, U.S.), and Margo Vintner (she/her, fey/fem;
genderqueer trans woman, both a dyke and a faggot, bigender; 29; white; U.S.) all said
that Japanese media offered a variety of complex, interesting, capable, and powerful
women and girls, while the U.S. media they’d grown up watching limited both the
number and the capability of women characters. On the Japanese side, however,
informants’ impressions were the opposite. Mai said that “American films often feature
strong women.” Luna said that they women in U.S. and Western media “are not just
being pretty, kawaii,” and said that they appreciated “strong” women characters. For
Japanese informants, it was not only the quality of U.S. media portrayals of women that
they admired, but also the quantity—or in some cases, the presence of women in media at
all. 理恵 (Rie; she/her; woman, transgender, new-half [ニューハーフ, nyūhāfu]; 65;
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Japanese; Japan), who was aged 65 at the time of our interview, appreciated U.S. sitcom
The Lucy Show and its star, Lucille Ball, because “In Japan, we would never see a female
comedian.” At that time, “All comedians were male. That’s why it felt very innovative.”
たに (Tani, they/them, nonbinary, 32, Japanese, Japan) admired a more recent U.S. film,
Ocean’s 8, because “There are many characters, and all the main characters are women.
Having that much variety and eclectic collection is something I don’t see in Japanese
movies,” they said. Again, these Japanese informants’ impression of Japanese media is
directly opposite the views of U.S. informants, who said that it was Japanese media that
offered a greater variety of women and girls in more powerful and empowering roles.
While their opinions about which media environment offered better
representations of women were starkly different, informants on both the U.S. and the
Japanese side recounted similar appreciation for the portrayals that they viewed
favorably. U.S. informants said that Japanese media inspired them to think differently
about femininity, imagine “different ways to be a girl” (Margo), and reimagine gender
roles. For U.S. informants, U.S. media portrayals of femininity were limited, weak, and
one-dimensional, and this was one reason why they sought out Japanese media. Japanese
informants, however, criticized Japanese media portrayals of femininity in almost the
same terms, and said that the poor representations of women in Japanese media prompted
them to turn to U.S. media. Japanese informants were as inspired by U.S. portrayals of
women as U.S. informants were inspired by Japanese portrayals of women. Mai said
when women were shown in leadership roles in U.S. media, “That makes a great
impression on me […] That was impressive and empowered me. […] These days, I often
realize that women don’t just have to be weak.” For Luna, too, U.S. media was
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empowering and affirming. They said, “when I see someone being strong – for example,
fighting for rights, speaking their mind, or telling their partner ‘no, I am no longer dating
someone like you’—that affirms how I feel about gender in a positive way.” Just like
U.S. informants, Japanese informants turned away from their local media in favor of
global media texts, which they said provided better representations of women.
More Diversity and More Engagement with Diversity
In addition to specific complaints about portrayals of gender and LGBTQIA+
representation in Japanese media, Japanese informants said that U.S. media was more
comfortable to watch because it generally featured more diverse characters and engaged
with diversity on multiple levels. In Japanese media, informants said, “neurodivergent” or
“autism-coded characters are usually represented really badly” (Sakura Miyajima;
she/her; woman, specifically a trans woman; 26; Japanese; Japan), non-ethnicallyJapanese foreigners actors are often cast to “play the villain” (A, he/him, transgender
man, 32, Japanese, Japan), and “most mainstream Japanese media doesn’t really tackle
issues of discrimination related to backgrounds” (けい [Kei], no pronouns, transfeminine,
20, Japanese, Japan). Japanese media “would rather get people to laugh at sexist jokes”
than engage with feminist ideas (雨木 [Ameki]; they/them; x-gender, queer, and
genderfluid; 25; Japanese; Japan).
Several informants explained Japan’s lack of engagement with diversity by
referencing the country’s history of isolationism and relatively low levels of racial,
ethnic, and religious diversity. Mai said, “Japan is an island nation and closed to
differences in terms of ethnicity and religion, for example. In contrast, America has many
people from different backgrounds.” Similarly, A said,
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It seems like America is more aware of including at least a certain
percentage of Black people and such, because of its longer history
addressing discrimination. […] In Japan, people are still under the
impression that Japan is a monoethnic country, and we rarely see
characters outside of that.
These explanations, like Mai’s comments about the portrayal of women discussed in the
previous section, draw connections between Japanese and U.S. social history and the
prevailing standards for media representation in each country.
Japanese informants admired the diversity of representation that they saw in U.S.
media. Informants said that in U.S. media, “some media are very body positive” (けい
[Kei]), “there is a lot more variety on who is participating in them, what their identities
are, and what they are about” (Kai; he/they; transgender FTM or FTX, but closer to FTM;
23; Japanese; Japan), “they are utilizing people of different races, sexuality, and others”
(A), and “people other than white cisgender men […] could be heroes” (Mai). A said that
“In terms of gender identity, watching media from outside Japan makes me feel more
open […] This is because, although there are discriminations represented, they are not
skewed. Compared to Japanese ones, they do not feel as stereotypical.” 雨木 (Ameki)
said, “It may be just that I’m not realizing American discrimination, but I don’t notice a
lot of discrimination in American media. That’s why I like them better.” For 雨木
(Ameki), positive representation did not necessarily mean that sexism, discrimination, or
stereotyping were not present in the media text. Instead, it was important to them that the
text pushed back against characters’ problematic behavior and engaged with social issues.
In one of their favorite shows, U.S. TV series One Day at a Time, 雨木 (Ameki)
explained,
It’s not like there is no sexist moments at all, but when they do happen,
people understand that it’s wrong. Their comedy has that in their
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assumption. They portray people that make sexist jokes as bad people.
Like, they are the “boke” in Japanese manzai. 5 Feminist characters can be
saying the right things, too. They don’t make their feminist identity the
butt of the joke, but rather the feminists can make jokes too. I like this
show because of that.
For 雨木 (Ameki), it was the chastising response to sexism in One Day at a Time that
made this U.S. media text comfortable to watch, as opposed to Japanese media texts that
uncritically played sexist jokes for laughs.
Overall, Japanese informants did not think that either U.S. media or U.S. society
were perfect or free from problematic portrayals, but they did judge U.S. media to be
better than Japanese media in terms of diversity. Both Mai and A mentioned issues of
racism in U.S. society, but still said that U.S. media was more diverse than Japanese
media. “I’m glad that there are many heroes with different identities from America,” Mai
said, “because I don’t see that in Japan. I’m actually jealous.” Yet Japanese informants
maintained an awareness of the gap between what they saw in U.S. media and what U.S.
society was like for people living there. As Mai explained,
Simply judging from movies, America seems very attractive. I feel like I
can live strongly as myself. However, when I heard the news in the last
few years that transgender students are not allowed to use the bathrooms
for gender not assigned at birth in schools, I thought that movies are just
movies and perhaps they are not real life. I like movies, and I am
influenced by movies a lot. But I guess I can’t just look at movies.
Although, as Mai said, movies “are not real life,” depictions of and engagement with
diversity in U.S. media both comforted and inspired her. The diversity that Japanese
informants saw in U.S. media helped them to imagine different social and political
Manzai is a form of two-person Japanese comedy that takes the form of conversations between the boke,
the “fool or funny man,” and the tsukkomi, “the sharp or straight man” (Tsutsumi, 2011, p. 147). The term
boke comes from the Japanese verb bokeru (ボケる), which means to grow senile, to be mentally slow, or
to play dumb. The role of the boke in mainzai comedy is “to make stupid or out-of-context statements and
to engage in cognitive misunderstandings,” while the role of the tsukkomi “involves making statements to
correct or to put down the boke” (Ōshima as cited in Tsutsumi, 2011, p. 149).
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realities, even if those progressive images had not yet been realized in actually-existing
U.S. society.
Alternative Theoretical Schema for Gender Variance
As Japanese informants spoke about their gender identities, their media use, and
their processes of gender discovery, it became apparent that in their view, what they
called “Western” media and “Western” societies were operating under a different
theoretical schema for gender variance than what they saw in Japanese media and society.
They preferred U.S. and Anglophone media not only because trans people, queer people,
and women were represented more often and more positively, but because the ideas about
gender and gender variance underlying Western media were better aligned with these
informants’ own identities. In other words, Japanese informants sought out “Western”
media because they understood their own gender identities through a “Western”
theoretical framework.
Language and Terminology
Japanese informants in this study did not directly say that they held “Western”
ideas about gender identity and gender variance. What they did say is that they found it
hard to connect with Japanese gender-variant communities and that theories of gender
that had been informative to their identities originated in the Anglophone world. Many
informants said that Japanese terms for gender variance did not resonate with them, and
that they hadn’t had the language to express their gender identities until they found
Anglophone terminology, either through entertainment media or on the Internet. When I
asked whether representations of gender from other countries had changed the way
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informants thought about gender, several said they had found new words to describe
themselves and their identities:
I hadn’t thought much about pronouns living in Japan. When I see
American and other English-speaking people use they/them, I thought,
right, I don’t really want to be called “she”, but I don’t really want to be
called “he” either. I think it’s problematic that Japanese only has kare [彼,
he] and kanojo [彼女, she] in the first place. I think about those things
now.
(雨木 [Ameki]; they/them; x-gender, queer, and genderfluid; 25; Japanese;
Japan)
I got information on genderfluidity [何かジェンダーフルイド, nan ka
jendāfuruido, lit. “something genderfluid”] from English websites, and the
word “nonbinary” [ノンバイナリー, nonbainarī] came from foreign
countries—where I do not live.
(Uzura, they/them, nonbinary and genderfluid, 29, Japanese, Japan)
At first, I only knew the term “x-jendā” [X ジェンダー] and it didn’t feel
right to me. After I found out that there is a term and a concept called
“agender” [A ジェンダー, a-jendā], I was able to understand where I
belong in society and how I should live.
(Sora; they/them; agender, more broadly, nonbinary and transgender; 21;
Japanese; Japan)
These informants all had mediated encounters with terminology that was new to them
and that originated in the Anglophone world, and this terminology helped them to
understand themselves and their genders. All were conscious of the words’ foreign
origins, and all deliberately chose these English loan words over terminology that
originated in Japan.
In the Japanese language, gender and gender variance can be discussed using a
variety of terms, including original Japanese words (e.g. third-person pronouns kare [彼,
he] and kanojo [彼女, she], and seibetsu [性別], which can be translated as “sex” or
“gender”); English loan words that have been transliterated into katakana, the syllabary
used to write foreign words in Japanese (e.g. トランスジェンダー, toransujendā); and
terms originating in Japan that may take inspiration from English terms, but which have a
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unique Japanese meaning. Two examples of the latter are x-jendā [X ジェンダー], a
term describing a gender (“jendā”) that is neither man or woman, but “X;” and the related
acronym FTX, which borrows the style of the English acronyms FTM (Female To Male)
and MTF (Male To Female), but implies a transition to or an identity of “X.” These
hybrid terms incorporate words or styles from Anglophone frameworks of gender
variance, but have no direct English translation; they are uniquely Japanese.
Billard and Nesfield (2020) have warned that translating local terms for gender
variance into Western terms may buy transnational legibility at the price of cultural
imperialism; local gender-variant identities are neither interchangeable with nor
equivalent to Western frameworks. Yet for many of my informants, the local Japanese
terms did not resonate. 山川くぬぎ (YAMAKAWA Kunugi; they/them; nonbinary and
agender; 40; Japanese, East Asian; Japan) 6 said that they “didn’t fit in” with the FTX
community in Japan, but when they encountered the terms nonbinary and agender, “I felt
like those are right.” たに (Tani, they/them, nonbinary, 32, Japanese, Japan) said they
identified as nonbinary because they “just didn’t like the term x-jendā.” Mai (she/her;
AMAB, woman; 24; Japanese; Japan) said that when she discovered the English loan
words transgender and “assigned gender” [アサインドジェンダー, asaindojendā], “I
thought that could be me.” For these informants, the Japanese framework for gender
variance was insufficient to describe their own identities.
山川くぬぎ (YAMAKAWA Kunugi) is the only Japanese informant in this study who both (1) chose two
names, a personal and a family name, for their pseudonym and also (2) placed the family name first, in the
Japanese style. Placing a family name in all capital letters to distinguish it from a personal name is a
common practice when writing Japanese names in Roman letters, especially when English-speaking readers
might be confused by Japanese name order. I have not placed family names in all capital letters for Yu
Sakamoto and Sakura Miyajima, both of whom gave me their pseudonyms with personal names first and
family names second, a style that will be familiar to English-speaking readers.
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From a postcolonial standpoint, one might reasonably ask whether Japanese
informants’ choice to use Anglophone loan words to describe their gender identities is
enmeshed with colonial power dynamics. Yu Sakamoto (no pronouns; gender nonbinary;
26; Japanese, East Asian, Taiwanese; Japan), who spoke fluent English and had studied
gender and sexuality at the graduate level, raised some concerns about this during our
interview. As Yu explained, “linguistically it’s very difficult to get the same idea in
Japanese, so everyone will be criticized for being Western, um, washed [laughs] first, if
you are feminist or queer in Japan.” This criticism had affected Yu’s own life in Japan, as
Yu shared with me:
Oh, I remember um when I first went to gay-slash-queer community in
Shinjuku, that district, to the, you know the most queer people crowded
places, I remember people told me that, What is gender identity? You use
a lot of, like, the big term [i.e. you’re using big words]. And I was so
shocked. Or like x-gender, 7 gender nonbinary, or like I use a lot of
katakana, like English foreign language oriented word. So that difference
kind of made me feel like ooh, I’m— am I like Americanized, or like
Westernized, kind of? That also um created— Not conflict but like, um. I
couldn’t kind of get into the community that well.
Yu was the only informant interviewed for this study who raised concerns around being
Americanized, Westernized, or Western-washed by engagement with Anglophone
terminology or Western theoretical frameworks for gender variance. Most of my
Japanese informants approached these frameworks with little criticism. I often heard
narratives of progress, in which U.S. media and society, while not perfect, were cast as
more advanced in their understanding of gender than Japanese media and society.
However, a requirement for participation in this study was that informants had used some
Yu spoke English throughout the interview and pronounced the term “x-gender” with an American accent.
This is the same term that other Japanese informants pronounced “x-jendā.”
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form of U.S. media, and while I deliberately included local Japanese terms x-jendā and
FTX in my call for participants, only three of my informants described their genders
using terms for gender variance that originated in Japan. 8 Based on this limited sample
and on Yu’s experience with the “gay-slash-queer community in Shinjuku,” it is
reasonable to imagine that there is more pushback against so-called “Western”
terminology and frameworks among the larger queer community in Japan. Nonetheless,
for my Japanese informants, including Yu, Western terminology and frameworks for
gender variance were critical to their processes of gender identification.
The concerns that Billard and Nesfield (2020) raise about cultural imperialism
and the global proliferation of “Western” terminology for gender variance deserve
consideration. Yet Billard and Nesfield’s (2020) conclusion does not call for refusing
these Western terms outright; instead, they highlight the ambivalent tension between
local authenticity and global intelligibility, and note that gender variant people make
strategic decisions about whether and how they will use Western terminology. While
Billard and Nesfield (2020) focus on journalism, educational media, and international
dialogues around gender variance, my work with non-cisgender Japanese informants
highlights their use of Anglophone terminology not to make their experiences intelligible
to a transnational audience, but to build identities for themselves. For these informants,
local Japanese terms were inaccurate or inadequate to describe their gender identities, and
they turned to global media discourses to find frameworks that worked for them.
These were: 理恵 (Rie), nyūhāfu (ニューハーフ); Kai, FTX; and 雨木 (Ameki), x-jendā (X ジェンダ
ー).
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English Language Access as Access to Ideas About Gender Variance
For many Japanese informants, the ability to understand or communicate in
English was critical to accessing ideas about gender variance that were new to them, and
that helped them discover, understand, or describe their own non-cisgender identities. As
Yu Sakamoto (no pronouns; gender nonbinary; 26; Japanese, East Asian, Taiwanese;
Japan) said, “it’s everyone’s struggle in Japan, if you want to learn about your gender
identity and sexual orientations, um you have to first learn American frameworks.” Many
Japanese informants talked about using Internet searches to get more information about
gender and to discover frameworks of gender variance that resonated with them. Some
informants said that the availability of information was limited in Japanese. Sora
(they/them; agender, more broadly, nonbinary and transgender; 21; Japanese; Japan) said,
“There are very few academic books in Japanese [on nonbinary identities]. […] There are
so few resources, as you can see. The only resource really is YouTube from Englishspeaking society.” とわ (Towa, they/them, no gender, 37, Japanese, Japan) said that
while they had found blogs about people’s personal experiences written in Japanese,
“Research papers or articles only came up in English.” 竹 (Take; they/them; everything
out there, pangender; 35; Japanese; Japan) said that they switched between English and
Japanese depending on what they were looking for, but “if you search in English there’s
like a lot more information and resources.” S (they/them; no thoughts about gender,
nonbinary; 23; Japanese; Japan) said, “I need to um learn the, the information, or like, I
need to know what, what’s happening in, in abroad. Especially for like trans or nonbinary
situations. Those information, almost all the information are written or spoken in
English.” Yu, Sora, とわ (Towa), and S all had strong English comprehension skills, but
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even informants whose English ability was limited, like Kuwai (they/she, demigender
and questioning, 20, Japanese, Japan), talked about using English terms in Internet
searches when they couldn’t find the results they were looking for.
Informants often said that they preferred English searches even when Japanese
searches returned results. Sakura Miyajima (she/her; woman, specifically a trans woman;
26; Japanese; Japan) and Kai (he/they; transgender FTM or FTX, but closer to FTM; 23;
Japanese; Japan) were more able to find community through English searches. Sakura
said the “English speaking trans communities online […] kind of exposed me to uh more
diverse forms of transness.” Kai said that when he searched social media to try and
connect with other transgender people, “In Japanese context, it was often difficult to tell
if someone was transgender or cross-dressing.” While Kai was able to find profiles of
Japanese people who identified as FTM, he said those people “overdid masculinity in
their profiles.” Kai felt that he “wasn’t able to keep up with that stereotype,” and that he
“felt more comfortable searching in English to find people like me.” Other informants
said that there was better information on gender variance available in English. Sora said,
“I find that a lot of explanations available in Japanese are inaccurate, so I try to search in
English.” Luna (they/them, nonbinary, 26, ethnicity not reported, Japan) said that their
impression of Japanese terminology for gender variance was that it was “very narrowed”
and “not correct.” Luna said that “Western media, like Western resources” were “more
reliable,” and thought they would “provide more inclusive and more accurate
information.” These informants had the language ability to perform meaningful searches
in both English and Japanese, but chose English-language resources because they wanted
“accurate” information.
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While Sora and Luna used words like “accurate” and “inaccurate” to explain their
preference for English-language searches, articles, and explanations of gender variance, I
interpret these preferences as a matter of alignment or misalignment with differing
frameworks for gender variance. The Japanese informants interviewed for this study—
who, again, all reported using U.S. or Anglophone media and all identified as noncisgender—all aligned to at least some degree with frameworks for gender variance that
originated in the so-called West. They sought out U.S. media representations of
LGBTQIA+ people, used terms of Anglophone origin to describe their gender identities,
and searched for connection and community using English terms. This study helps
describe their experiences and understand their use of transnational media, but makes no
claims that these informants’ experiences are representative of all gender variant people
in Japan. More work is needed to trace the contours of Anglo-American, Japanese, and
other global frameworks for gender variance and explore their differences. Yet the
Japanese informants in my study, and especially Luna and Sora’s language of accuracy,
demonstrate the gap between the “Western” framework for identifying, describing, and
representing gender variance and the prevailing standards in Japan. Luna and Sora’s
identities aligned, not with the local gender possibilities that they saw around them in
Japan, but with the framework they saw in U.S. media and Anglophone Internet
discourse. For my Japanese informants, Western frameworks of gender variance were the
ones that resonated.
The Japanese informants I interviewed were conscious of the role that English
language ability played in their access to information and theories about gender, and in
some cases, to their own identities. Yu “couldn’t find any single coming out video in
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Japanese,” but was able to watch many such videos in English. Yu “always knew that I
have a privilege […] to get an access, English accessibility for that.” Sora said that their
position as a college student had made it easier for them to access English-language
information, and thus, their gender identity. “Given that, this is not just a personal issue,”
they said. “People do not have equal access to information. If others like me are
struggling to find that information, I think we need to think of that as a societal, political
issue.” For Sakura, it was finding online English-speaking trans communities that helped
her realize, “holy shit, I’m a girl. And I can be a girl without conforming to the, um, the
stereotypes Japanese media told me.” Sakura was glad to have reached this epiphany that
helped her discover her gender identity, but she expressed frustration that it took learning
English for her to access the information she needed.
In an ideal world it didn’t have to be like in my second language speaking,
rather than my first one because, like you know, having like a decent
ability in my second language is kind of a privilege, obviously. […] Like I
was just privileged enough to access those communities, those um,
information […] like, I was banned from like knowing my identities
because of language barrier, and that’s kind of infuriating.
For Yu, Sora, and Sakura, English language access was an explicitly political issue. This
speaks not only to the differing frameworks for gender variance operating in AngloAmerican and Japanese discourses, but also to inequities in language content on the
Internet. Despite persistent assumptions that all of human knowledge exists on the
Internet and global development policies that claim providing Internet access will
ameliorate a wide range of educational disparities and information gaps (Arora, 2019;
Nothias, 2020), the vast majority of content on the Internet is written in English; as of
November 2022, 59.7% of websites with meaningful content (e.g., not simply a notice
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that a domain is for sale) were in English (Web3Techs, 2022). The next most-used
content language was Russian, at 5.3%, and Japanese ranked sixth, at 2.9% (Web3Techs,
2022). The role of the Internet in rising global media consumption and in non-cisgender
people’s processes of gender identity formation will be discussed further in Chapter 7.
Japanese informants spoke about the importance of their English language ability
to their processes of gender identification in ways that I found deeply moving. In contrast
to using Japanese first-person pronouns, which often carry gendered associations, Kai
said that speaking English felt easy. “I was grateful that I could use ‘I’ without thinking
twice,” he explained. 9 たに (Tani, they/them, nonbinary, 32, Japanese, Japan) said that
without their English language ability, “I think I would have felt more confined than I do
now. And, one more thing— if I couldn’t speak English, if I hadn’t been exposed to
information from English-speaking countries, I don’t think I would have transitioned.”
Sora, too, said that without the ability to understand English, “I think I wouldn’t have
been able to find my identity.” They said that the terms for gender variance available in
Japanese “consider physical characteristics as essential, and they always accompanied
explanations like ‘sex assigned at birth’ as the ‘real sex’ in parentheses. That would not
have saved me. I would not have found where I belong in society.” For these informants,
being able to speak and understand English was a critical component in their processes of
self-discovery and their ability to live comfortably as themselves.
There are many words in Japanese that would be translated as “I” in English. While these words are not
technically or grammatically gendered, there are cultural expectations around who uses which word, such
that when a person speaking Japanese refers to themself in the first person, the word they choose often
genders them implicitly. For example, 私 (watashi) has feminine overtones, while 僕 (boku) has masculine
overtones. Many Japanese informants used the more neutral 自分 (jibun), which roughly translates to “one”
or “oneself” and does not carry gender associations, in place of a first-person pronoun.
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One informant, Yu Sakamoto, put English language access in even stronger terms,
describing it as a matter of survival. Yu recounted the experiences that set Yu on the path
to studying abroad in the United States:
I remember in junior high school and high school um, I— At that time, in
Japan, I didn’t know any queer people around me at all, and then— so
that, that’s the reason why at that time I really thought queer people don’t
live that long. [laughs] Probably they’re dead or something. After 20 years
or something like that. Um and then I knew there are some queer
representation in the West, so the only way to survive in this world is to
learn English and then escape from Japan. […] At that time, yeah, learning
English was one of the, um— survival, for me.
As a young person, Yu did not see a path to survival in Japan. Yu did not elaborate on
what Yu imagined would happen to queer people in Japan, but drew the conclusion that
they “don’t live that long,” estimating a life expectancy under 20 years. To Yu, learning
English became not only a matter of living as oneself, but of living at all.
Conclusion
As this chapter has shown, Japanese informants in this study differed markedly
from U.S. informants in their assessment of Japanese media. While U.S. informants
sought out Japanese media for its fluid and varied depictions of gender and sexuality,
Japanese informants stringently avoided Japanese media and criticized its depictions of
gender and sexual minorities as stereotypical, regressive, hurtful, sensationalized, or
simply bad. Japanese informants turned instead to Anglophone and U.S. media, where
they said they saw more and better representations of queer and trans people and
generally better engagement with diversity. While some voiced criticisms of U.S. media,
the Japanese informants in this study generally accepted a linear narrative of progress in
which U.S. society and U.S. media were more advanced than Japan.
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Japanese informants said that U.S. media was more comfortable to watch because
it generally featured more diverse characters and engaged with diversity on multiple
levels. They knew that U.S. media representations did not transparently reflect the social
or political realities in the United States, but judged U.S. media to be better than Japanese
media in terms of diversity and LGBTQIA+ representation. Their image of the U.S. as
more advanced, as further along the one-way arc of progress, reflects an “imagined
America” (Darling-Wolf, 2015, p. 150) that is globally pervasive (Darling-Wolf, 2015).
Historical power dynamics between the United States and Japan, particularly
Commodore Perry’s forcible opening of Japan’s borders to foreign trade in 1853 and the
WWII defeat and subsequent occupation of Japan by U.S. forces, certainly play a role in
my informants’ imagination of the U.S. Yet as Darling-Wolf (2015) argues, scholars
must approach the global imagination of “America” as powerful, progressive, and
opulent “not as a blatant example of U.S. cultural imperialism but as one ingredient of
globalized hybridity” (p. 150). While this chapter has detailed Japanese informants’
impressions of U.S. media as diverse and progressive, Chapter 5 demonstrated that U.S.
informants had the opposite view: to them, Japanese media offered the progressive
representations that U.S. media lacked.
For informants in both locations, the cultural distance between them and the
transcultural media they sought out enabled them to use transcultural media in ways that
they could not use their local media. Both U.S. and Japanese informants described being
frustrated with their local media to the point of disengaging, but said that they found
imaginative resources in media from the other country that helped them to discover,
understand, or express their non-cisgender identities. Cultural distance allowed my
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informants to identify with the parts of transcultural media that were meaningful to them
while easily disidentifying with representations that they might otherwise have found
difficult to stomach. In other words, cultural distance itself became an imaginative
resource that informants used in the negotiation of their gender identities.
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CHAPTER 7
THE INTERNET, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND THE GLOBALIZATION OF
GENDER
To me, being, being queer or be— having like the resources and the
knowledge to transition or even really hear much about it would not have
been possible without the Internet.
(Fortune, she/her, transgender woman, 25, white, U.S.)
The Internet, globalization, and digitization of media have shaped the lives of
informants in this study. Aged between 19 and 66 at the time of our interviews in 2022,
most informants had lived through profound changes in the accessibility and availability
of transnational media, the amount and quality of LGBTQIA+ media representation, and
the prevailing discourses around gender variance. Both U.S. and Japanese informants
recalled significant shifts in their consumption of transnational media and their ideas
about gender that they traced back to their access to online platforms and streaming
services. In this chapter, I detail informants’ use of the Internet to access media produced
outside their local market, learn terminology and theories around gender that were
previously unknown to them, and connect with similarly-marginalized people to form
communities. When informants talked about discovering, negotiating, or understanding
their non-cisgender identities with and through media, the Internet played a central role.
As Fortune (she/her, transgender woman, 25, white, U.S.) said, the Internet enabled
queerness and transness in ways that “would not have been possible” without it.
Accessing Transnational and LGBTQIA+ Media Online
Internet access played a key role in access to transnational and LGBTQIA+ media
for both U.S. and Japanese informants. As informants gained access to the Internet, they
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were exposed to more content that was outside of their mainstream, and they were better
able to choose the content that they watched, read, played, or listened to. Without Internet
access, informants’ media consumption was restricted by the curation of broadcast or
other mass media, and by their parents’ rules. When informants were able to use the
Internet to find media on their own terms, their consumption habits changed. Depending
on their home situation, this change came at different times, anywhere from elementary
school to college, but the Internet always played a key role.
The U.S. informants in this study were born between 1981 and 1998, and most
had at least some memories of encountering Japanese media without access to the
Internet (although Marcel [they/she; feminine non-binary; 24; white, Latinx/o/a; U.S.],
one of my youngest informants at age 24, said “I did always have access to the Internet
and Japanese manga and anime”). Many U.S. informants recounted early experiences
with anime on broadcast television via the Toonami programming block, which aired on
Cartoon Network from 1997-2008 (Yoshida, 2017). Many also mentioned reading print
volumes of manga at bookstores or at the library. (“We would go hang out at the Borders
[…] and they had all the manga there,” Arrow [they/them, transmasc nonbinary, 31,
white, U.S.] recalled.) When relying on these mass-market options, however, informants’
consumption of Japanese media was limited to what the TV stations, bookstores, and
libraries chose to carry. When informants gained access to the Internet, they had more
control over what they watched and read and were better able to find shows and comics
that featured the androgyny, gender bending, and LGBTQIA+ themes that they sought
out. They also gained access to communities of fans (and often, of LGBTQIA+ people, as
discussed below) who could recommend more content tailored to their interests. U.S.
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informant Six (they/she, genderqueer, 25, white, U.S.) attributed their “explosion” of
interest in Japanese anime not only to a boom in popularity among their peers but “also,
having unwatched Internet access as a small child, right. Really, seeing the fandom
around that.” Fortune (she/her, transgender woman, 25, white, U.S.) said that while she
had encountered anime as a young child, it was “largely not accessible to me” due to her
parents’ disapproval; however, that changed “when I like, had access to YouTube.”
Internet access enabled U.S. informants to dodge parental restrictions on their media
consumption and to elude censorship by watching the original versions of anime, like
Sailor Moon, that had been heavily edited for U.S. broadcast television.
The Internet was a critical component for expanding informants’ access to both
transnational media and also media with LGBTQIA+ themes. U.S. informants said that
the availability of both Japanese media and LGBTQIA+ media was limited in the U.S.
mass market when they were young and described newfound access when they were able
to get online. TK (they/them, non-binary, 30, white, U.S.) said,
I can pick what I consume. I can choose. I have the Internet, I have blogs
with recommendations, I have friends— That’s the other thing, I didn’t
have many friends who were into these things growing up. I just had like
Tumblr at a certain point, and like God, I was on 4chan. […] Growing up
in a small rural place I didn’t have much access to it, whereas now it’s, it’s
everywhere, and you can talk to any person and they’ll be like oh yeah, I
love this, I love that.
When TK described this shift in their consumption, we were discussing their impression
that Japanese media was featuring more and better representations of trans and gender
non-conforming people. TK was hesitant to declare that this was an overall trend,
suggesting that it might be their own “biased view” because they chose to watch genderbending media. This context suggests a double meaning when TK says they “didn’t have
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many friends who were into these things” and “didn’t have much access to it,” where
“these things” and “it” can refer both to Japanese media and to gender-bending media.
Reading the above quote in this way suggests that for TK, the Internet was an important
venue for both transnational and LGBTQIA+ discovery. Both transnational media and
LGBTQIA+ media were outside of the mainstream, and TK had only limited access to
this content in the “small rural place” where they grew up. Gaining access to the Internet
enabled TK to reach beyond the media representations available in U.S. mass media and
to curate their own media diet of Japanese media and gender-bending content. The
intersections between U.S. anime fan communities, LGBTQIA+ communities, and the
Internet will be discussed further below.
Japanese informants also said that the Internet had enabled them to access more
transnational and LGBTQIA+ content. When asked how they accessed U.S. and other
non-Japanese media, all but three Japanese informants said that they used the Internet. Of
the three who did not, 理恵 (Rie; she/her; woman, transgender, new-half [ニューハーフ,
nyūhāfu]; 65; Japanese; Japan) was 65 years old and mostly talked about seeing U.S.
shows broadcast on Japanese TV; Mai (she/her; AMAB, woman; 24; Japanese; Japan)
said that she did use the Internet to search for information related to gender identity, but
watched movies in theaters; and 竹 (Take; they/them; everything out there, pangender;
35; Japanese; Japan) lived in the U.S. and had ready access to U.S. media. Japanese
informant QQ (he/him, genderfluid, 26, Japanese, Japan) said that these days, “because of
the Internet, a lot of things are available” in Japan, and “compared to like ten years ago
it’s super convenient.” My interview with QQ took place in 2022, 11 years after the
Japanese launch of Hulu. Before that time, QQ said, he used to “visit America, go to like,
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Target or like those kind of places, or, or Amazon and just get like the DVD boxes and
Blu-Rays, and just you know buy the bundles and just you know, take them home.” The
proliferation of U.S. streaming services in the Japanese market made U.S. media much
more widely and easily accessible. Hulu launched in Japan in 2011 (Lawler, 2014),
followed by Netflix in 2015 (Spangler, 2015), Amazon Prime Video in 2016
(Gruenwedel, 2021), and Disney+ in 2020 (King, 2021). These streaming services were
all mentioned by Japanese informants as points of access to U.S. and other non-Japanese
media.
However, availability of media in Japan generally did not always translate into
access for my informants. Several Japanese informants said that their media access was
limited by their parents or guardians. Mai said, “When I was young, I couldn’t pick and
choose information myself […] While in elementary school, my parents were intervening
in information access, but after that, I was able to explore.” Once Mai’s parents allowed
her to have more control over her media choices, she “started going to movies by myself
or using social media,” and this meant greater access to information about and
representations of gender. Many Japanese informants said that receiving their first
smartphone was a turning point in their media access and also their own gender journey.
Out of 23 Japanese informants, 11 explicitly connected the discovery of their noncisgender identity to Internet access; Mai, Sakura Miyajima (she/her; woman, specifically
a trans woman; 26; Japanese; Japan), Luna (they/them, nonbinary, 26, ethnicity not
reported, Japan), Jin (they/them; nonbinary, transmasculine; 21; Japanese; Japan), Uzura
(they/them, nonbinary and genderfluid, 29, Japanese, Japan), 山川くぬぎ
(YAMAKAWA Kunugi; they/them; nonbinary and agender; 40; Japanese, East Asian;
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Japan), けい (Kei, no pronouns, transfeminine, 20, Japanese, Japan), 雨木 (Ameki;
they/them; x-gender, queer, and genderfluid; 25; Japanese; Japan), とわ (Towa,
they/them, no gender, 37, Japanese, Japan), A (he/him, transgender man, 32, Japanese,
Japan), and Kai (he/they; transgender FTM or FTX, but closer to FTM; 23; Japanese;
Japan) all said that either Internet searches or social media discourse were the vectors by
which they arrived at their gender identities. But this Internet-based exploration of gender
identity was predicated on informants’ ability to access the Internet without restrictions
and in ways that felt safe, comfortable, or private for them.
One informant, Kai, said that his Internet and media access had been heavily
censored while he was growing up, and that these restrictions kept him from learning
about his transgender identity until he went to college. Although his parents gradually
eased their restrictions over time, eventually giving him a smartphone when he went to
high school, his attempts to research LGBTQIA+ identities, access LGBTQIA+-related
media, or connect with LGBTQIA+ people on the Internet were stymied by content
filters. Kai tried searching with different keywords as he learned them, such as sekumai,
the Japanese term for “sexual minority,” but
It almost always was blocked by the filter […] all results related to lesbian
were blocked. I was wondering why, but now I know that all the top
search results for “lesbian” are adult videos in Japan. So the filter must
have thought that I was looking for adult contents.
Because terms related to LGBTQIA+ identities were categorized as adult content, Kai
was blocked from researching gender variance until he left for college, where, he said, “I
was able to search more broadly” and was “finally able to […] watch contents that I
wasn’t able to watch before, and really reflect on my identities.” For Kai, as for many
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Japanese informants, access to foreign media and access to information about gender
variance were linked. This access was facilitated by the Internet, but this meant that
restrictions on Internet access, such as those imposed on children by their parents, made it
more difficult for Japanese informants to work through their gender identities.
U.S. informants also mentioned parental restrictions on their media use. Fortune
(she/her, transgender woman, 25, white, U.S.), Clarissa (she/her, trans woman, 35, white,
U.S.), and Alois (he/they, nonbinary transmasculine, 27, white, U.S.) all said that their
parents either implicitly or explicitly disapproved of Japanese media, and that they either
couldn’t access Japanese media or had to hide their consumption from their families.
Alois, for example, said that he used to check out Japanese manga from his local library,
“but I wasn’t allowed to get it, so I got a backpack with two compartments um and I
would put the manga in the other compartment um and then I would hide it under my
pillow.” Several U.S. informants said that their parents considered Japanese media risqué
or too sexualized for their children. Alois said that his mom “kind of thought that, like, all
anime was like adult animation.” Just as, in Kai’s case, information about gender and
sexuality was classified as inappropriate and hidden by an Internet search filter, the
gender-bending manga that Alois said helped him to discover his trans identity were
considered inappropriate and forbidden by his parents. However, U.S. informants mostly
talked about restrictions in terms of circumventing them.
The U.S. informants I interviewed frequently talked about using the Internet to
access Japanese media through informal or illicit means, colloquially known as media
piracy. This was sometimes discussed as a means to access explicitly sexual content, like
the yaoi manga that Jules (they/them, genderfluid nonbinary trans person, 26, white,
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U.S.) read on their Nintendo DS “to avoid Internet search history. Because when I grew
up there was only the family computer.” Other times, piracy was presented as a way to
access content that was not officially available to a U.S. audience. Arrow (they/them,
transmasc nonbinary, 31, white, U.S.) said that if a show is “not streaming somewhere
because it’s too old or something else I’ll just pirate it, if I can.” TK said that they do
subscribe to legal streaming sites, but that occasionally the English subtitles are not
released at the same time as the show, so they will turn to illegal sites to avoid spoilers.
“I’m paying!” they said, “I’m paying for it but I’m going to still watch it on the illegal
site because they’ve got their high definition with the subtitles ready to go.” And for
some informants, illicit access was simply part of their media use. Ron Guy (they/them;
nonbinary/don’t subscribe to the idea of traditional gender; 29; Black, Latinx/o/a,
Indigenous; U.S.) said, “I watch a lot of stuff on Hulu. A lot of stuff on Netflix, a lot of
the original stuff and um— I watch on sketchy streaming sites sometimes too, to keep it
real with you. That’s how it is.” And in a humorous nod to the prevalence of media
piracy among U.S. fans of Japanese media, I had this exchange with Marcel (they/she;
feminine non-binary; 24; white, Latinx/o/a; U.S.):
Aiden: How do you access Japanese media?
Marcel: Um… in totally legal ways. [laughs]
Aiden: [laughing] I won’t tell anyone, that’s—that’s not what I’m here for.
Marcel: [still laughing]
Aiden: So you’re saying the Internet.
Marcel: Yeah. [still laughing]
For these informants, Internet access was central to their consumption of Japanese media.
Although many informants said that offline access to Japanese media in the U.S. had
increased during their lifetimes, as the libraries, bookstores, and video rental shops of
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their youth picked up on the 90s anime boom and began to carry more Japanese content,
the Internet had become by far their most common mode of access by 2022, when our
interviews took place. For both U.S. and Japanese informants, the Internet was a key site
of access to transnational media.
Discovering Gender Variance and Learning About One’s Identity
Both Japanese and U.S. informants pointed to the Internet as a place—often, the
place—where they discovered ideas about or terminology for gender variance, and where
they began to explore their own non-cisgender identities. While many U.S. informants
said that Japanese media texts had been the site of their first encounters with gender
variance, as discussed in Chapter 5, internet discourse and social media often played a
role in their processes of gender identification. Alys (she/her, agender trans woman, 25,
white, U.S.) said that she had been aware of transgender people in an “abstract sense”
while she was growing up, but it wasn’t until she “started using Twitter a lot” and “ended
up following a lot of trans women” that she began to imagine trans identification as a
possibility for herself. Blueberry (she/they, nonbinary, 41, white, U.S.) had a similar
reaction when a blogger she followed announced his transition. She said that was “the
first time that I’ve actually heard from someone who was transitioning, who was going
through this change. And, as I read a lot of his take on things, I realized his perspective
and my perspective were pretty damn similar.” Clarissa (she/her, trans woman, 35, white,
U.S.), who was 35 at the time of our interview, said,
I was the first generation of like, Internet people. So I’d spend a lot of time
online in forums and trans groups reading their blogs about how they’re
getting laser and how they have survived the year doing the real life test
before they can start hormone replacement therapy.
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For Clarissa, Blueberry, and Alys, the Internet was a place where they encountered
actually-existing trans people and began to see non-cisgender identity as a real possibility
for their own lives.
For Matt (he/him, trans and male, 24, Southeast Asian, U.S.) and Alois (he/they,
nonbinary transmasculine, 27, white, U.S.), the emphasis was on the discourse they
encountered online and how those discussions shaped their imagination of gender
possibilities. Both mentioned Tumblr as a site of gender discourse and a place where they
could work out their own gender identities. Alois said, “It wasn’t until I started using
Tumblr that I—which was when I was maybe 16 or 17—that, I guess, I learned that trans
people existed.” Alois was 27 at the time of our interview, and would have been 16 in
2011. Matt talked about the same era, saying that it was in the early 2010s when he
joined Tumblr and “learned about that stuff. And ‘that stuff’ being, you know, that there
were other trans identities out there. And I, slowly I started like warming up to the idea, it
was like— could that be me? Maybe?” Online discourses around gender identity exposed
Matt and Alois to new terminology, and from there to new ideas about what gender could
be.
While U.S. informants’ stories often followed a pattern in which they encountered
arresting representations of gender fluidity or gender variance in Japanese media and then
found community online with other LGBTQIA+ people, Japanese informants often
described their path running in the opposite direction. Most Japanese informants talked
about feeling different from their peers, searching the Internet for information about
gender variance, and then seeking out U.S. media representations of the gender identities
at which they had arrived. Japanese informants frequently said that their first encounters
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with the terms that now made up their gender identities happened online. Uzura
(they/them, nonbinary and genderfluid, 29, Japanese, Japan) “saw the word ‘genderfluid’
(ジェンダーフルイド, jendāfuruido) on Twitter at first.” 雨木 (Ameki, they/them; xgender, queer, and genderfluid; 25; Japanese; Japan) “arrived at the terms x-jendā (X ジ
ェンダー) and queer (クイア, kuia) through the Internet, mostly Twitter.” 山川くぬぎ
(YAMAKAWA Kunugi; they/them; nonbinary and agender; 40; Japanese, East Asian;
Japan) said that they first saw the term FTX on “a blog related to sociology somewhere”
and then “researched on SNS [i.e., social media]” 10 to learn more.
Researching gender online to understand more about their own identities was a
common theme among Japanese informants. Luna (they/them, nonbinary, 26, ethnicity
not reported, Japan) said, “I Googled so many times and then reached out some, some
resources that explain about the nonbinary, and I thought, oh, this must be me.” Mai
(she/her; AMAB, woman; 24; Japanese; Japan) and Jin (they/them; nonbinary,
transmasculine; 21; Japanese; Japan) had similar experiences: “When I was in junior high
school, I was able to access social media and internet in general. There, I learned about
transgender identity and lives, and started to think vaguely that I may be one of them”
(Mai). “As I researched on the internet and read fictions related to transgender, I started
to think that my gender might be different from what I had thought” (Jin). Sakura
Miyajima (she/her; woman, specifically a trans woman; 26; Japanese; Japan) said that
“English speaking trans communities online” exposed her to “more diverse forms of
transness,” and said that was “how I came to my idea as a trans woman.” It was after
In Japanese the term SNS, which stands for Social Networking Site(s) or Social Networking Service(s),
is used similarly to the term “social media” in English.
10
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these informants came to understand themselves as, for example, trans or nonbinary that
they began to seek out media representations of those identities.
The Internet provided access to new discourses around gender, and also opened
up new ways to participate in those discourses. U.S. informants said that they had more
freedom to experiment with gender and their own self-presentation in Internet spaces.
Alois said that after encountering the term “nonbinary,” he started using it for himself,
“especially like online, since that was like you know, since you could present yourself
however you wanted.” For Alois, as for other trans people (Baldwin, 2018), the largely
anonymous space of the Internet—where it was possible to communicate without
revealing one’s physical body or using one’s voice—lent itself to gender exploration and
experimentation. Blueberry had a similar experience. At 41, Blueberry, who identifies as
nonbinary, was my oldest U.S.-based informant. She recognized that the Internet was
evolving, and that increased use of voice and video communication had reduced some of
the “freedom of going on to the Internet,” but she fondly recalled the “completely
different reception” that she got when she “would go into AOL chat and I had screen
names where I would go on and be a guy instead of a girl.” Without the expectation to
reveal one’s voice or face, “you can be whoever you want to be on the Internet,” she said.
Internet Access Connecting Marginalized Communities
Japanese informants did not mention online anonymity or gender
experimentation, but did talk about using SNS (an equivalent term to “social media” in
English) to connect with queer and trans communities. They talked about using services
like Twitter or Instagram, blogging sites, and YouTube to try to find other people like
them. Yu Sakamoto (no pronouns; gender nonbinary; 26; Japanese, East Asian,
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Taiwanese; Japan) searched for coming out videos on YouTube, and S (they/them; no
thoughts about gender, nonbinary; 23; Japanese; Japan), Jin (they/them; nonbinary,
transmasculine; 21; Japanese; Japan), Sora (they/them; agender, more broadly, nonbinary
and transgender; 21; Japanese; Japan), and QQ (he/him, genderfluid, 26, Japanese, Japan)
looked for YouTube videos by trans, queer, nonbinary, or non-cisgender creators. A
(he/him, transgender man, 32, Japanese, Japan) said that he “tried to find people similar
to me on various blogs and Mixi,” a Japanese social networking platform. Sora said that
they are “openly nonbinary [ノンバイナリー, nonbainarī] and asexual [A セクシャル,
a-sekusharu]” on Twitter and that they use the platform to “communicate with other
people like me.”
Few Japanese informants talked about offline connections with other noncisgender people; the majority used the Internet to make those connections. While, again,
no Japanese informants explicitly connected Internet-based communication to anonymity,
Kuwai (they/she, demigender and questioning, 20, Japanese, Japan) did say that they used
SNS to meet people in part “because I am closeted; I am in the closet about my gender
identity.” “I rarely meet people in person these days,” they said. Though some Japanese
informants said that they had little connection to the larger LGBTQIA+ community—と
わ (Towa, they/them, no gender, 37, Japanese, Japan), for example, said that because
they had not faced hardships related to gender identity, “I haven’t been able to share that
sadness, and I don’t feel the need to”—for many, talking with other non-cisgender people
on SNS had been transformative. Uzura (they/them, nonbinary and genderfluid, 29,
Japanese, Japan) said that having nonbinary and x-jendā friends “was a huge moral
support, and they helped me accept the concept of nonbinary (ノンバイナリー,
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nonbainarī).” For many Japanese informants, the Internet was instrumental in connecting
them with similarly-identified people.
Japanese informants also talked about Internet-based communities around the
media they enjoyed, particularly foreign media and media featuring LGBTQIA+
identities. As discussed above, the Internet and streaming media were how the majority
of Japanese informants accessed U.S. and other foreign media; as detailed in Chapter 6,
the Japanese informants in this study sought out U.S. and Anglophone media because
they far preferred its representations of gender and sexuality to those in Japanese media.
The Internet, therefore, was a means of access to both U.S. media and U.S. ideas about
gender. Japanese informants talked about using SNS to find not only other people who
shared their identities, but also people who shared their political and theoretical ideas
about gender. Kuwai (they/she, demigender and questioning, 20, Japanese, Japan) used
SNS to connect with media fans who shared their feminist ideals and performed queer
readings of entertainment media. 雨木 (Ameki; they/them; x-gender, queer, and
genderfluid; 25; Japanese; Japan) followed “feminists and queer people” on Twitter and
got media recommendations from those feeds. 山川くぬぎ (YAMAKAWA Kunugi,
they/them; nonbinary and agender; 40; Japanese, East Asian; Japan) traced their first
encounter with the word nonbinary (ノンバイナリー, nonbainarī), which was how they
described their own gender, to “some movie-related SNS communities on the Internet.”
In media fan communities, Japanese informants could connect with like-minded folks and
also find out about other media texts that they might enjoy. Many Japanese informants
said that the primary way they found new content to watch was through
recommendations from online friends and communities.
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For U.S. informants, the Internet facilitated communication and, thus, community
for two intersecting groups: U.S. fans of Japanese media, and LGBTQIA+ people. There
was a broad consensus among U.S.-based informants that queer spaces and Japanese
media fan spaces intersect. This was often expressed implicitly, as when informants
offhandedly mentioned that the fan spaces they frequented were full of queer people (or
vice versa), or suggested either anime message boards or LGBTQIA+ community spaces
as good venues for me to recruit more participants for this study. However, many
informants also spoke explicitly about the connections they saw between the LGBTQIA+
community and Japanese media fandom. Alex Rowan (they/she; a person first,
biologically female sex organs, not a boy or girl; 36; white, Japanese; U.S.) called the
“transgression” in anime and manga “sort of like natural catnip to like you know
someone like on a— On a, you know, not um. You know, not cisgender whatever.” Alex
said that in anime circles, they encountered “very like all sorts of, of like LGBTQ kinds
of people, and like you know I’m like oh, okay, these are my kind of weirdos too.”
Fortune (she/her, transgender woman, 25, white, U.S.) pointed to “similar media
preferences” among trans people—“some trans people have never heard of Neon Genesis
Evangelion, but a lot have”—and identified a larger pattern of allies “sympathetic, in
every way” to trans issues among fans of Japanese media. This suggests both thematic
interests shared by trans folks that are satisfied by Japanese media texts and also a culture
of acceptance that thrives in Japanese media fan spaces.
For U.S. informants, the common thread connecting queerness and Japanese
media fandom was marginalization. Members of both communities were outliers and
outcasts in larger U.S. society, but the Internet enabled them to connect with like-minded
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people. Falafel (they/them, non-binary, 30, white, U.S.) said that their favorite piece of
Japanese media, video game Kingdom Hearts—a crossover franchise incorporating
characters from Disney movies and from the Japanese Final Fantasy video game series—
was a place where they felt comfortable and included. Falafel said that they and their
“LGBTQIA plus” friends “always felt like we were— Not necessarily like outsiders, but
like we didn’t really fit anywhere but like video games, in particular like Kingdom
Hearts.” Six (they/she, genderqueer, 25, white, U.S.) also spoke about the connection
between queerness and Japanese media fandom, describing both as a form of “otherness.”
They said that Japanese media fan spaces “tend to be more inherently queer or queer
aware” and ascribed this to a shared social position of marginality. As Six explained,
when you have that otherness, even if you’re not necessarily queer, that is
a queerness within itself, right. So— I think that that opens up to, even if
you’re not necessarily queer yourself, you’re gonna find people who are
also other in another way, right, and you have to be— able and willing to
understand and coexist, if not love these people to stay in that kind of
space, or you’re gonna— kkrt [points thumb backwards over shoulder] get
the boot pretty quickly, right.
For Six, the “willing[ness] to understand and coexist” with those who share “that
otherness” stemmed from the need for marginalized communities to band together.
Within the already-othered community of anime and manga fans, being intolerant of
queerness would lead to “the boot” and, thus, to further ostracization.
U.S. informants said that the Internet was integral to this building of communities
of marginalization. Margo Vintner (she/her, fey/fem; genderqueer trans woman, both a
dyke and a faggot, bigender; 29; white; U.S.) saw slash fiction—a largely online fan
practice and surrounding community that is certainly not confined to Japanese media
fandom (Jenkins, 2012) but is also certainly practiced by Japanese media fans
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(Hemmann, 2020)—as a fluid space where gender was being negotiated. Slash fiction is a
practice in which media fans write fictional narratives that place characters who are not
presented as queer in the original text into queer relationships. Margo said that she and
others had been transformed by online slash spaces, and that the slash fiction “scene” had
played a role in her own process of gender discovery. For Margo, the fact that these
communities were located online but were also broadly accessible was key to their
transformative power. She said that the “largely anonymous” space of online fanfiction,
with its “low barrier of entry”—“If you absolutely must, you can write gay fanfiction on
a library computer”—welcomed the kind of “gender play” for which participants might
not have an outlet in their everyday lives. “Because they are virtual, because they have a
low barrier of entry, because they are largely anonymous, they serve as these spaces for
gender play and gender communication,” Margo said.
U.S. informants talked about the Internet as key to processes of communication,
connection, and cross-cultural influence that were entwined with queer and trans
identification. On the interest survey that I used to recruit participants for this study,
when I asked why they were interested in being interviewed, Alex Rowan (they/she; a
person first, biologically female sex organs, not a boy or girl; 36; white, Japanese; U.S.)
wrote, “I’ve noticed myself there seems to be an affinity between this form of media and
many lgbtq people and I’m happy someone is exploring that in academia.” During the
interview, I asked Alex when they first noticed this affinity. “Like basically as soon as I
sort of like got online like in the late 90s,” they replied. Alex talked about using the
Internet to find “fan subs of, of like things that you couldn’t get, like you know it wasn’t,
hadn’t been distributed,” and encountering other LGBTQ Japanese media fans as part of
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the search process. Musing about what they said were slow but positive changes in
gender representation in Japanese media, Six said, “I wonder how much of it is access to
the Internet and access to like, us as queer folks being able to speak to each other more
freely across, you know, language barriers and across cultural barriers.” Fortune (she/her,
transgender woman, 25, white, U.S.) had similar thoughts, suggesting that the Internet
itself was the connecting factor that brought U.S. anime fan communities and queer and
trans communities together. “The anime community seems to be like one of the first
communities to take true advantage of the Internet,” she explained, “And to me, being,
being queer or be— having like the resources and the knowledge to transition or even
really hear much about it would not have been possible without the Internet.” Here,
Fortune posits that the Internet is not only a meeting place for trans people and U.S.
anime fans, but that it is in fact the lynchpin that allows those communities to exist.
Both Japanese media texts and information about gender variance were relatively
inaccessible to people in the U.S. before widespread Internet use became normative in
U.S. society. Before the Internet became widely available, members of these two
communities—U.S. anime fans and queer and trans folks—could seek each other out at
in-person conventions, fan club meetings, or support groups, but these in-person groups
carried greater risks of social consequences if individuals were identified with the larger
community. The Internet allowed for safer, more anonymous connections with a much
greater number of community members, which in turn enabled information-sharing
around techniques for accessing both Japanese media texts and gender transition
resources. Previous studies of transgender people’s identity formation and transition
processes have called “the internet revolution of the 1990s” the “most significant
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technological transformation for transgender individuals and communities to date”
(Cavalcante, 2016, p. 113). As Fortune put it, “I think the intersectionality here is, like,
communities born out of the Internet.” In short, the Internet was the key technology that
enabled both Japanese media fandom and queer and trans communities to thrive.
Global Marketplace of Gender: Exchanging Cultural Ideas Around Gender
Variance
For both U.S. and Japanese informants, the Internet served as a global
marketplace in which cultural ideas about gender variance could be exchanged over long
distances. Processes of exchange facilitated by the Internet included access to
transcultural media texts, which represented gender and gender variance in ways that
were unfamiliar to informants; connecting to communities of like-minded people,
including gender-variant folks, as well as fan communities around transnational media;
and learning terminology or theoretical schemas for gender variance that originated
outside informants’ local cultural context. Both U.S. and Japanese informants used the
Internet to access transnational media texts and to participate in discourses about gender
with like-minded people. U.S. informants talked more about fan communities and
practices surrounding Japanese media consumption, whereas Japanese informants talked
more about learning terminology that originated in the Anglophone world and accessing
theoretical material about gender, such as academic articles or books originally written in
English. Both groups described the Internet as an information resource for people who
feel out of step with the gender norms of their own societies.
The Internet was a connecting force for both transnational media exchange and
also negotiation of gender-variant identities. As Fortune (she/her, transgender woman, 25,
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white, U.S.) said, the “resources and the knowledge to transition or even really hear much
about it” were most prolific and easiest to access on the Internet. And for Yu Sakamoto
(no pronouns; gender nonbinary; 26; Japanese, East Asian, Taiwanese; Japan), terms
related to marginalized gender, sexual, or romantic identities, like “x-gender or agender
or like ace [asexual], ace and aro [aromantic],” are largely an online phenomenon for
Japanese people. Yu said, “these terms kind of started from on Twitter, rather than the
human to human kind of. You don’t hear that often from people, but from Twitter.” Both
discourses around and self-identification as gender or sexual minorities are taking place
online, Yu said, rather than in person. The Internet was also a major avenue for accessing
transnational media. While both U.S. and Japanese informants had access to some
transnational media through local broadcasts, rental shops, or libraries, the Internet and
streaming media vastly increased the volume and variety of transnational media available
to them. This meant that informants were better able to curate their own transnational
media diets, better able to both seek and follow up on media recommendations from
trusted and like-minded people, and better able to find and consume LGBTQIA+-related
media.
Globalization makes distant media, people, and ideas feel ever more proximate as
technological advances and economic forces facilitate processes of exchange that happen
faster and reach farther. Social media and SNS cross both distances and language
boundaries; on Twitter, for example, Japanese and English speakers coexist and interact,
though as Yu, S (they/them; no thoughts about gender, nonbinary; 23; Japanese; Japan),
Luna (they/them, nonbinary, 26, ethnicity not reported, Japan), Sora (they/them; agender,
more broadly, nonbinary and transgender; 21; Japanese; Japan), Kuwai (they/she,
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demigender and questioning, 20, Japanese, Japan), and Sakura Miyajima (she/her;
woman, specifically a trans woman; 26; Japanese; Japan) all pointed out, limited English
proficiency presented a barrier for Japanese people trying to participate in transnational
discourses around gender, identity, and media representation. The proliferation of digital
and streaming media, including the international expansion of U.S.-based services like
Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video, increased access to global media. Streaming
transformed the media production ecology, leading to increased production of media
targeting minority identities and audiences, including LGBTQIA+ content. The growth of
Internet sites such as YouTube also facilitated both LGBTQIA+ content creation and
transnational media exchange. Digital media makes minority content proximate and
accessible, enabling the formation of communities and the popularization of once-niche
media and ideas. As people who once felt like outcasts or outliers, out of step with their
societies, find each other and exchange media and ideas transnationally, both theories
around and lived experiences of gender are being globalized.
In this chapter, I have discussed the role of the Internet and streaming media in
the globalization of gender. My informants pointed to the Internet as a key site where
they accessed transcultural media, with its attendant images of gender hailing from
culturally distant locations, and also where they encountered global discourses around
gender variance. Both U.S. and Japanese informants said that encountering transcultural
media had changed their ideas about gender, and the site where they most often had these
encounters was the Internet. The ability to connect online with other people whose gender
identity or expression was marginalized within their own societies helped informants to
feel more supported, creating a community among outcasts, and also gave them access to
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information about gender variance and gender transition that they had not encountered
elsewhere. In other words, the Internet was a site where informants exchanged resources
transculturally and imagined new gender possibilities. In the next chapter, I synthesize
the findings discussed in Chapters 5, 6, and 7 and discuss my informants’ use of
transcultural media to generate imaginative resources: the images and ideas, most often
transmitted through media, that people use to (re)imagine themselves and their societies.
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CHAPTER 8
IMAGINATIVE RESOURCES
I think that seeing representation of, of a variety of people can really help
people determine more things about their identities. It’s not limited to
transgender people or queer people. I think that all people can find
characters that they really see themselves in and really relate to, and
sometimes seeing these characters go on and do something might inspire
them. In the case of transgender people and queer people, it might be
going forward and living their genuine lives.
(Marcel; they/she; feminine non-binary; 24; white, Latinx/o/a; U.S.)
In this chapter, I confirm that for my informants—as has long been established in
media, communication, and feminist theories—media function as imaginative resources
(Appadurai, 1996; Liechty, 2006), providing sparks that catalyze change and opening up
possibility spaces for audiences. By using the term “resources,” I emphasize not only the
use-value of media, but also their potential to be imported, exported, and exchanged,
especially across long distances and through global channels. I also underline the
consequences of a lack of resources. For my informants, limited access to media—
whether it was entertainment media, communication platforms, or repositories of
information—limited their ability to discover, understand, or enact their non-cisgender
identities.
Transnational texts serve an important imaginative function because the
representations they provide are decontextualized when consumed outside of their
locality of origin, and this allows for more expansive reinterpretation of these images.
While recognizing the importance of textual analysis, this study has shown that we must
also consider the social positioning and cultural context of audiences, because texts mean
different things and are used in different ways by transnational audiences. In this chapter
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I argue that deterritorialization enables greater polysemy, which produces more
imaginative resources for audiences relative to locally-produced texts. Although my
informants spoke often about seeking out more “positive” representations of trans and
gender-diverse people in transnational media, I argue that the value of representation lies
in access to a greater diversity of images, not in categorizing these images as “good” or
“bad.” As Cáel Keegan (2022) has shown, so-called “bad” texts can provide greater
opportunities for reimagining gender and breaking with hegemonic cisheteronormativity.
As my study demonstrates, transnational audiences are better able to extract imaginative
resources from texts that are dismissed as “bad” representation by local audiences. In
short, what matters about representation is less the specific qualities of any individual
text, and more the ability to access a broad diversity of texts and representations—
especially those that, due to the cultural distance between the points of production and
reception, open space for audiences to reimagine the status quo and challenge hegemony.
Traveling Texts, Imaginative Resources: Negotiating Non-Cisgender Identities
Through Transnational Media Representations
Trans and feminist media studies have long established that people use media to
negotiate their gender identity and expression (Cavalcante, 2018; Darling-Wolf, 2004a,
2004b, 2004c, 2006; Kornfield, 2011; Lilja & Wasshede, 2016; Martin, 2012;
Parameswaran, 2002b). Media representations, alongside family relationships and social
connections, are a major vector by which people learn about gender and gender roles,
encounter gender possibilities previously unknown to them, and begin to question, test, or
reimagine their own genders. For transgender, gender diverse, non-cisgender, and gender
non-conforming people, relationships to media representations of gender become even
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more complex. People who do not conform to the normative gender standards of their
society not only have fewer media representations to draw from that reflect their own
gender identity or gendered social position, but are also inundated with media
representations that replicate and reinforce cisheteronormativity.
Negotiating a gender identification that is outside of the mainstream calls for
creativity and ingenuity. Non-cisgender people have to be more proactive about seeking
imaginative resources to negotiate their gender identities, since fewer of the available
representations fit. Both U.S. and Japanese informants in this study described the media
environment as a space where they could test out different possibilities and think deeply
about gender, identity, and society, as well as a space of solidarity, where they could find
community and support. Media was “a way to escape” from struggles with gender and
sexuality (けい [Kei], no pronouns, transfeminine, 20, Japanese, Japan), and seeing
diverse characters in media gave informants “examples of like, here’s something I could
try, or here is something that reflects back, like, how I see myself acting in the world as a
person” (Jake; he/they; nonbinary and transmasculine, an effeminate guy and also kind of
a dyke; 27; white; U.S.). Many informants said that they “started learning about gender
and such through entertainment [media]” (Kuwai, they/she, demigender and questioning,
20, Japanese, Japan) and that media representations of gender diversity “helped me
realize my identity” (Jin; they/them; nonbinary, transmasculine; 21; Japanese; Japan). On
the whole, media texts played an important role in gender discovery for my informants.
Some informants drew from media examples that gave them comfort or
affirmation, like Luna (they/them, nonbinary, 26, ethnicity not reported, Japan), who said
they started reading and watching Boys’ Love (BL) media “to accept my queer identity
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[…] I know, like there are many, many parts that are not realistic, but still I’m, I can
affirm my, my queerness through that.” Others used media to gauge their own position
within their society, to work out how they should act or how they wanted to interface
socially, or to judge the distance between their own ideas about gender and the
mainstream. Informants used media representations of gender diversity “to judge how
people may think about someone like me” (とわ [Towa], they/them, no gender, 37,
Japanese, Japan). Some participated in the “fluid space” of media fan communities
“where you can get feedback and participate with other people in these discourses of
gayness that allow you to imagine any number of things” (Margo Vintner; she/her,
fey/fem; genderqueer trans woman, both a dyke and a faggot, bigender; 29; white; U.S.).
Media and its surrounding discourses have long been established as spaces where gender
is being worked out and worked on, but the stakes were particularly high for my
informants as queer, trans, nonbinary, or gender-diverse people. They described both a
conscious reliance on media as a source of information on gender diversity, gender
possibilities, and gendered social positions, and a narrow field of available media
representations that resonated with them. In a mediascape in which informants felt
alienated by and thus turned away from the majority of available texts due to pervasive,
hegemonic cisheteronormativity, finding texts with which they could connect took on
greater meaning.
The Importance of Transcultural Media to Transgender and Gender-Diverse People
Transcultural media played an important role in my informants’ processes of
gender negotiation, and was a key source of imaginative resources that helped them
discover, tease out, or come to terms with their own non-cisgender identities. Throughout
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my interviews, both U.S. and Japanese informants described a sense of alienation from
their local, mainstream media. As discussed in Chapter 5, U.S. informants found images
of queerness, gender transgression, fluidity, and androgyny in Japanese media that they
did not see in contemporaneous U.S. media; while U.S. media endlessly replicated
stereotypes of “a man saving a woman and a man saving a woman and a man saving a
woman” (Blueberry, she/they, nonbinary, 41, white, U.S.), informants said that Japanese
media, by contrast, offered multiple masculinities and femininities, and presented crossdressing and gender transgression in accepting, matter-of-fact ways. However, as detailed
in Chapter 6, Japanese informants actively avoided what they called “stereotypical” (S;
they/them; no thoughts about gender, nonbinary; 23; Japanese; Japan), “cringe-worthy”
(Saba, they/them, gender non-conforming, 26, Japanese, Japan), and “sensational” (A,
he/him, transgender man, 32, Japanese, Japan) representations in Japanese media that
made transgender and gender variant identities “the butt of the joke” (Sora; they/them;
agender, more broadly, nonbinary and transgender; 21; Japanese; Japan). Japanese
informants turned instead to U.S. media, where they said they saw queer and trans
characters “depicted naturally” (とわ [Towa], they/them, no gender, 37, Japanese, Japan)
and treated with respect. U.S. and Japanese informants’ experiences of the same media
texts were markedly different; for instance, while many U.S. informants remembered
Japanese anime Sailor Moon as an iconic queer text, Japanese informants dismissed it as
just another piece of mainstream media.
My informants sought out transcultural media because they said it provided
resources that they could not find in local media. Foreign media was important to them
because it disrupted the status quo, generating new imaginative possibilities through
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difference. Foreign media was a way of “learning about queer history in other places”
(Jules, they/them, genderfluid nonbinary trans person, 26, white, U.S.) and challenging
gender norms. Transcultural media helped Japanese informant A to recognize gender
inequality in Japanese society. “Through foreign media, I think about those things a lot,”
he said. “Then, I’d often talk with other friends that care about these topics using media
as example.” The cultural distance between foreign media and transcultural audiences
was a catalyst for questioning cisheteronormative hegemony. As Jake (he/they; nonbinary
and transmasculine, an effeminate guy and also kind of a dyke; 27; white; U.S.)
explained,
seeing what is considered, like, worthy of outcry that isn’t considered like,
um— in the culture I grew up in, being like, as quite a situation, um, does
definitely kind of call into, like— um just how, how changeable, um,
different societal ways that people present can be.
Through their own close reading and analysis of transcultural media texts, informants
were inspired to think differently about gender roles, imagining possibilities other than
what was normative in their own culture. Diversity of representation was key; informants
said that “seeing representation of, of a variety of people can really help people determine
more things about their identities” (Marcel; they/she; feminine non-binary; 24; white,
Latinx/o/a; U.S.) and “interacting with media, such as books, movies, or anything else,
helps me realize and check what I see outside and inside” (Uzura, they/them, nonbinary
and genderfluid, 29, Japanese, Japan). Foreign media’s disruption of gender roles was
“freeing” (Jules). Kai (he/they; transgender FTM or FTX, but closer to FTM; 23;
Japanese; Japan) said that he was looking for a role model, “and having foreign media
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means I have many times more choices for that. […] Perhaps I’m looking for somewhere
to belong, like a shelter.”
When I asked informants whether seeing representations of gender from other
countries changed how they thought about gender, the answer was a resounding yes.
Some said that encounters with transcultural media had directly affected their
understanding of their own gender, leading them to question, renegotiate, or discover
their non-cisgender identity. Others said that foreign media had caused them to think
differently about “the concept of gender” itself (Mimi; it/its, she/her; nonbinary, pseudo
trans femme, neutrois or agender; 29; East Asian, Japanese, Ryūkyūan; U.S.). Jin
(they/them; nonbinary, transmasculine; 21; Japanese; Japan) said, “I’m not sure if it
changed, but I started to make sense of what was always in my heart, that never really felt
right.” Many informants had strong emotional connections to the transcultural media
texts that spurred their reevaluation of gender. Kai said, “Having media from overseas
helps me have that room to think, and it makes me thankful that there are people like this
outside of here. In that sense, foreign media and representations are saving me in many
ways.” Informants described finding transcultural representations of gender that
resonated with them after years of feeling alienated by local media’s reproduction of the
status quo. Access to foreign media was a relief, because “you know at least, you know,
you don’t feel alone” (QQ, he/him, genderfluid, 26, Japanese, Japan).
Often, foreign media provided the initial spark that helped both Japanese and U.S.
informants imagine new gender possibilities for themselves. For U.S. informants, as
discussed in Chapter 5, this most often happened when they saw characters in Japanese
media who were “doing gender” (West & Zimmerman, 1987) differently than what they
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saw in U.S. media and society. As Fortune (she/her, transgender woman, 25, white, U.S.)
said, “gender roles vary across like, from country to country and seeing like, how—
seeing how someone can be defined as trans in a different country […] allows me to like
explore my gender a little more.” For Japanese informants, as discussed in Chapter 6, the
initial spark was most often Anglo-American terminology or frameworks for gender
variance that they encountered through social media or SNS, after which they sought out
Anglo-American media representations to affirm their newly-labeled non-cisgender
identities. In both cases, transnational media provided imaginative resources that were
lacking in informants’ local society and media environment.
In any society, those who are at the periphery—whether in terms of gender, or any
other marginalized identity—are under-resourced compared to those whose identities are
closer to the center. People whose gender identities reflect the local mainstream and who
conform to societal expectations about their assigned gender enjoy an abundance of
media representations through which they can feel affirmed and supported, and negotiate
their own identities within an environment of plenty. Non-cisgender people, by contrast,
have few examples from which to draw. Because of their marginal position in their own
societies, non-cisgender informants in both the United States and in Japan looked to
media from outside of their local environments to find imaginative resources for gender
identity formation.
Transcultural media provided imaginative resources for both U.S. and Japanese
informants not in spite of, but because of the dissociation between the context of
production and the context of reception. As Morrigan (they/them; queer trans
nonbinary/agender; 29; white, Hispanic; U.S.) put it, “I think one of the benefits of it
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[globalization] is, getting to see gender representation from different countries also
allows you to know that the way we often talk about gender in the United States is not the
only way to talk about gender.” Japanese informants, for their part, felt affirmed and
encouraged by U.S. media texts, which openly labeled transgender and nonbinary
identities and displayed an overt political consciousness around diversity that they could
not find in Japanese media. For informants in both the U.S. and Japan, cultural distance
was an important resource for gender renegotiation, first because culturally different
representations of gender provided more variety and diversity than what was available in
local media markets, and second because the global audience’s lack of cultural context
made it easier to find useful resources in media texts.
Cultural distance made media representations more polysemic, opening space for
interpretation where meaning would otherwise have been fixed. For example, TK
(they/them, non-binary, 30, white, U.S.) said that the clothing worn by Japanese anime
characters sparked their re-evaluation of gender roles, but acknowledged that “part of it,
too, I think, was my cultural ignorance, like I didn’t understand that a yukata was
something that men wore as well as women. So then it’s like, wow, there’s boys in
dresses! I love this!” When informants didn’t have the full cultural context, they felt more
freedom to reinterpret media texts and to allow those texts to challenge their own cultural
expectations. Jake compared watching foreign-language media to attending synagogue
and listening to prayers being sung in a language he did not understand. “There is
something about um kind of knowing that I don’t have the full context that is a little bit
freeing for me,” he explained. Often, “viewing as the outsider” (山川くぬぎ
[YAMAKAWA Kunugi]; they/them; nonbinary and agender; 40; Japanese, East Asian;
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Japan) was a major draw for informants consuming transcultural media. The difference
between outsider and insider reception can help explain the gulf between Japanese and
U.S. audiences’ experiences of the same texts. For instance, the U.S. informants who
hailed Sailor Moon as a breakthrough queer and gender-bending text experienced it
outside the context of mainstream Japanese media and its highly segmented marketing
machine. For Japanese informants, the queer possibilities of the text were dampened by
recognition of culturally normative gender tropes, which made the text feel more
stereotypical and less subversive, and by the text’s positioning within the shōjo genre of
media marketed towards young girls. Japanese audiences’ culturally proximate
positioning made it easier to dismiss Sailor Moon as a mainstream, non-transgressive
text.
Cultural distance also allowed global audiences to dismiss stereotypical or
problematic aspects of the transcultural texts they enjoyed. They compartmentalized
undesirable aspects as part of a distant, foreign culture while continuing to enjoy,
appreciate, and make use of other aspects which they found innovative, transgressive, or
pleasurable. Alois (he/they, nonbinary transmasculine, 27, white, U.S.) addressed this
directly when he explained that he was able to dismiss “Loli [Lolita] characters” and
hyper-sexualized young women in anime because “I’m also kind of like at a removed
distance, because it is something that another country is producing.” The distance
between himself as a consumer and the culture of Japanese media production allowed
Alois to enjoy anime and manga and draw from their representations of “very soft men”
as he negotiated his own transmasculine identity, while compartmentalizing sexist
representations of women as “probably saying something about people in the anime
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industry […] But like I said that’s not, that’s not the hill I’m prepared to die on. I just
kind of like look at it like, I’m like— None of my business today.” Japanese informants,
on the other hand, often said that they were so disgusted with Japanese media
representations of gender that they refused to engage with any Japanese media. S
(they/them; no thoughts about gender, nonbinary; 23; Japanese; Japan) called Japanese
television “toxic,” but explained that the context in which they experienced television
was part of the problem. In their house, S said, the television was in a shared family
space, and their family’s conversations while watching TV perpetuated and reinforced the
“very cis and hetero-centric” attitudes embedded in the programs. For S, the wider
Japanese social context—personified in their parents’ and siblings’ TV-watching
commentary—was “mixed up” with their television viewing, and the two could not be
separated. This had led S to turn away from Japanese television completely; they did not
own a TV, and only streamed U.S. and British media on Netflix.
Cultural positioning was a major factor in how informants interpreted media and
in what media they found more comfortable and enjoyable to consume. Bicultural
informant 竹 (Take; they/them; everything out there, pangender; 35; Japanese; Japan),
who had grown up in Japan but then moved to the U.S. as an adult, had witnessed this
phenomenon in their own multiracial household. They explained,
Japanese media is not really good at like queer representation, so I do get,
I do see people criticize that and— but then like it’s funny because people
are like, oh Hollywood is so much better and blah blah blah, but then
like— so we live in a household where it’s like multiracial, so— but
Hollywood is really bad at, like, racial representation. [laughs] So, like it’s
hard to watch both, like you just have to pick the, like which one’s worse?
[…] My husband actually likes Japanese media better because then, like
you know he can forget about all the, the racial like things in Hollywood
movie […] and then, when I watch Japanese media I’m like kind of like,
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ugh, did you just, did you hear what that person just said? [laughs] I guess
like people look for, um, media— like it’s, it’s easy to enjoy when you are
kind of blinded to, so like you know if you don’t fully understand the
culture, it might be like, you know, more enjoyable for you, right.
While 竹 (Take)’s husband found refuge in Japanese media from racial stereotypes in
Hollywood movies, 竹 (Take) themself could not help but notice gender stereotypes in
Japanese media. Those stereotypes stood out to them because of their familiarity with
Japanese culture, and made Japanese media less enjoyable for them to watch than it was
for their non-Japanese husband. The cultural disconnect that “blinded” both U.S. and
Japanese informants to the gender stereotypes and uncomfortable representations in
transcultural media made it easier for them to find affirmation and inspiration in media
produced outside of their own cultural context.
The Hybridization of Gender
This study has demonstrated that cultural hybridity and gender hybridity are
intertwined. Gender is a part of culture and cannot be separated from its cultural context.
Thus, when cultural hybridity happens, gender hybridity happens too; gender becomes
automatically hybridized because gender and culture are intertwined. The mixing of
cultures leads to a mixture of gender representations that come from different places. As
demonstrated by my interviews, having access to a variety of gender representations is
useful in the process of negotiating one’s own gender identity, and this variety is
particularly valuable for non-cisgender people who are already seeking a gender “role
model” (Kai; he/they; transgender FTM or FTX, but closer to FTM; 23; Japanese; Japan)
or “a template to, to start off with” (Leo; he/him; FTM trans, trans guy; 32; Japanese;
U.S.). For people whose gender identities are outside of the mainstream, who don’t
conform to the normative gender expectations of their societies, encounters with
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transcultural media have special significance because they automatically carry a diversity
of gender representations that are outside the audience’s experience. As my informants
have shown, these encounters can catalyze transformative gender renegotiation in ways
that culturally proximate media does not.
The very fact of deterrotorialization increases the utility of transcultural texts,
because it is easier for audiences to imagine new possibilities when they are less
conscious of the cultural norms in which those texts are steeped. Local audiences are
constrained by their cultural knowledge. In Stuart Hall’s (1973/2018) terms, meaning is
shaped by the dominant codes in play at both the site of production and the site of
reception. Resistant reading is possible, but the “structures of understanding” (Hall,
1973/2018, p. 260) have hewn a well-worn path to the dominant reading, and straying
from that path entails breaking with established ideological structures. As Hall
(1973/2018) has explained, these structures are culturally contingent:
Any society/culture tends, with varying degrees of closure, to impose its
segmentations, its classifications of the social, cultural, and political
world, upon its members. There remains a dominant cultural order,
though it is neither univocal nor uncontested. […] We say “dominant,” not
“determined,” because it is always possible to order, classify, assign, and
decode an event within more than one “mapping.” But we say “dominant”
because there exists a pattern of “preferred readings,” and these mappings
both have the institutional/political/ ideological order imprinted in them
and have themselves become institutionalized. (p. 269, emphasis in
original)
While asymmetry between the encoding of meaning at the site of production and the
decoding of meaning at the site of reception is fundamental to the process of
communication, the degree of asymmetry necessarily increases when media texts are
decoded by global receivers. Audiences are embedded in their own society’s dominant
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cultural order, and are thus removed from the preferred reading of transcultural media
texts, which are produced under different social, political, and cultural conditions than are
present in their locality. This frees transcultural audiences to more easily break with the
dominant reading of a text and imagine new meanings. As 竹 (Take) said, “it’s easy to
enjoy when you are kind of blinded to […] the culture.”
Hybridity is useful because it is disconnected. The “large and complex repertoires
of images” provided by global mediascapes offer “a series of elements (such as
characters, plots, and textual forms) out of which scripts can be formed of imagined
lives” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 35), and the disconnection, the différance between the context
of production and the context(s) of reception, the “entire configuration of its meanings,”
are “immediately and irreducibly polysemic” (Derrida, 1972/1982, p. 7). The mode of
consumption practiced by my informants, in which individual elements of transcultural
texts are deterritorialized and redeployed outside their context of production, somewhat
resembles Azuma’s (2001/2009) conception of database consumption, in which texts are
reduced to constitutive elements that are endlessly remixed. However, where Azuma
(2001/2009) bemoans the loss of the modernist “grand narrative” (p. 28) and derides
database consumers as “[s]nobbish, cynical subjects” (p. 70) who are “animalized” (p.
92) and uninterested in meaning beyond “confirm[ing] the self as a pure idle spectator”
(p. 69), I argue that for transcultural non-cisgender consumers, remixing deterritorialized
elements of gender representation opens space for new, counterhegemonic, and deeply
personal forms of meaning. As Appadurai (1996) argues, “the new power of the
imagination in the fabrication of social lives is inescapably tied up with images, ideas,
and opportunities that come from elsewhere, often moved around by the vehicles of mass
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media” (p. 54). Far from the “pure idle spectator[s]” of Azuma’s formulation (2001/2009,
p. 69), my informants actively engaged with transcultural media, redeploying
deterritorialized representations as part of a gender discourse that not only had
implications for their own gendered lives, but also held the potential to realize
Appadurai’s (1996) vision of media as “semiotic diacritics of great power” (p. 53). By
accessing a database of deterritorialized images and critically renegotiating their own
understandings of gender, my informants challenged the cisheteronormative formulations
of gender that were hegemonic within their own societies.
How Representation Matters
My informants said that they chose media produced in distant cultural locations
because they wanted to see “better” representations of gender, sexuality, and diversity
than what was available in their local media. However, as demonstrated by the contrast
between U.S. and Japanese informants’ assessment of the same media texts, “better”
representation is relative. Informants from both sides of this study said that they wanted
to see “positive” representation of trans, queer, and other socially marginalized people,
but their definitions of what counted as positive were different and sometimes
contradictory. For example, U.S. informants praised the ambiguity of queer, trans,
nonbinary, and gender-variant identities in Japanese media. Jules (they/them, genderfluid
nonbinary trans person, 26, white, U.S.) said that “learning about nonbinary identities in
different countries,” and particularly through Japanese media, showed them that “those
things haven’t always been as concrete and, uh, definition-focused, label-focused, as they
are now” in the United States. However, Japanese informants sought out U.S. media that
explicitly named queer and non-cisgender identities and that respected the labels
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characters or media personalities chose for themselves. Luna (they/them, nonbinary, 26,
ethnicity not reported, Japan) criticized Japanese media for depicting men whom Luna
interpreted as bisexual, “but they don’t really say ‘I’m bisexual,’” refusing a sexual
identity label and instead focusing on individual relationships with other characters. For
Japanese informants, “positive” representation was found in characters who explicitly
claimed a queer, trans, or gender-diverse identity label, whereas for U.S. informants,
“positive” representation looked like ambiguity and the refusal of labels.
The yearning for “better” media representations is culturally contingent. My
informants, who all resisted the dominant cisnormative formulations of gender within
their societies, were searching for media representations that broke with local norms. In
Japan, where censorship laws allow widespread publication of gay pornography as long
as penetration and genitalia are not explicit, and whose language is highly contextual,
relying on suggestion and implication, informants wanted media that explicitly labeled
characters as transgender, queer, or nonbinary and celebrated those identities. In the U.S.,
where identity politics have segmented the population and conflicts have arisen within
the LGBTQIA+ community over the policing of identity label boundaries, informants
looked for media where gender transgression was more fluid and did not need to be
explicitly defined. While both U.S. and Japanese informants shared some ideas about
what “good” representation would look like—for example, that it was generally better to
have more media representations of trans and nonbinary people rather than fewer—the
specifics of what they wanted were markedly different.
What my informants did agree on was that “better” representation—whatever that
meant to them—opened up new possibilities for realizing and living a trans, queer,
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nonbinary, gender-diverse, or non-cisgender identity. This was especially important, they
said, for young gender-nonconforming people who would grow up with a wider variety
of available representations of non-cisgender identities. Alex Rowan (they/she; a person
first, biologically female sex organs, not a boy or girl; 36; white, Japanese; U.S.), for
example, connected the increased availability of foreign media with the openness they
saw among genderfluid youth:
So many things are like, you know, normalized and like open to them.
Things that like, when I was coming up like I didn’t even know that was a
possibility. I didn’t know that like, you know, I could just not choose, you
know, not have to choose to be, you know— you know, pick one side and
that’s where you are. Like you know, like— I didn’t even know that was a
possibility back then.
Alex saw widening access to transcultural media as a key difference between the cultural
environment of contemporary youth and the environment they had experienced when
they were “coming up” in the queer community. Alex’s observations, as well as the
experiences of my informants on the whole, align with the conclusions of feminist
research that what matters about representation is not any specific standard of “good” or
“bad,” “positive” or “negative” representation, but instead the greatest possible diversity
of representation.
Much ink has been spilt, and standards have been invented and refined, over the
question of what positive representation looks like and how to achieve it. There are
certainly media representations of transgender people that are difficult, even painful, for
many trans folks to watch, and the impulse to create and uplift media that is respectful
and inclusive is an admirable one. But the same representations mean different things to
different people, and radical reconsiderations of hegemonic gender formations can be
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sparked by “bad” texts (Keegan, 2022). In the theoretical tradition of camp, the
postmodern, and the pastiche, my informants performed queer readings of transcultural
texts that were considered regressive by local audiences. Their cultural distance from the
context of production allowed informants to repurpose and (re)claim images that, in their
original cultural context, were linked to harmful stereotypes or intractable cultural norms.
These decontextualized representations provided my informants with important resources
for gender renegotiation.
The spread of global media automatically increases the diversity of
representations available to audiences, even if there is no attention to diversity on the part
of producers. Gender imagery is woven throughout media, and cultural configurations of
gender are embedded in texts on multiple denotative and connotative levels. The
disjunctive global movement of mediascapes not only carries a diversity of
representations of race, religion, and political ideology, as Appadurai (1996) has argued,
but is always-already imbued with a diversity of gender representations. Because gender
is culturally inflected, representations of gender from culturally distant locations will by
their very nature carry some degree of asymmetry between the point of production, where
explicit or implicit gender messages are encoded, and the site of reception. The more
access audiences have to global media, the greater the diversity of gender representations
that they will encounter. This adds to the repertoire of possible resources that media
consumers can use to negotiate their gendered identities. Again, it does not matter
whether media producers intended to create diverse, progressive, positive, or “good”
gender representations. Through transcultural media encounters, both cultural
hybridization and gender hybridization take place simultaneously, as consumers
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incorporate an increasingly diverse repertoire of gender images into the database of
references that they can draw on to question and reimagine gender. This is the power of
global popular culture to disrupt gender hegemony.
These processes are especially important to U.S. informants, because historically
the U.S. has been a major exporter, not an importer, of global media. Consumers around
the world have long been familiar with U.S.-produced entertainment media as Hollywood
has dominated the global film market and U.S. television shows have been syndicated
globally (Erigha, 2019; Mirrlees, 2013), and there have been vibrant systems of
transcultural media consumption among non-U.S. countries long before the streaming era
(Darling-Wolf, 2015). In the U.S. market, however, nationally-produced media have
dominated, meaning that U.S. consumers have had fewer media resources available to
challenge the dominant cultural order. Rather than encountering global media as a matter
of course, U.S. consumers have had to actively seek out those alternative representations.
This historical under-resourcing of U.S. consumers is evident in my informants’
experiences. U.S. informants described their first encounters with Japanese media as
memorable, disruptive, and “something I’d never seen anywhere else” (Alois, he/they,
nonbinary transmasculine, 27, white, U.S.). While Japanese informants had long had
access to U.S. and other global media—理恵 (Rie; she/her; woman, transgender, newhalf; 65; Japanese; Japan), one of my oldest informants at age 65, described watching
popular U.S. television series on Japanese broadcast TV as a child—for many U.S.
informants, the anime boom of the 1980s and 1990s was their first encounter with global
media. The increasing availability of non-U.S. media on U.S. streaming services in the
digital media era is beginning to bring U.S. consumers the opportunities for ready-to159
hand encounters with a diversity of global representations of gender—representations
that, through the inherent asymmetry between the sites of production and reception that is
produced through deterritorialization, open space for more polysemic interpretations and
new, potentially radical renegotiations of gender.
Gaps in Representation: Inadequate Resources
Although the informants in this study described numerous ways that they had
benefited from access to transcultural media, for some, the representational resources
they needed remained unavailable, even in imported media. This was particularly true of
ethnically Asian informants who said that they struggled to find media representations of
queer Asians. Despite the general consensus among Japanese informants that “Japanese
media is not really good at like queer representation” (竹 [Take]; they/them; everything
out there, pangender; 35; Japanese; Japan) and that U.S. media did a better job
representing queer and trans people, both Japanese and U.S. informants said that U.S.
media lacked positive representation of Asian people. Informants said that “Hollywood is
really bad at, like, racial representation” (竹 [Take]); “Asian men in Hollywood, they’re
always like the dorky characters […] they’re never the leading man” (Leo; he/him; FTM
trans, trans guy; 32; Japanese; U.S.), “there’s just not very many Asian American, uh,
representations” (Mimi; it/its, she/her; nonbinary, pseudo trans femme, neutrois or
agender; 29; East Asian, Japanese, Ryūkyūan; U.S.), and “almost all the main character
are white” (S; they/them; no thoughts about gender, nonbinary; 23; Japanese; Japan). The
lack of racial diversity meant that even when ethnically Asian informants found media
that reflected their non-cisgender identities, they were still left under-resourced because
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they did not see representations that spoke to the intersection of their ethnic and gender
identities.
Informants described seeking out intersectional media representation and feeling
frustrated and at a loss when the representations they were looking for did not exist. Mimi
said, “the reason why I watched so much like Japanese media was because that was the
only place I could like, see people like me,” but as an Asian American, it still felt
frustrated because “that’s Asian stories, that’s not Asian American stories. So it’s like
that kind of, you’re still looking for yourself, right.” U.S. informant Leo, an ethnically
Japanese transgender man, said that white trans guys on YouTube were “the only type of
[trans] representation” that he saw, and because of this he struggled to know “what I’m
supposed to be reaching for” in terms of Japanese masculinity. “All I know— that I’m
just so uncomfortable, but I don’t know, like, I don’t know what it’s supposed to look
like,” he said. Without any available models of Japanese trans men, Leo turned to J-pop
and K-pop idol groups to find “a template” for Asian masculinity. Just as Mimi turned to
Japanese media for Asian stories when Asian American stories were unavailable, Leo
turned to Japanese media for representations of Asian masculinity when representations
of transgender Asian masculinity were unavailable. These informants used transnational
media to meet some of their representational needs, but were unable to find
representations that reflected their intersectional identities as non-cisgender Asian
Americans. This gap in representation left Mimi and Leo with fewer imaginative
resources than were available to white trans Americans.
Japanese informants also expressed frustration with the lack of racial diversity in
U.S. media. When Yu Sakamoto (no pronouns; gender nonbinary; 26; Japanese, East
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Asian, Taiwanese; Japan) was struggling with gender and sexuality and looking for
community, “many times I typed Asian gay coming out video [on YouTube], but there’s
none at that time [around 2015].” Yu turned instead to coming out videos that did not
align with Yu’s ethnically Asian identity. “I cried a lot when I saw the coming out video,
but at the same time I feel pain, because there’s only white people on the video,” Yu said.
Yu was one of several informants who described mixed feelings about media
representations that reflected some, but not all, of their intersectional identities. Mimi felt
frustrated by the lack of Asian American media representation it could find, but it found
that it could relate to android characters. “So there’s those like two kind of competing
things, right. It’s, in terms of like your physical identity, maybe not so much, but in terms
of like your like inner identity, yeah,” Mimi said. Both Yu and Mimi were able to
connect with media representations on one axis—sexuality for Yu, genderlessness for
Mimi—but could not find representations at the intersection of their racial and
LGBTQIA+ identities. Yu described feeling isolated and singled out in the U.S. because
“a lot of people thought like nonbinary or like trans things are like non-Asian stuff or like
white stuff. They have never seen like nonbinary Asians.”
Race was not the only axis of identity on which informants felt representations
were lacking. けい (Kei, no pronouns, transfeminine, 20, Japanese, Japan) felt “moved”
and “empowered” by stories about trans women, but said “at the same time, I also
consider being fat as one of my identities. When I try to find people that look like me,
who is fat and hairy, I don’t see that.” Like Yu and Mimi, S was “struggling” with the
whiteness of queer media—“I wanted to see Asian people, and also queer person or
people in representation, but it’s very hard,” they said—but they also struggled with a
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lack of transgender representation. “It’s not that hard to um watch those queer-friendly
medias, but […] I think almost all the all those dramas or movies are, you know, still
cisgender,” S said. When S did find transgender representation, nonbinary identities were
not represented, and when they did find nonbinary representation, Asian ethnicities were
not represented. As they explained,
There are um binary trans person in some of the media, but it’s hard to
find nonbinary people in media. So, so because of that I, I sometimes
watch YouTube to search, or to find nonbinary person in English. But […]
when you search nonbinary in, in YouTube, I mean, almost all the people,
nonbinary person, are white. […] That was very shocking for me. And,
even though it’s empowering, but somehow it’s— rather not empowering
for me. […] So I’m feeling very hard that um, I, I can’t find any um role
model of like trans or nonbinary, and um Asian as well.
S, けい (Kei), Yu, and Mimi all had to make do with partial media representations of
their intersectional identities, and this led to conflicted feelings. Like S said, these partial
representations were both “empowering” and “rather not empowering.” My informants
were able to use partial representations as imaginative resources, but when one or more
of the axes of identity that were central to informants’ lives were conspicuously absent
from media, this created a sense of dissonance that made these partial representations less
useful for informants.
Just as Crenshaw’s (1989) groundbreaking work showed that people who held
multiple marginalized identities were multiply disadvantaged by the U.S. legal system,
my informants who held multiple marginalized identities were multiply under-resourced
by (a lack of) available media representations. Informants like Yu and S struggled to find
representations of gender variance that resonated with them. When they did find
identifiable queer, trans, or nonbinary characters, these characters were inevitably white.
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This left Yu and S to pick the best of bad options: either seek out Asian representation
that didn’t resonate in terms of gender and sexuality, or opt for LGBTQIA+
representation that didn’t resonate in terms of race. However, as intersectionality scholars
have shown (Crenshaw 1989, Collins 2019), race and gender are inextricable. What I
have been calling “partial representations” do not and cannot capture the nonbinary Asian
identity that Yu and S shared. Race is gendered and gender is raced, and “nonbinary
Asian” is a distinct identity with unique intersectional qualities that are more than
additive. Yu and S were able to extract some useful resources from cisgender Asian or
nonbinary white media representations, and both spoke about the value of those
representations. But the mixed feelings described by Yu and S—as well as by けい (Kei),
Mimi, 竹 (Take), and Leo—demonstrate that the value of these representations is itself
partial.
Critics of intersectionality complain that adopting this framework will require
researchers to consider an endless parade of increasingly specific identities, and that there
will be no end to the analytical categories that one must include, for fear of censure. By
making these arguments, critics are missing the point. To imagine that one can simply
include a lengthy list of identities, like checking off boxes, falls prey to the additive
fallacy. People’s identities are not check boxes that can be ticked or not ticked, included
or discarded, at will. Yu and S are not nonbinary and Asian; they are nonbinary Asians,
as well as many other inextricable axes of identity. Because identities are necessarily
intertwined, it will never be possible to consider the full scope of a person’s identity in a
single analysis. Intersectionality does not call for that. What the intersectionality
framework asks us to recognize is the complex relationship between many axes of
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identification, and the compounding—not additive—process by which they affect one
another. I take this not as a call for individual research projects to consider exhaustive
lists of identity factors (although studies of gender that neglect race, and vice versa, may
justifiably be criticized for incomplete analysis), but as a call for more studies that center
particular intersections. By making space for multiple works on, for example, nonbinary
East Asian, nonbinary Black African, nonbinary South Asian, nonbinary Indigenous
American, or nonbinary Arab people (to name just a few), we can make inroads towards
understanding not only these specific identity positions, but also the intersectional
interplay between race and gender.
Hybridity, Resource Exchange, and the Transcultural Feedback Loop
The exchange of imaginative resources across cultural boundaries has enabled a
transcultural feedback loop between Japan and the U.S. that is contributing to the
globalization of gender. Imported transcultural media inspire both audiences and creators;
cultural distance makes representations that local audiences consider regressive and
stereotypical seem new and innovative to global audiences. Individuals incorporate the
influences of transcultural media into their understanding of their own genders, using the
resources they gather through culturally distant media representations to imagine new
gender possibilities for themselves—genders that are now hybridized, an enmeshment of
the local and the global, the hegemonic and the radical, the fantastical and the familiar.
Some individuals inspired by transcultural media go on to become media creators
themselves; their hybrid creations travel back across the same cultural divide that turned
the tired local into the exotic global, and the process begins again. Through the global
exchange of imaginative resources, gender is continually hybridized.
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My informants said the influence of transcultural media was driving the
production of new local media in which they saw improved representation of LGBTQIA+
identities. U.S. informants astutely pointed to the Japanese influence in recent U.S.
animated series like Steven Universe and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, which
they cited as positive and progressive representations of gender and sexuality. Matt
(he/him, trans and male, 24, Southeast Asian, U.S.) said that “queer representation in
media started, you know, becoming more and more frequent after Steven Universe. I
really think it was Steven Universe in the West that like did that.” TK (they/them, nonbinary, 30, white, U.S.) said, “I feel like Western cartoons have been really good these
last couple of years, actually. They’ve, there’s been a lot better stuff. Like I wish I had
that when I was growing up.” These informants were well aware of the Japanese
influence in these U.S. shows: “a lot of the American cartoons coming out at that time [in
the mid to late 2000s], you can tell that those creators watched anime growing up” (TK);
“a lot of them are also, also feel very like, Japanese inspired” (Matt). These informants
are pointing to the same processes documented by Hemmann (2020) in which “shōjo
manga (and the animated adaptations of these manga) have had a strong cultural impact
on successive generations of pop culture fans in North America” (p. 15), including on
creators. According to Hemmann (2020), these influential shōjo works were produced in
a “heady cultural atmosphere […] at a time when many female artists were challenging
the gender binary in progressive and socially informed manga” (p. 11), and the gender
bending in shōjo is reflected in the works of U.S. creators who grew up watching
Japanese anime. TK said “the borrowing um has been happening for a very long time,”
pointing out “Walt Disney being inspired by Tezuka [TEZUKA Osamu],” but said “I
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think [about] like my generation and maybe like the generation right above me, being the
first people who have come into adulthood having had better access to that growing up,
and it affecting their work that they make.” What TK is suggesting here is that the action
of Internet-enabled globalization has sped up the exchange of imaginative resources via
transcultural media, and that their own generation of media creators has incorporated
more Japanese influences as a result.
Some informants also saw these influences affecting media production in Japan.
Six (they/she, genderqueer, 25, white, U.S.) said they had recently read a Japanese manga
featuring a transgender main character, and recounted the author’s note that
I would have never been able to write this if I didn’t know there were
other people like me, you know transness really isn’t spoken about where I
am in Japan, and the Internet has been such a big part of, you know, all of
this.
In Six’s recollection, mediated transcultural discourses enabled the production of
transgender representation in at least one Japanese manga. Japanese informant Uzura
(they/them, nonbinary and genderfluid, 29, Japanese, Japan), a manga creator themself,
had felt this influence directly. They explained,
From my point of view, it seems that the expressions seen in America or
European countries are being imported by those at the forefront [最先端に
いる, saisenta ni iru] of Japanese media. That is how they are expressing
the “newest” [最新に見える, saishin ni mamieru, lit. ‘seems newest’]
sexuality and queer expressions. I draw manga myself, and notice when
foreign comics have genderfluid, transwoman, or other trans characters. I
think that Japanese media is empowered from that kind of foreign media,
and try to find other new [新しい, atarashii] expressions.
Uzura’s language of progress (“forefront,” “new,” “newest”) implies, again, a framework
in which the U.S. is ahead and Japan is behind. To Uzura, the “‘newest’ sexuality and
queer expressions” come from the U.S., and it is only “those at the forefront of Japanese
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media” who are incorporating those influences. Yet to TK and Matt, the U.S. is the one
drawing influence from Japanese media, and Japanese-inspired shows are the ones
pushing the boundaries of sexuality and gender. Both Japanese and U.S. informants—
including TK and Matt, as well as Ron Guy (they/them; nonbinary/don’t subscribe to the
idea of traditional gender; 29; Black, Latinx/o/a, Indigenous; U.S.), Lu Stein (they/them,
nonbinary, 27, white, U.S.), Blueberry (she/they, nonbinary, 41, white, U.S.), Jin
(they/them; nonbinary, transmasculine; 21; Japanese; Japan), 竹 (Take; they/them;
everything out there, pangender; 35; Japanese; Japan), and Yu Sakamoto (no pronouns;
gender nonbinary; 26; Japanese, East Asian, Taiwanese; Japan)—specifically mentioned
U.S. series Steven Universe, describing it as progressive and inspiring, a groundbreaking
source of positive representation. Steven Universe, again, is heavily inspired by Japanese
media (Hemmann, 2020). If Japanese creators draw from Steven Universe to push the
boundaries of gender representation, they complete another lap of the transcultural
feedback loop, and the hybridized representations they produce will be able to trace their
genealogies through the U.S. and back again to Japan.
Both Japanese and U.S. informants said that media representations of LGBTQIA+
people, and of gender more broadly, were generally improving. Most informants, both
Japanese and U.S., said that U.S. media representations were getting better, and they
often pointed to shows like Steven Universe as evidence. Japanese informants were split
when it came to Japanese media; some said that they saw positive improvements, while
others said they still refused to engage with any Japanese media because of its
stereotypical or regressive gender representations. Both U.S. and Japanese informants
generally agreed that the social and political climate for non-cisgender people in their
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own country was improving, but were hesitant to speculate about what life was like for
non-cisgender people in the other country.
While many informants talked about the importance of media representations in
their personal lives, from inspiring them to question gender roles to becoming a pivotal
catalyst in their gender transitions, few directly linked media representation with larger
shifts in society. Alex Rowan (they/she; a person first, biologically female sex organs, not
a boy or girl; 36; white, Japanese; U.S.) was the exception. Alex recounted how
important the “incredibly homoerotic” Neon Genesis Evangelion had been to them in the
1990s and wondered, “when people [in Japan] who are watching this now grow up, will
that mean like there’ll be an opening of like society?” Alex didn’t think this had
happened yet in Japan, but did credit the increased availability of Japanese anime with
cultural shifts in the United States. They recalled,
there were very few like [Japanese] properties that were translated even
back in the 90s and the early 2000s, and like now like, I mean, I, I— I
couldn’t even tell you everything that’s out right now. I couldn’t possibly
keep up now with everything that’s out. And, like, I do think that’s made,
you know, had an effect.
Alex saw the increased U.S. availability of anime and manga, with its “homoerotic”
themes and gender fluidity, as a catalyst for change, and wondered “what will happen in
like, you know within Japanese society” as Japanese people who grew up with that same
anime and manga came of age. Yet as this study found, Japanese audiences did not find
those texts progressive in the same way that Alex and other U.S. informants did. For the
Japanese informants in this study, it was U.S. media that offered a catalyst for change.
The experiences of my informants, their opposite views about which country’s
media was more progressive, and the transcultural feedback loop by which U.S. and
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Japanese media producers continue to draw on, incorporate, and exchange imaginative
resources underscore the utility of cultural distance. As this study found, cultural distance
is an attractive quality for non-cisgender audiences, whose identities and experiences are
not well-reflected in their local mainstream media. Cultural distance enabled my
informants not only to enjoy transcultural media texts by glossing over the problematic
elements that local audiences found difficult to watch, but also to extract imaginative
resources from those texts, which they could then deploy in their own negotiation of
gender identity. Bicultural informants like 竹 (Take), who held some form of insider
status in both Japanese and American culture, could not fully disengage from either
country’s media—“So, like it’s hard to watch both, like you just have to pick the, like
which one’s worse?”—whereas informants like Jake (he/they; nonbinary and
transmasculine, an effeminate guy and also kind of a dyke; 27; white; U.S.) found it
“freeing” to watch translated media, acknowledging “I am coming in aware that there is
gonna be things I don’t understand.” Alex Rowan wondered if Japanese anime, which
they believed had inspired more openness to LGBTQIA+ people in the United States,
would do the same for Japanese society. But for Japanese creators like Uzura, it was U.S.
media that was at the “forefront,” and that had inspired their own work. As media
continues to flow across borders and loop between cultures, both media representations
of gender and individuals’ own gender identities continue to hybridize, incorporating
imaginative resources filtered through cultural distance.
Conclusion
Media reflects, extends, and feeds the imagination. Media representations can be a
source of solidarity and community, especially for marginalized groups, who often have
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limited contact with others like themselves outside of the media sphere. As manga artist
Uzura (they/them) said, “It makes me happy to know that I can create characters that
resonate with other genderfluid people. It also works as a mechanism to realize that there
are others who feel like I do.” Both creators and consumers of media that centers
marginalized identities can feel a sense of connection through media and be comforted by
imagining themselves part of a larger community. Media also plays a role in selfdiscovery, catalyzing the questioning process and supplying models, templates, and
images in which audiences can see possible selves, and by means of which they can test
their own identification, deciding who they are or want to be, and how they wish to live
in the world. Transcultural media plays a key role in self-discovery for folks, like noncisgender people, who are marginalized within their local communities. My informants
described resource scarcity within their local media environments; they could not find the
imaginative resources they needed close to home, so they sought those resources further
afield, in media produced within other countries.
Cultural distance is a key component in the economy of imaginative resources.
For culturally proximate audiences who are marginalized within their own societies, it
may be difficult to appreciate local texts, which reflect and transmit hegemonic
representations that can be painful for marginalized people. Cultural distance provides
some insulation from stereotypes and negative representations, making it easier for global
audiences to extract useful imaginative resources from texts that local audiences disdain
and avoid. U.S. informants said outright that cultural distance allowed them to pick and
choose from representations within Japanese texts, using representations of gender
fluidity to imagine new gender possibilities for themselves while brushing aside
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stereotypical representations of gender roles as simply part of Japanese culture, and
therefore not applicable to them. Japanese informants, on the other hand, interpreted U.S.
media as being less bound by stereotypes, and positioned it at the forefront of gender
discourse. Even when trends in Japanese media, like gender fluidity and the refusal of
labels, aligned with prominent trends in Anglo-American gender theory and activism,
Japanese informants interpreted U.S. media as the “newest” (Uzura), most progressive
representation of gender and sexuality. For Japanese informants, U.S. media was, though
not perfect, the best available source of LGBTQIA+ representation.
Chapter 6 detailed Japanese informants’ positioning of the United States as ahead
and Japan as behind in terms of gender representation, reflecting a narrative of linear
progress in which the United States is at the vanguard of social change and all other
nations are developing along a path forged by “America.” While my U.S. informants did
not talk about the United States in this way, and indeed were often critical of the U.S.
social climate around gender and sexuality, their deployment of cultural distance in order
to extract imaginative resources from Japanese media texts aligns with this same
narrative. When U.S. informants ignored, excused, glossed over, or put up with
stereotypical representations of gender in Japanese media—the same representations that
Japanese informants actively avoided—they did so by compartmentalizing these
representations as part of Japanese culture, and therefore not applicable to them as
Americans. The imagination of mainstream Japanese culture as traditional and, indeed,
somewhat backwards helped U.S. audiences to dissociate themselves from problematic
gender representations in Japanese media. At the same time, the imagination of
“America” as a source of progress and new ideas allowed Japanese informants to draw
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imaginative resources from U.S. media while setting aside the unpleasant realities of the
U.S. political and social climate, where political and legal attacks against transgender
people are commonplace and trans folks continue to face economic hardships, barriers to
accessing social resources, and physical and institutional violence (Drydakis, 2017;
Fischer, 2019; Movement Advancement Project, 2013; Spade, 2015). For both U.S. and
Japanese informants, the narrative of U.S. progress became a component of imagined
cultural distance and informed their consumption of transcultural media, contributing to a
negotiation process by which some representations were extracted as imaginative
resources and others were deemed irrelevant and discarded.
The experiences of non-cisgender people provide a window into the work of
imaginative resources and the role they play in people’s lives. Because the realization of
their identities involves working against prevailing gender hegemonies, non-cisgender
people have often thought deeply about the concept of gender, the way it is represented
and negotiated within society, and its role in their own lives. In my interviews with noncisgender people from Japan and the United States, I found their explanations and
interpretations eloquent and moving. They were highly perceptive, and offered insightful
thoughts on the role that gender played in their lives. For example, A (he/him,
transgender man, 32, Japanese, Japan) said,
Gender helps me think about the societal impact from discrimination […]
It’s difficult to feel gender discrepancy, and I have forgotten a lot of my
memories because of it. But now that it’s past, gender gives me an edge to
start questioning a lot of different things. Overall, I think it’s an important
theme for me. Without this viewpoint, I wouldn’t be able to think about
dominance, majority, minority, and things like that.
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A’s explanation of what his gender experience has meant to him speaks to the capacity of
gender itself to function as an imaginative resource. By questioning gender, testing its
boundaries, and rethinking what it could look like for them, my informants were able to
imagine not just new gender possibilities for themselves, but new political realities.
Wrestling with the concept of gender helped non-cisgender people to reimagine their
world.
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CHAPTER 9
CONCLUSION
I used to feel like being trans felt like a disease. Like, I felt like I caught it
[…] and I couldn’t stop it. But now I see it as a gift, and I feel like if other
people knew the power and the insight that we have I feel like we could
like, save the world, you know. Do— create really magical things.
(Leo; he/him; FTM trans, trans guy; 32; Japanese; U.S.)
In this dissertation, I have argued that transnational media fuels the imaginations
of non-cisgender people and can play an important role in the discovery and negotiation
of gender variant identities. Through interviews with non-cisgender informants with
cultural roots in one of two sites, the U.S. or Japan, who consumed media from the other
site, I have shown that cultural distance between the point of production and the point of
reception enables greater interpretive flexibility, allowing audiences to use global texts to
reimagine gender in ways that they could not replicate with culturally proximate media.
The traveling texts of global popular culture and the culturally distant (and therefore
culturally different) representations of gender that they carry serve as imaginative
resources for non-cisgender people, contributing to the repertoire of references
(Appadurai, 1996) or database of ideas (Azuma, 2001/2009) from which they can draw
inspiration to remix, renegotiate, and resist gender norms.
Gender is social, relational, and constructed (Butler, 1990/2007; De Lauretis,
1987; Salamon, 2010) and also culturally contingent (Billard and Nesfield, 2020; Ho,
2021b; McLelland, 2003). Theories of globalization and cultural hybridity demonstrate
the central role played by the imagination in the construction of both the other and the
self (Anderson, 2006; Appadurai, 1996; Darling-Wolf, 2015; Kraidy, 2005). In this study,
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I have shown that encounters with transcultural media texts fuel non-cisgender
audiences’ renegotiation of gender, suggesting that the imagination of a cultural other
necessarily entails the imagination of a gender other. In Chapter 2, I outlined the
theoretical frameworks of gender, identity, media globalization, and imagination that
underpin my work. In Chapter 3, I detailed the historical relationship between the United
States and Japan that makes my case study of the U.S.-Japan axis of media exchange a
fruitful one. Chapter 4 introduced my research questions and explained the process by
which I recruited informants for in-depth interviews about their gender identities, cultural
backgrounds, and transcultural media use.
Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 detailed how my informants found resources critical to
their gender identity journeys in culturally distant media texts—the same texts that
culturally proximate informants dismissed as regressive and hopelessly, uselessly
embedded in gender stereotypes. Chapter 5 discussed U.S. informants, who said that
Japanese media provided transgressive representations of androgyny, queerness, crossdressing, gender bending, and gender fluidity that they could not find in
contemporaneous U.S. media. These texts were useful to informants’ construction of their
own non-cisgender identities even when the texts also contained stereotyping or
patriarchal overtones that informants acknowledged were problematic. Chapter 6
discussed Japanese informants, who said that U.S. media provided diverse, accurate, and
respectful representations of LGBTQIA+ and especially trans and nonbinary identities
that they could not find in Japanese media. In contrast to U.S. informants, Japanese
informants actively avoided Japanese media, which they saw as regressive, offensive, and
hurtful. These findings not only reinforce Keegan’s (2020) argument that “bad” texts
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offer opportunities for critical challenges to existing gender systems, but also suggest that
cultural distance itself is a valuable resource for troubling entrenched hegemonies.
Contemporary discourses around representation, both popular and scholarly, often
advocate for “better” representation—more diversity, less stereotyping; more
“authenticity,” less relegation of minority characters to roles of victimhood or comic
relief. While these efforts are laudable, we must recognize that no single text will achieve
perfect representation. In addition to striving for diverse, conscientious, and respectful
media portrayals of LGBTQIA+ people, we must support the creation and accessibility of
a wide diversity of representations, because it is in this vibrant discourse that gender
norms will continue to be challenged, negotiated, and rewritten. Both U.S. and Japanese
informants in this study found inspiring portrayals of gender in transcultural texts that
were dismissed by local consumers as stereotypical or “bad” representation. My analysis
has suggested that the global circulation of media automatically provides the diversity
that leads to ongoing renegotiation of gender norms—that hybridization of culture, long
established in scholarship as one consequence of media globalization (Appadurai, 1996;
Darling-Wolf, 2015; Kraidy, 2005), also leads to the hybridization of gender. Media
representations become particularly polysemic in a transnational context. The process of
deterritorialization opens new space for multiplicity and interpretation, causing texts to
become more polysemic and thus provide more imaginative resources when they are
consumed transnationally.
My project also calls for continued engagement with audiences, particularly
through ethnographic methods. While it is important to study media texts, studies that
analyze texts in isolation from the global contexts in which popular culture is
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increasingly consumed limit their findings. To get a fuller picture of how media texts
function in a rapidly globalizing world, it is important to engage with the audiences who
consume them in distant locations, with little or no knowledge of the originating cultural
context. Once texts become deterritorialized, hybrid meanings emerge, and audiences
may find valuable resources in texts that are consumed outside of their context of
production. The asymmetry inherent in transnational media consumption displaces what
Hall (1973/2018) terms the dominant or preferred reading of a text, opening space for
transcultural audiences to perform resistant readings—but it will be difficult for scholars
to know how texts signify to these culturally distant audiences without directly engaging
at the site of reception. Ethnographic work can help paint a fuller picture of how texts
work differently for audiences with different backgrounds and sociocultural positions.
As discussed in Chapter 6, global power dynamics at play along the U.S.-Japan
axis affected informants’ reception of transcultural media texts. Both U.S. and Japanese
informants accepted a linear narrative of progress in which the U.S. was positioned at the
forefront of gender discourse, and most did so uncritically. For Japanese informants, the
U.S. was seen as “ahead” while Japan was “behind,” both in terms of media
representation and in terms of gender theory, social acceptance, and legal and civil rights.
For U.S. informants, Japanese media representations were seen as more transgressive and
progressive, but actual Japanese society was still imagined as socially conservative and
limiting.
These global power dynamics have implications for who is able to make use of
which imaginative resources. Cultural distance combined with U.S. global positioning as
an imagined leader in terms of gender diversity allowed U.S. audiences to extract
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imaginative resources from the same Japanese media texts that Japanese audiences
avoided. U.S. informants connected with the fluidity and indeterminacy of gender in
Japanese media texts, but were able to brush off elements of gender stereotyping or the
suggestion of patriarchal social systems as a part of Japanese culture that had nothing to
do with them—as Alois (he/they, nonbinary transmasculine, 27, white, U.S.) put it, “none
of my business today.” To U.S. audiences, “it just seemed like they [Japan] were sort of
like next level” in terms of queer and gender variant media representation, “even though
it wasn’t really reflected” in Japanese society (Alex Rowan; they/she; a person first,
biologically female sex organs, not a boy or girl; 36; white, Japanese; U.S.). Although
U.S. informants often spoke of the challenges of living as LGBTQIA+ people in U.S.
society, especially in areas that they described as rural and conservative, none suggested
that LGBTQIA+ people would find greater freedom or acceptance in Japanese society.
U.S. audiences were able to draw on a U.S. social context that they, too, imagined as
more progressive and generally more open to LGBTQIA+ lives than the Japanese social
context, and combine this with Japanese media representations of gender fluidity that
were absent in their local U.S. mediascape.
For Japanese audiences, the imagined positioning of the U.S. at the forefront of
gender equality led them to draw resources not only from U.S. media representations, but
also from theories of and terminology for gender variance that originated in the AngloAmerican context. Japanese informants called Japanese terminology for or explanations
of gender variance “inaccurate” (Sora; they/them; agender, more broadly, nonbinary and
transgender; 21; Japanese; Japan), “narrowed” and “not correct” (Luna, they/them,
nonbinary, 26, ethnicity not reported, Japan), and said that they preferred to search for
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information in English. Gaining access to a greater variety of U.S. entertainment media
and also English-language popular and academic discourses around gender helped
Japanese informants to imagine gender differently and to find representations of gender
that resonated with them. However, this same power dynamic made it more difficult for
Japanese informants to use the resources available in local media. Where U.S. informants
saw transgressive portrayals of gender fluidity that helped them to challenge the labelfocused schema of gender categorization prevalent in the U.S. context, Japanese
informants saw representations that were hopelessly mired in stereotypes and strict
Japanese gender roles. Awareness of the dominant reading (Hall, 1973/2018) of Japanese
media texts impeded Japanese informants from extracting imaginative resources from
those texts and using those resources to construct alternative readings. U.S. informants,
by contrast, were separated from the dominant reading by cultural distance, and this
asymmetry made it easier for them to deploy alternative readings of Japanese media texts.
In Chapter 7, I discussed the role of the Internet in transcultural media exchange
and the globalization of gender. Both U.S. and Japanese informants said that the Internet
was a major component in their transcultural media consumption practices and a point of
access to discourses around gender variance that helped them to imagine and enact new
gender possibilities. The increasing availability of streaming services gave informants
more options for transcultural media, and the informants in this study actively sought out
media from global contexts, sometimes to the exclusion of local media. The rise of social
media or SNS (social networking site or service; Japanese equivalent term to ‘social
media’) allowed for more communication with other LGBTQIA+ folks and helped
informants to learn about gender variance in distant cultural contexts. Informants were
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better able to understand their own non-cisgender identities when they could connect with
like-minded people or see media representations that resonated with them, and the
Internet vastly increased the repertoire of references (Appadurai, 1996) that they could
access.
Cultural hybridization long predates the Internet; hybridity and mixing are
intrinsic parts of how culture works (Pieterse, 2019; Siapera, 2010). However, the
increased speed and distance capabilities that the Internet has brought to global
communication have accelerated the process of globalization and increased the variety of
media texts available to consumers (Mirrlees, 2013; Steger, 2020). This study’s focus on
the U.S. and Japan helps reveal the ways in which globalization acts unevenly and takes
place under conditions of unequal power (Kraidy, 2005). While audiences outside of the
U.S. have long been exposed to U.S. and other global media, U.S. dominance of the
global entertainment market has left U.S. audiences comparatively under-resourced in
terms of encountering media produced elsewhere. The rise of streaming media has
brought to U.S. audiences global media access similar to what the rest of the world has
experienced for years. In this study, U.S. informants described intense personal
revelations that were catalyzed by their exposure to Japanese media, which was unlike
anything they had experienced before. In Japanese media representations, U.S.
informants encountered configurations of gender that they never knew existed, and these
encounters changed the way they imagined the stock of possibilities for their own lives.
The increased speed and availability of Internet access has helped non-U.S. media to
enter the U.S. media market at much higher levels than during earlier eras dominated by
broadcast media, and this has changed the balance of global to local media for U.S.
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consumers to more closely resemble the variety that has long been a staple of non-U.S.
media markets. My research suggests that one consequence of this increased variety of
global texts is increased potential for the hybridization of gender. As U.S. audiences
experience more media produced outside of their own cultural sphere, the polysemy of
these deterritorialized media representations opens space to question and reimagine
gender.
In Chapter 8, I outlined informants’ use of transcultural media as imaginative
resources: the images and ideas, transmitted by media, that people draw on in order to
reimagine their world. Following and extending Stuart Hall’s (1973/2018)
encoding/decoding model, I argued that cultural distance generates imaginative resources
in ways that cultural proximity does not, because asymmetry between the cultural context
of production and the cultural context of reception makes deterritorialized texts more
polysemic and invites alternative readings. Through my engagement with non-cisgender
U.S. and Japanese informants, I demonstrated the value of transcultural media to
transgender and gender-diverse people as they navigate gender identities and expressions
that do not conform to normative expectations within their local cultures. I argued that
gender hybridization is intertwined with cultural hybridization, and that the former takes
place automatically under conditions of the latter. For this reason, I suggest that in
addition to “better” representation—a worthy goal, but also a concept that is subjective
and ill-defined—media creators, producers, and distributors should prioritize greater
volume, diversity, and variety of media representation, and especially the border-crossing
circulation of transcultural media texts. The existing gaps in representation that left, in
particular, queer Asian informants under-resourced also point to the importance of
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producing and circulating the greatest possible diversity of media representations. As
imaginative resources are exchanged over time and across borders, new creators are
inspired to push the boundaries of gender, and the media they produce can, in turn,
provide imaginative resources for someone else.
The processes I have described in this study are historically situated but, I argue,
not confined to any particular historical period. The U.S. and Japanese informants in this
study were, overall, focused on different timeframes—U.S. informants mostly talked
about influential Japanese texts of the 1980s and 1990s that were part of the U.S. anime
boom, whereas Japanese informants mostly talked about streaming U.S. television and
movies from the 2010s and 2020s. For U.S. informants, the Japanese media texts they
encountered during their youth—transgressive and unlike anything they saw in U.S.
media at the time—catalyzed formative experiences that helped them to realize their own
non-cisgender identities. For Japanese informants, discourses around gender identity
were heavily influenced by Anglo-American terminology and frameworks for gender
variance. Through participation in these globally-inflected discourses, Japanese
informants arrived at their non-cisgender identities. Then they sought out Anglophone
and especially U.S. media, in which they saw identities like their own portrayed more
frequently and with what they interpreted as more understanding and sensitivity. The
crucial transcultural media encounters informants described centered on different time
periods, but the connective threads between U.S. and Japanese informants’ experiences
point to a continuing process of imaginative resource exchange.
One similarity between U.S. and Japanese informants in this study was their
appreciation of U.S. animated series of the 2010s and 2020s, which informants on both
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sides praised for their representations of gender diversity. This praise of recent U.S.
media, and the near absence of praise for Japanese media from 2015 and beyond, might
be interpreted as support for the idea that the U.S. is “ahead” of Japan in terms of gender
representation. Yet the shows informants named—Steven Universe, Owl House, and
Amphibia, for example—were all heavily influenced by Japanese anime of the 1990s era.
This suggests not a linear narrative of “progress,” in which cultures start at point A and
travel towards point B at varying speeds, but instead an ongoing exchange of imaginative
resources within a hybridity framework. In my conceptualization, decontextualization
and deterritorialization enable greater polysemy, and elements from one culture’s media
get reinterpreted and redeployed, creating new representations that use familiar elements
in an unfamiliar way. These new representations are then reinterpreted globally, and the
cycle of exchange continues.
The informants in this study chose to consume not simply transcultural media, but
transcultural media produced in specific locations. For U.S. informants, that location was
Japan; for Japanese informants, it was the U.S. The longstanding relationship of media
and cultural exchange between Japan and the U.S., detailed in Chapter 3, certainly
influenced this configuration, but there is more to these specific media selections than can
be explained by Commodore Perry’s landing or the Cool Japan policy. U.S. informants’
imagination of Japanese media as playful, progressive, and queer speaks to the enduring
influence of exoticism and Orientalism that have pervaded the Western image of Japan
for centuries: Japan has long been marked as different, and this difference was key to
informants’ selection of Japanese media. Many informants said that Japanese media’s
depictions of masculinity were key to their own reimagination of gender possibilities.
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The cultural frame of reference that sees Asian men as feminine or feminized enabled
U.S. audiences to extract imaginative resources for gender bending from texts that,
according to Japanese informants, depict “just like, how Japanese men are” (竹 Take;
they/them; everything out there, pangender; 35; Japanese; Japan). The personal historical
context for these transcultural media encounters was also significant; most U.S.
informants said they encountered Japanese media for the first time during their youth and
that animated media was their point of entry. Informants said that they enjoyed animated
media, and that Japan produced more varied, more interesting, and simply more animated
media than the U.S. did. Nostalgia for the important texts, key genres, and meaningful
encounters of their youth influenced their continued use of Japanese media.
For Japanese informants, the choice to seek out U.S. media was heavily
influenced by global discourses of progress that situate the U.S. at the “forefront” of
gender reimagination. Unlike U.S. informants, whose most significant Japanese media
encounters were often with anime broadcast during the 1980s and 1990s, Japanese
informants’ most significant U.S. media encounters were often with online discourses
around gender variance and terminology. The U.S. entertainment media texts named by
Japanese informants were much more recent, produced in the 2010s and 2020s. Japanese
informants chose these texts because they adhered to standards of representation that felt
more respectful and positive than those available in Japanese media. Media that
proactively include queer and trans characters and cater to LGBTQIA+ audiences are
invested in producing what will be judged as “good” representation. Popular critiques of
queer and trans representation have led to cultural shifts in which, for example, trans
characters are more likely to be played by trans actors, self-identification is honored, and
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storylines have moved beyond familiar tropes of trans tragedy. Both U.S. and Japanese
audiences participated in these discourses around representation, and both groups
generally subscribed to the vision of “good” representation presented in Anglophone
popular discourse. For Japanese audiences, this led to repudiating Japanese media and
consuming primarily U.S. media, where they saw those standards of good representation,
if not always enacted, then at least pursued.
The contemporary U.S. media landscape of the 2010s and early 2020s includes
many explicitly LGBTQIA+ and particularly trans and nonbinary characters. This is part
of a wider cultural shift in the U.S. in which queerness and gender variance are more
visible and LGBTQIA+ audiences are increasingly seen as an un(der)tapped market. In
an environment of proliferating streaming media platforms, in which audiences
increasingly expect and producers increasingly provide content that would have been
considered too niche to be greenlit for broadcast television or widespread theatrical
release, content that caters to LGBTQIA+ people has become increasingly available.
Relative to the Japanese mediascape, contemporary U.S. media offers more explicit
LGBTQIA+ representation and closer adherence to standards of positive representation
as construed in Anglophone popular discourse, and this led Japanese informants to
choose U.S. media. For U.S. informants, however, cultural distance enabled them to
continue enjoying Japanese media and drawing from the gender-bending fluidity they
saw there while putting aside the stereotypes and sexism that made Japanese media
painful for Japanese audiences. They continued to choose Japanese media even as they
also engaged with some of the newer U.S. and Anglophone media texts that centered
LGBTQIA+ identities and issues.
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Ultimately, whether we think of global popular culture as a database of references
(Azuma, 2001/2009) or a repertoire of ideas (Appadurai, 1996), what matters most for
gender renegotiation is generating as much diversity as possible and giving access to the
largest possible database to the largest possible group of people. The circulation of
transcultural media texts is accomplishing this aim. When people encounter
deterritorialized media texts that challenge their local culture’s established gender norms,
they gain imaginative resources for gender hybridization. By encouraging the exchange
of media representations of gender outside of their cultural context of production, and by
embracing the decontextualization and deterritorialization that enable these texts to be
reinterpreted and resistant readings to be performed, we can encourage the radical
rethinking of hegemonic gender norms that has been championed by feminist, queer, and
trans scholars alike.
Yet even as we deploy cultural hybridity and gender hybridity in a bid to trouble
gender hegemony, we must be mindful that “hybridity is not posthegemonic” and “does
not implicate the relenting of inequality” (Kraidy, 2005, p. 148). As Marwan Kraidy
(2005) has argued, and as my research has shown, hybridity is negotiated under
conditions of unequal power. U.S. dominance in terms of global “progress” on gender
equality—imagined across academic, political, social, and representational realms—led
Japanese informants to gravitate towards U.S. media representations of and terminology
for gender variance, at the expense of local Japanese conceptualizations of gender. U.S.
informants, on the other hand, were able to productively draw imaginative resources from
Japanese media representations of gender while selectively discarding elements that they
viewed as regressive or problematic. However, neither U.S. nor Japanese informants
187
interviewed for this study described sustained engagement with local Japanese
terminology for or conceptualizations of gender, such as x-jendā. While more work is
needed to understand who identifies as x-jendā and why, the imbalance in my study
results is suggestive of the overall imbalance in global discourses around gender theory,
in which U.S. and North Atlantic voices dominate. While I argue that increased
circulation of global entertainment media can and will disrupt the gender status quo, the
uplifting of theoretical, academic, and political voices from outside of the Euro-American
sphere is also needed.
To understand the role that transcultural media plays in the globalization of
gender, and thus in the lives of transgender, nonbinary, gender variant, and non-cisgender
people, it is necessary to look beyond the text itself. This work requires integrated
analysis of production, text, and reception, as foregrounded in Kraidy’s (2005) critical
transculturalism framework. Kraidy’s (2005) model considers power, structures, and
agency, and argues that the local is neither necessarily emancipatory nor necessarily
disempowered; it is simultaneously a site of power and a site of marginalization. The
critical transculturalism framework locates agency in social practice, which Kraidy
(2005) defines as the ways in which social, political, and economic structures are
reproduced. In this study, I have described the social practices of non-cisgender
transcultural media users, detailing the ways in which their deterritorialized consumption
of culturally distant gender representations produce imaginative resources that audiences
use to reproduce gender in new, counterhegemonic ways. The transcultural feedback loop
in which U.S. audiences are inspired by imported Japanese media texts, then grow up to
produce innovative U.S. media texts to which Japanese creators turn for “the ‘newest’
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sexuality and queer expressions” (Uzura, they/them, nonbinary and genderfluid, 29,
Japanese, Japan), suggests an iterative process in which the ongoing mixing of cultural
hybridization can produce the repetition with variations that Butler (1990/2007)
envisioned as disrupting the regulatory regimes of gender. As Kraidy (2005) warns, this
disruption is not guaranteed, and conditions of unequal power must be taken into account.
Yet the circulation of global media and the ensuing hybridization of gender carry the
potential for transformation.
Gender is a culture and cultures are inflected by gender. The gender system
extends globally but is also inflected by place, by local social norms. The imagination of
gender, gender variance, and especially what constitutes “progressive” understandings of
gender is bound up with global discourses around progress, civil rights, and media
representations. Gender is thus a political alignment—and for my informants, also a
geopolitical alignment. By tying gender to the political, I don’t mean to evoke identity
politics in the sense that one’s political opinions or voting behavior coalesce around
patterns that are linked to—and come to stand in for or be stood in for by—a personal
identity. What I mean is that identification relative to the gender-sex system (whether
somewhere within it or outside of it) is a political act. The system of gender cannot be
separated from the political—that is, the interpersonal relations of power and agency that
structure competition over scarce resources.
Gender is a position—not something we are or have, but a space we enter and
take up. It is a position relative to society, always already entangled with culture, never
outside, never prediscursive. Trans people are those who consciously position ourselves
upon the spatial field of gender, who are aware that movement within the gender-space is
189
possible, and who actively undertake that movement. As this study has demonstrated,
cultural hybridity and cross-cultural contact contribute to the continued rethinking and
reimagining of gender. The movement of ideas and images via transcultural media flows
helps make the gender-space visible as a space, a landscape that can be traversed. When
unfamiliar configurations of gender-space become visible, trans consciousness is
heightened, and more possibilities for gender variant identities emerge.
The transgender, nonbinary, gender variant, and non-cisgender people whom I
met during this study shared profound insights into gender, culture, and the borderland
spaces where these concepts are negotiated and reimagined. Their position outside of the
gender mainstream gave them, as Leo (he/him; FTM trans, trans guy; 32; Japanese; U.S.)
put it, the “power and the insight” to question gendered hegemony and to critically assess
the dominant codes of gender that surrounded them. By accessing, considering, enjoying,
critiquing, and iterating upon transcultural media texts, they drew on imaginative
resources that helped them not only to push the boundaries of gender discourse, but
perhaps more importantly, to live personal lives in which they felt more like
themselves—more comfortable, more supported, more powerful, and more seen. Their
experiences speak to the power of difference and the importance of diversity, and also
underscore the scholarly imperative to conduct research with and about non-cisgender
people. Voices from the borderlands, from the in-between, can provide unique insights
into both gender and culture. These are the insights that can, in Leo’s words, “create
really magical things”—if we are willing to listen.
190
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APPENDIX A
PARTICIPANT DATA
Table 1: U.S.-Side Informants
#
Pseudonym
Pronouns
Self-described gender
1
2
3
4
Ron Guy
Arrow
Falafel
Six
they/them
they/them
they/them
they/she
5
6
7
8
Jake
TK
Lu Stein
Jules
Margo
Vintner
Alois
Alys
Fortune
Florence
Marcel
Clarissa
Matt
Morrigan
he/they
they/them
they/them
they/them
she/her;
fey/fem
he/they
she/her
she/her
he/him
they/she
she/her
he/him
they/them
nonbinary/don't subscribe to the idea of traditional gender
transmasc nonbinary
non-binary
genderqueer
nonbinary and transmasculine; an effeminate guy and also
kind of a dyke
non-binary
nonbinary
genderfluid nonbinary trans person
genderqueer trans woman, both a dyke and a faggot,
bigender
nonbinary transmasculine
agender trans woman
transgender woman
dude guy
feminine non-binary
trans woman
trans and male
queer trans nonbinary/agender
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
Age
207
29
31
30
25
Ethnicity
Black, Latinx/o/a,
Indigenous
White
White
White
Duration
27
30
27
26
White
White
White
White
1:37:11
1:03:46
1:08:09
1:08:33
29
27
25
25
25
24
35
24
29
White
White
White
White
White, European
White, Latinx/o/a
White
Southeast Asian
White, Hispanic
2:21:30
1:38:09
1:10:41
1:05:00
1:33:01
0:57:28
1:29:42
0:45:52
1:44:32
0:45:06
1:02:12
0:52:02
1:00:03
19 Mimi
it/its;
she/her
20 Alex Rowan
21 Blueberry
106 Leo
they/she
she/they
he/him
nonbinary, pseudo trans femme, neutrois or agender
a person first, biologically female sex organs, not a boy or
girl
nonbinary
FTM trans, trans guy
208
East Asian, Japanese,
29 Ryūkyūan
0:55:57
36 White, Japanese
41 White
32 Japanese
1:04:39
2:11:02
2:12:52
Table 2: Japan-Side Informants
Interview
language
Duration
English
English
Japanese
English
Japanese
1:33:53
0:57:51
0:58:45
1:37:10
1:22:43
Japanese
Japanese
NR
Japanese
Japanese
Japanese
English
Japanese
English
Japanese
English
Japanese
1:05:25
0:49:52
1:31:20
0:56:38
1:19:55
1:12:35
21 Japanese
Japanese
1:00:22
Japanese, East
40 Asian
Japanese
1:05:33
65
20
24
23
23
37
20
Japanese
Japanese
Japanese
English
Japanese/English
Japanese
Japanese
1:04:17
1:02:06
1:29:31
1:43:56
2:13:18
1:47:09
1:12:50
#
Pseudonym
Pronouns
Self-described gender
Age
101
102
103
104
105
Yu Sakamoto
QQ
Bloodhound
Wilmot
Saba
Sakura
Miyajima
Kazuki
Luna
Jin
竹 (Take)
Uzura
none
he/him
they/them
he/him
they/them
gender nonbinary
genderfluid
very close to nonbinary
male
gender non-conforming
26
26
19
26
26
Ethnicity
Japanese, East
Asian, Taiwanese
Japanese
Japanese
Japanese
Japanese
she/her
they/them
they/them
they/them
they/them
they/them
26
66
26
21
35
29
113 Sora
山川くぬぎ
(YAMAKAWA
114 Kunugi)
they/them
woman; specifically, a trans woman
neither female nor male; human
nonbinary
nonbinary, transmasculine
everything out there, pangender
nonbinary and genderfluid
agender; more broadly, nonbinary and
transgender
理恵 (Rie)
けい (Kei)
Mai
S
Kai
とわ (Towa)
Kuwai
she/her
none
she/her
they/them
he/they
they/them
they/she
107
108
109
110
111
112
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
they/them
nonbinary and agender
woman, transgender, new-half (ニューハ
ーフ, nyūhāfu)
transfeminine
AMAB; woman
no thoughts about gender; nonbinary
transgender FTM or FTX, but closer to FTM
no gender
demigender and questioning
209
Japanese
Japanese
Japanese
Japanese
Japanese
Japanese
Japanese
122 たに (Tani)
123 A
they/them
he/him
124 雨木 (Ameki)
they/them
nonbinary
transgender man
x-gender (X ジェンダー, x-jendā), queer,
and genderfluid
210
32 Japanese
32 Japanese
Japanese
Japanese
1:06:11
1:12:39
25 Japanese
Japanese
0:54:48
APPENDIX B
RECRUITMENT MATERIALS
Item 1: U.S.-Side Recruitment Flyer
TRANSGENDER, NONBINARY, AND NON-CISGENDER
PARTICIPANTS NEEDED FOR MEDIA RESEARCH STUDY
Do you identify as transgender, nonbinary, genderfluid, or non-cisgender?
Do you watch Japanese anime or movies, read manga, play Japanese video
games, listen to Japanese music, or use other types of media that were
produced in Japan? If so, please consider participating in a PAID research
study about non-cisgender people’s use of transnational media!
Aiden Kosciesza (he/him), a transgender doctoral candidate at Temple
University, is conducting research on gender representation in media and
what media representations of gender mean for transgender, nonbinary,
genderfluid, gender variant, gender non-conforming, or otherwise noncisgender people.
Participants in this study will be interviewed over Zoom and will be asked
questions about their gender and the media they use. Interviews will last
approximately one hour. Each interview participant will receive a $20 gift
card in grateful recognition of their time and expertise.
If you are interested in participating, please follow this link to complete the
interest survey: https://bit.ly/trans-media-study. Please share this call for
participants with your network!
For more information about this study, please contact Aiden Kosciesza in
the Media and Communication Studies Department at Temple University:
aiden.kosciesza@temple.edu
211
This study has been reviewed by, and has received ethics clearance from,
the Institutional Review Board at Temple University.
Do you like Japanese media?
Do you identify as transgender or non-binary?
Scan this QR code to volunteer for the research study!
212
Item 2: Japan-Side Recruitment Flyer
メディアについての研究に参加していただけるトランスジェンダ
ー、
Xジェンダー、非シスジェンダーの方を募集中
私たちは、シスジェンダー以外の方による多国籍メディアの消費に
ついて、謝礼付きの研究を行っています。シスジェンダー以外の性
自認（トランスジェンダー、Xジェンダー、性同一性障害、FTM、
MTF、FTX、MTXなど）の方で、アメリカで制作されたメディア
（テレビ番組や映画、マンガ、ゲーム、音楽など）を普段から消費
している方を探しています。
テンプル大学博士課程所属で、トランスジェンダーのエイデン・コ
シュチェシャ（三人称：he/him）は、メディアにおけるジェンダー描
写、およびそれが非シスジェンダー（トランスジェンダー、Xジェン
ダー、中性、両性、無性、不定性など）の人々に与える影響につい
ての調査を行っています。
調査に参加して頂ける方には、性自認（ジェンダー）や、普段消費
しているメディアについてZoomにてお聞きします。インタビューは
1時間ほどを予定しています。参加してくださる方には、謝礼として
¥2000を差し上げます。
参加を検討して頂ける方は、こちら（https://bit.ly/trans-media-studyjp）の事前アンケートにお答えください。ぜひ周りの方々にもお声を
かけてください。
この研究についてご質問のある方は、エイデン・コシュチェシャ
（テンプル大学 メディア・コミュニケーション研究学部 Eメー
ル：aiden.kosciesza@temple.edu）までご連絡ください。
213
本研究は、テンプル大学機関内審査委員会によ
り審査され、倫理的認可を受けています。
このQRコードを読み取って、研究調査にご協
力をお願いします。
214
Item 3: English Translation of Japan-Side Recruitment Flyer
Transgender, X-gender, and non-cisgender participants needed for media research study
Do you identify as transgender, X-gender, seidōitsuseishōgai [Japanese translation of
Gender Identity Disorder or GID], FTM, MTF, FTX, MTX, or non-cisgender? Do you
watch American TV or movies, read American comics, play American video games,
listen to American music, or use other types of media that were produced in the U.S.? If
so, please consider participating in a PAID research study about non-cisgender people’s
use of transnational media!
Aiden Kosciesza (he/him), a transgender doctoral candidate at Temple University, is
conducting research on gender representation in media and what media representations of
gender mean for transgender, X-gender, genderfluid, gender variant, gender nonconforming, or otherwise non-cisgender people.
Participants in this study will be interviewed over Zoom and will be asked questions
about their gender and the media they use. Interviews will last approximately one hour.
Each interview participant will receive a ¥2000 gift card in grateful recognition of their
time and expertise.
If you are interested in participating, please follow this link to complete the screening
survey: [SCREENING SURVEY LINK GOES HERE] Please share this call for
participants with your network!
For more information about this study, please contact Aiden Kosciesza in the Media and
Communication Studies Department at Temple University: aiden.kosciesza@temple.edu
This study has been reviewed by, and has received ethics clearance from, the
Institutional Review Board at Temple University.
215
Item 4: U.S.-Side Screening Survey
TRANSGENDER, NONBINARY, AND NON-CISGENDER PARTICIPANTS
NEEDED FOR RESEARCH STUDY
We are looking for volunteers to take part in a study of transgender, nonbinary, and noncisgender people’s use of transcultural media.
As a participant in this study, you would be interviewed about your gender identity, the
media you use (watch, read, play, or listen to), and what representations of gender in
media mean to you.
Your participation would involve a virtual interview over Zoom. Interviews will last
around one hour each.
To volunteer for this study, please answer the questions below and provide your contact
information. Please share this survey with anyone who might be interested in
participating!
For more information about this study, please contact Aiden Kosciesza in the Media and
Communication Studies Department at Temple University: aiden.kosciesza@temple.edu
This study has been approved by, and has received ethics clearance from, the
Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Temple University.
Section I: Demographics
1) Are you 18 years old or over? [YES  Q2; NO  INELIGIBLE]
2) How old are you? [WRITE IN]
3) Do you live in the United States? [YES  Q4; NO  INELIGIBLE]
4) Which of the following options describe you? Check all that apply.
a) U.S. citizen
b) Grew up in the U.S.
c) Long-term U.S. resident (over five years)
d) Short-term U.S. resident (five years or less)
e) Moved to the U.S. from another country within the last year
5) Please describe your gender in your own words. [WRITE IN]
6) Do you identify as cisgender (meaning your gender identity matches the sex you were
assigned at birth)? [YES  INELIGIBLE; NO  Q7]
7) Which of the following options describe you? Check all that apply.
a) Transgender
b) Nonbinary
c) Genderfluid
d) Gender variant
e) Gender non-conforming
216
f) Trans man
g) Trans woman
h) FTM
i) MTF
j) Agender
k) Other [WRITE IN]
8) How would you describe your racial or ethnic background? Check all that apply.
a) White
b) Black
c) African
d) European
e) East Asian
f) South Asian
g) Middle Eastern
h) African-American
i) Hispanic
j) Latinx/o/a
k) Chicanx/o/a
l) Japanese
m) Chinese
n) Korean
o) Ainu
p) Ryūkyūan
q) Indigenous
r) Native American
s) First Nations
t) Native Hawaiian
u) Pacific Islander
v) Other [WRITE IN]
Section II: Japanese Media
9) What kinds of Japanese media do you use (watch, read, listen to, play, etc.)? Check
all that apply.
a) Animated (anime) movies
b) Animated (anime) TV shows
c) Live action movies
d) Live action TV shows
e) Manga (Japanese comics)
f) Doujinshi (Japanese fan-made comics)
g) Video games
h) Music
i) Magazines
j) Other [WRITE IN]
10) Please list some titles of Japanese media (e.g. anime, manga, video games, music,
etc.) that you enjoy, use often, or that have been important in your life. [WRITE IN
TEXT BOX]
Section III: Interview
217
11) What time zone are you in?
a) Eastern Time
b) Central Time
c) Mountain Time
d) Pacific Time
e) Other [WRITE IN]
12) Please provide an email address where you can be contacted to set up an interview.
[WRITE IN]
Thank you for your interest in this study! If you have any questions about the study,
please contact Aiden Kosciesza at Temple University: aiden.kosciesza@temple.edu
218
Item 5: Japan-Side Screening Survey
メディア調査研究に必要なトランスジェンダー、X ジェンダー、およびシスジェ
ンダーでわありませんの参加者
トランスジェンダー、X ジェンダー、シスジェンダーでわありませんの人々によ
る異文化メディアの使用に関する研究に参加するボランティアを募集していま
す。
この調査の参加者として、あなたはあなたの性同一性、あなたが使用するメディ
ア（見る、読む、再生する、または聞く）、そしてメディアにおける性別の表現
があなたにとって何を意味するかについてインタビューされます。
参加には、Zoom を介した仮想インタビューが含まれます。面接はそれぞれ約 1
時間続きます。面接中に通訳が同席します。
この研究にボランティアとして参加するには、以下の質問に答え、連絡先情報を
提供してください。参加に興味があるかもしれない人とこの調査を共有してくだ
さい！
この研究の詳細については、テンプル大学メディアコミュニケーション学部の
Aiden KOSCIESZA（aiden.kosciesza@temple.edu）にお問い合わせください。
この研究は、テンプル大学の倫理委員会によってレビューされ、倫理的認可を
受けています。
セクション I：人口統計
1. 18 歳以上ですか？
[YES  Q2; NO  INELIGIBLE]
2．何歳ですか？ [WRITE IN]
3. 日本に住んでいますか？ [YES  Q4; NO  INELIGIBLE]
4. 次のオプションのどれがあなたを説明しますか？当てはまるもの全てをご確
認ください。
a) 日本国民
b) 日本で育ちました
219
c) 日本に5年以上住んでいました
d）日本に5年以下住んでいました
e) 昨年中に他国から日本に引っ越しました
5. 自分のジェンダーを説明してください。[WRITE IN]
6. あなたはシスジェンダーとして識別しますか（あなたの性同一性があなたが出
生時に割り当てられた性別と一致することを意味します）？ [YES 
INELIGIBLE; NO  Q7]
7. 次のオプションのどれがあなたを説明しますか？当てはまるもの全てをご確認
ください。
a) トランスジェンダー
b) Xジェンダー
c) ジェンダークィア
d) 性同一性障害
e) FTM
f) MTF
g) FTX
h) MTX
i) その他（書き込み）[WRITE IN]
8. 人種的または民族的背景は何ですか？当てはまるもの全てをご確認ください。
a) 日本人
b) 中国人
c) 韓国人
d) アイヌ人
e) 琉球人
f) 白人
g) 黒人
h) アフリカ人
i) ヨーロッパ人
j) 東アジア人
k) 南アジア人
l) 中東人
m) ラテン系
n) ブラジル人
o) 先住民族
p) その他（書き込み）[WRITE IN]
セクションII：アメリカのメディア
9. どのような種類のアメリカのメディアを使用していますか（見る、読む、聞
く、再生するなど）？当てはまるもの全てをご確認ください。
a) アニメーション映画
b) アニメーションテレビ
c) 実写映画
220
d) 実写テレビ
e) アメコミ
f) テレビゲーム
g) 音楽
h) 雑誌
i) その他（書き込み）[WRITE IN]
10. 楽しんでいる、頻繁に使用している、または人生で重要なアメリカのメディ
ア（映画、漫画、ビデオゲーム、音楽など）をいくつか挙げてください。
[WRITE IN TEXT BOX]
セクションIII：インタビュー
11. どのタイムゾーンにいますか？
a) 日本標準時 (GMT+9)
b) その他のタイムゾーン（具体的に記入してください）[WRITE IN]
12. 面接を設定するために連絡できるメールアドレスを入力してください。
[WRITE IN]
この研究に興味を持っていただきありがとうございます！研究について質問があ
る場合は、テンプル大学の Aiden KOSCIESZA に連絡してください：
aiden.kosciesza@temple.edu
221
Item 6: English Translation of Japan-Side Screening Survey
Transgender, X-gender, and non-cisgender participants needed for media research study
We are looking for volunteers to take part in a study of transgender, X-gender, and noncisgender people’s use of transcultural media.
As a participant in this study, you would be interviewed about your gender identity, the
media you use (watch, read, play, or listen to), and what representations of gender in
media mean to you.
Your participation would involve a virtual interview over Zoom. Interviews will last
around one hour each. A translator will be present during the interview.
To volunteer for this study, please answer the questions below and provide your contact
information. Please share this survey with anyone who might be interested in
participating!
For more information about this study, please contact Aiden Kosciesza in the Media and
Communication Studies Department at Temple University: aiden.kosciesza@temple.edu
This study has been approved by, and has received ethics clearance from, the
Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Temple University.
Section I: Demographics
1) Are you 18 years old or over? [YES  Q2; NO  INELIGIBLE]
2) How old are you? [WRITE IN]
3) Do you live in Japan? [YES  Q4; NO  INELIGIBLE] 11
4) Which of the following options describe you? Check all that apply.
a) Japanese citizen
b) Grew up in Japan
c) Lived in Japan for more than five years
d) Lived in Japan for less than five years
e) Moved to Japan within the last year
5) Please describe your gender in your own words. [WRITE IN]
6) Do you identify as cisgender (meaning your gender identity matches the sex you were
assigned at birth)? [YES  INELIGIBLE; NO  Q7]
7) Which of the following options describe you? Check all that apply.
a) Transgender
b) X-gender
c) Genderqueer
The original version of the screening survey gave respondents an “ineligible” message if they said they
did not live in Japan. Later, I removed the ineligible message in order to include respondents who grew up
in Japan but were presently living elsewhere.
11
222
d) Gender identity disorder
e) FTM
f) MTF
g) FTX
h) MTX
i) Other [WRITE IN]
8) How would you describe your racial or ethnic background? Check all that apply.
a) Japanese
b) Chinese
c) Korean
d) Ainu
e) Ryukyuan
f) White
g) Black
h) African
i) European
j) East Asian
k) South Asian
l) Middle Eastern
m) Latin(o/a)
n) Brazilian
o) Indigenous
p) Other [WRITE IN]
Section II: American Media
9) What kinds of American media do you use (watch, read, listen to, play, etc.)? Check
all that apply.
a) Animated movies
b) Animated TV shows
c) Live action movies
d) Live action TV shows
e) Comics
f) Video games
g) Music
h) Magazines
i) Other [WRITE IN]
10) Please list some titles of Japanese media (e.g. anime, manga, video games, music,
etc.) that you enjoy, use often, or that have been important in your life. [WRITE IN
TEXT BOX]
Section III: Interview
11) What time zone are you in?
a) Japan time (GMT+9)
b) Some other time zone [WRITE IN]
12) Please provide an email address where you can be contacted to set up an interview.
[WRITE IN]
223
Thank you for your interest in this study! If you have any questions about the study,
please contact Aiden Kosciesza at Temple University: aiden.kosciesza@temple.edu
224
APPENDIX C
SEMI-STRUCTURED INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
Item 1: U.S.-Side Semi-Structured Interview Questions
Thanks so much for making time to do this interview. I really appreciate it.
The first thing I want to do is ask your permission to record this interview. May I?
[START RECORDING]
Okay, we’re recording now. Thank you. I’m going to start by going over a few logistics.
Before this meeting, I gave you a consent form to sign, [which you returned to me]. Do
you have any questions about that form? [Are you ready to sign it now?]
The other thing I asked you to do beforehand was to choose a pseudonym for your
privacy. This shouldn’t be a name you use anywhere else, like an online handle or
username. It should be unique to this project. Could you say and also spell the
pseudonym you’ve chosen?
Great. And what pronouns do you use?
Thanks so much!
Before we get started, I want to remind you that your participation is completely
voluntary; you can end the interview at any time. If I ask a question you don’t want to
answer, just let me know and we’ll skip it. If I get something wrong or if I use a term that
doesn’t ring true for you, please correct me.
From time to time, I might look down at my interview notes (like I’m doing now!) but I
am still listening to you.
Do you have any questions right now? This can be about the project, about me, or
anything you want to know before we begin.
Okay, we’re ready to get started.
SECTION I: Intro questions – must ask
1) Tell me about yourself. What identities are important to you? What words would you
use to describe yourself and who you are?
2) Where are you from? Is there a place that you consider home?
225
SECTION II: Media basics – must ask
3) So tell me a little bit about the media that you like. What are you watching right now?
What are you interested in at the moment?
4) What is your favorite piece of media ever?
5) What media was important to you growing up?
6) [if not yet mentioned] How about Japanese media? What’s one of your favorite
Japanese shows/movies/games/manga/ etc?
7) What is your favorite character [in X thing they mentioned]? Tell me about them.
Why do you like them?
8) Let’s talk a little about how gender is shown in the Japanese media you
[watch/read/play/etc].
a) What are men like? What are women like?
b) Can you think of characters who challenge the gender binary? Tell me about
them. How do they do that?
9) What are the main differences between Japanese and American media? What is it
about Japanese media that you like the most?
10) How do you access [whatever Japanese media they mentioned] the anime that you
watch/the games that you play/ etc?
IF TIME: (can skip this)
11) How about media from other countries, like British TV shows, or Bollywood movies,
or Korean music videos? Do you watch anything like that? How do you access them?
SECTION III: Gender identity and experience – must ask
Oral transition: Now I’d like to switch gears and talk about you and your gender identity.
12) How did you arrive at your gender identity? How old were you? What helped you
realize your gender identity?
13) Growing up, as you were discovering your gender identity, how did you feel about
media representations? Did you feel represented?
14) Have these representations evolved? How? What has changed since you were young?
15) Can you think of any media that were important to your development of gender
identity and expression? [if they haven’t mentioned this already]
16) Where does your identity fit in among the representations of gender that you see in
media?
17) Please tell me about a piece of media that has been important to you in terms of
gender identity or expression.
18) Does seeing representations of gender from other countries change how you think
about gender?
SECTION IV: Extra things to ask if we have time – can skip
19) What changes would you like to see in media representations of gender?
20) What role do you think media plays in changing the conditions of non-cisgender
people’s lives?
21) What is life like for non-cisgender people in the U.S.?
22) What do you think life is like for non-cisgender people outside of the U.S.? How do
you know?
226
23) Has the situation for non-cisgender people in the U.S. changed during your lifetime?
How?
24) What changes would you like to see in the circumstances that non-cisgender people
face in the U.S.?
Final question
25) What does “gender” mean to you?
SECTION V: Wrap-up: must ask
26) For the record, could you please describe your gender in your own words?
27) Is there anything else about you – your identity, your background, your personal
circumstances – that you would like to share?
28) What other questions should I have asked? Is there anything else you would like to
add?
29) How would you suggest I contact other non-cisgender folks who might be interested
in participating in this research? Is there a place in the physical world where I should
hang a poster, or a website where I should post a link?
30) Is there anyone you know who would be a good candidate for this research? Would
you share the interest survey link with them?
227
Item 2: Japan-Side Semi-Structured Interview Questions
Hello! Thanks so much for making time to do this interview. I really appreciate it. I’m
Aiden Kosciesza, the researcher, and with me is Tsukumo Niwa, who will be interpreting
for us today. よろしくお願いします！
The first thing I want to do is ask your permission to record this interview. May I?
[START RECORDING]
Okay, we’re recording now. Thank you. I’m going to start by going over a few logistics.
Before this meeting, I gave you a consent form to sign, [which you returned to me]. Do
you have any questions about that form? [Are you ready to sign it now?]
The other thing I asked you to do beforehand was to choose a pseudonym for your
privacy. This shouldn’t be a name you use anywhere else, like an online handle or
username. It should be unique to this project. Could you say and also type in the chat the
pseudonym you’ve chosen?
Great. Next, could you please describe your gender in your own words?
In the write-up of this study, what English pronouns would you like me to use when I
write about you? For example, you could choose he/him, she/her, they/them, some other
pronoun, or no pronouns, meaning I would just use your pseudonym.
Thanks so much!
Now I have a little script to read before we begin. Here we go:
I want to thank you for taking the time to share your experiences with me. This research
interview is part of a study on non-cisgender people’s use of transcultural media. Your
participation is completely voluntary; you can end the interview at any time. If I ask a
question you don’t want to answer, just let me know and we’ll skip it. If I get something
wrong or if I use a term that doesn’t ring true for you, please correct me.
From time to time, I might look down at my interview notes (like I’m doing now!) but I
am still listening to you.
Do you have any questions right now? This can be about the project, about me, or
anything you want to know before we begin.
Okay, we’re ready to get started.
228
SECTION I: Intro questions – must ask
31) Tell me about yourself. What identities are important to you? What words would you
use to describe yourself and who you are?
32) Where are you from? Is there a place that you consider home?
SECTION II: Media basics – must ask
33) So tell me a little bit about the media that you like. What are you watching right now?
What are you interested in at the moment?
34) What is your favorite piece of media ever?
35) What media was important to you growing up?
36) [if not yet mentioned] How about U.S. media? What’s one of your favorite American
shows/movies/games/comics/ etc?
37) What is your favorite character [in X thing they mentioned]? Tell me about them.
Why do you like them?
38) Let’s talk a little about how gender is shown in the American media you
[watch/read/play/etc].
a) What are men like? What are women like?
b) Can you think of characters who challenge the gender binary? Tell me about
them. How do they do that?
39) What are the main differences between American and Japanese media? What is it
about American media that you like the most?
40) How do you access [whatever American media they mentioned] the shows that you
watch/the games that you play/ etc?
IF TIME: (can skip this)
41) How about media from other countries, like British TV shows, or Bollywood movies,
or Korean music videos? Do you watch anything like that? How do you access them?
SECTION III: Gender identity and experience – must ask
Oral transition: Now I’d like to switch gears and talk about you and your gender identity.
42) How did you arrive at your gender identity? How old were you? What helped you
realize your gender identity?
43) Growing up, as you were discovering your gender identity, how did you feel about
media representations? Did you feel represented?
44) Have these representations evolved? How? What has changed since you were young?
45) Can you think of any media that were important to your development of gender
identity and expression? [if they haven’t mentioned this already]
46) Where does your identity fit in among the representations of gender that you see in
media?
47) Please tell me about a piece of media that has been important to you in terms of
gender identity or expression.
48) Does seeing representations of gender from other countries change how you think
about gender?
SECTION IV: Extra things to ask if we have time – can skip
49) What is life like for non-cisgender people in the Japan?
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50) What do you think life is like for non-cisgender people outside of Japan? How do you
know?
51) Has the situation for non-cisgender people in Japan changed during your lifetime?
How?
52) What changes would you like to see in the circumstances that non-cisgender people
face in Japan?
53) What changes would you like to see in media representations of gender?
54) What role do you think media plays in changing the conditions of non-cisgender
people’s lives?
Last Qs
55) When you talk about yourself in Japanese, what words do you use? For example, do
you say boku, watashi, ore? Why do you use those words? Has the way you speak
Japanese changed over time as you discovered your gender identity?
56) What does “gender” mean to you?
SECTION V: Wrap-up: must ask
57) For the record, could you please describe your gender in your own words?
58) Is there anything else about you – your identity, your background, your personal
circumstances – that you would like to share?
59) What other questions should I have asked? Is there anything else you would like to
add?
60) How would you suggest I contact other non-cisgender folks who might be interested
in participating in this research? Is there a place in the physical world where I should
hang a poster, or a website where I should post a link?
61) Is there anyone you know who would be a good candidate for this research? Would
you share the interest survey link with them?
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