ABSTRACT
This article explores the gender and sexuality boundary work of Japanese shojo anime series Ouran High School Host Club (2006) through theoretical perspectives of Judith Butler’s performativity theory and Roland Barthes’ semiotic theory. At the same time that Ouran first aired, the Akihabara district in Tokyo was alive with a vibrant dansō community. Only recently has this community been researched for the first time. In addition, reverse harem manga, which Ouran can be classified as, has only recently been analyzed. Visual theory specific to anime style, paired with emerging research about Japanese Dansō identity and the changing role of the shōjo in global society, creates a rich understanding of the nuanced boundary work that takes place in Ouran. I argue, Ouran High School Host Club successfully operates within a dominant paradigm of shōjo conventions in order to create space for two new performances of the shōjo, which disrupt the shōjo myth. These performances are Haruhi’s dansō identity, and Tamaki’s shōjo identity. Viewers can still identify the show within shōjo genre conventions; however, it is within this comfortable space that the series is able to develop each character with significant depth and create non-normative performances of gender and sexuality. This is an important step toward inclusive boundary work, where images in a highly visible mass-market media text can create representations of gender performance to be experimented and identified with.
There are times when the full picture of something cannot be seen until after the fact: just as a polaroid needs time to develop, so too do complex cultural moments that disrupt the normative framework through which we understand reality. Such is the case when analyzing Ouran High School Host Club (2006), an anime series from the mid-2000s, which benefits from fifteen years of new scholarship in shōjo research and gender performance as it allows for a much richer picture to be developed. At the same time as Ouran was being released, for example, the Akihabara district in Tokyo was alive with a vibrant dansō community. Only recently has this community been researched for the first time.[1] In addition, reverse harem manga, which Ouran can be classified as, has only recently been analyzed.[2] Furthermore, the expansion of our general and academic understandings of gender expression, sexual orientations, and romantic orientations provides an exciting new space in which to have a conversation with a popular transnational media text in which much of this new work can be retroactively identified.
Thus I argue, Ouran High School Host Club successfully operates within a dominant paradigm of shōjo conventions in order to create space for two new performances of the shōjo, which disrupt the shōjo myth. These performances are Haruhi’s dansō identity, and Tamaki’s shōjo identity. Viewers can still identify the show within shōjo genre conventions; however, it is within this comfortable space that the series is able to develop each character with significant depth and create non-normative performances of gender and sexuality. This is an important step toward inclusive boundary work, where images in a highly visible mass-market media text can create representations of gender performance to be experimented and identified with.
Media reception practices are gendered practices: men and women are expected to consume different kinds of texts. In the case of Japanese media (manga and anime), adolescent marketing categories are divided into shōnen: for adolescent boys, and shōjo: for adolescent girls. Often a project will start off as a serialized manga, and when it becomes popular enough, it will be picked up as an anime series. This is the true for popular shōnen titles such as Dragon Ball Z (1989-1996), Naruto (2002-2007), and One Piece (1997-); and popular shōjo titles such as Sailor Moon (1992-1997), Fruit Baskets (2001), and Vampire Knight (2008). The word shōjo actually means “young girl,” but she represents more than a marketing category, a character type, or a cultural symbol. The shōjo is a site of global interconnectivity, gendered negotiation, and a struggle for power.[3] She sells herself as “Japanese” and also “other,” not quite here, and not quite there. She is visible, displaced, and opaque. Further, she has a surface-level body that allows for liminal agency through a gaze that fleetingly commands audience attention.[4] Each iteration of the shōjo, therefore, is imbued with struggles for power, the maintenance of traditional gendered hierarchies, and the hopes and anxieties of future possibilities.
English-language shōjo scholarship is rich with analyses that span decades. The recent collection of Berndt et al (2019), Shōjo Across Media: Exploring “Girl” Practices in Contemporary Japan, demonstrates a shift in this scholarship toward a perspective that does not conflate the symbolic shōjo with real-life girls, but rather a curated concept that real girls can apply or be seen as.[5] It is this perspective that I take up in my analysis of Ouran, which demonstrates the possibilities of the mythological and performativity for girls, boys, and nonbinary folks. The concept of shōjo as a stereotypical idea of girlhood and femininity is hundreds of years old, having begun in the Meiji period of Japan (1868-1912).[6] Girls are traditionally expected to be quiet, compliant, and accepting of the demands of their male spouses and elder family members, and this expectation is enculturated during primary school years where girls are controlled and punished for performances that fall outside of normative boundaries.[7] In addition, gender performance is a highly visible performance, where girls are expected to dress in school uniforms in skirts, and boys in pants. The shōjo manga genre, since the 1970s, has done incredible boundary work in expanding the limitations of rigid gender roles. It is this fascinating fifty-year progression of mediated mythology—a site of struggle for power and popularity among woman and man creators and audiences—that leads us into stories beyond even what Ouran could hope to accomplish.
In this essay I use a combination of semiotic theory and performativity theory to analyze the text, especially the first and last episodes, which show the animation of soulful bodies as moved through the narrative—and thus, the mythological status of the shōjo symbol.
In order to analyze the symbolic function of the shōjo, which aligns with Berndt et al’s call for scholarship that understands the shōjo as a curated concept that real girls can apply or be seen as, a semiotic approach is needed to investigate the meaning-making process negotiated between creator, text, and audience.
A symbol can be understood as mythic, what Roland Barthes would define as “a second-order semiological system . . . constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it, composed of the signifier-signified-sign.”[8] The process of creating a sign, a symbol that communicates something in the world, has two parts: one, a signifier, a word or symbol, and two, a signified, the mental image conjured when one encounters the signifier. This process is known as signification, and it is what creates meaning in the world by connecting signifiers and signifieds as signs. The sign “shōjo” conjures a mental image of a young girl, which is subjective for the individual based upon taste, desire, experience, history, and so on. What makes the shōjo mythic, though, is that it obscures the truth of real girls’ experiences through animated performance, naturalizing a specific set of expectations that young girls should embody, and a specific set of viewing practices that audiences should take up. In other words, myth has a double function: “it points out and it notifies, it makes us understand something, and it imposes on us.”[9] This naturalized set of expectations helps to reify the dominant structures of society, which can seem so to other folks that do not, for example, visually conform to the set standards. What Ouran does for the shōjo myth is to subvert the impositions generally called forth by its performance, in that two main characters do not visually conform to set standards of gender and sexuality.
The condition of a mediated, or media environment, matters for the characters’ performances and representations. Like the shōjo symbol, the televisual landscape is a liminal space: whereas the shōjo exists in an ambiguous plane between childhood and adulthood, the televisual landscape exists between the creator(s) and the audience. Through the process of encoding and decoding, audiences receive texts in three ways: dominant, negotiated, or oppositional readings. These three types of readings were first proposed by Stuart Hall (1977) in “Encoding/Decoding” in relation to the analysis of audience reception of televisual communication. What matters for Hall, and for something like the analysis of non-normative gender performativity within a patriarchal paradigm, is the role that power plays in having an effect to “influence, entertain, instruct, or persuade, with very complex perceptual, cognitive, emotional, ideological or behavioral consequences.”[10] Viewers have an affective relationship with their beloved texts that is messy, complex, and at times contradictory. Hall’s terms help to make sense of these possible responses, or decodings.
Note the different types of readings: dominant readings occur when a viewer decodes the message within the bounds of the dominant, hegemonic code.[11] A negotiated reading occurs when a viewer decodes the message within the dominant code, accepts some of the message as legitimate, and rejects other parts of it based upon their situated logics.[12] It is not possible to specify at a totalizing level which parts of the message a viewer will accept or modify, because the negotiation happens at a local level, where the viewer’s experiences, values, beliefs, and so on may run up against the dominant codes. The final type, an oppositional reading, occurs when the viewer decodes the message in an alternative framework.[13] My reading of Ouran High School Host Club is negotiated, in that while I understand the premise of the show, I am taking up Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and coupling it with Thomas Lamarre’s concept of “soulful bodies” in order to further the possibilities of the show’s impact.
Much of what the characters do in Ouran is perform: they perform as hosts to charm young women, and they perform various gender identities for monetary and personal reasons. They continuously perform themselves through stylized dressing patterns, looking practices, and actions that wear away at stereotypical expectations into more meaningful identities with complex needs, desires, fears, and goals. Over the course of the series, the struggle for identification is shown through a complex intersection of historical framing, societal expectation, youthful curiosity, and rebellion against existing boundaries of acceptable performance. According to Butler, gender is not passively scripted on the body, and neither is it determined by nature, language, the symbolic, or the overwhelming history of patriarchy. Gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure, but if this continuous act is mistaken for a natural or linguistic given, power is relinquished to expand the cultural field bodily through subversive performances of various kinds.[14]
In a televisual environment, gender is understood through a process of representation and looking practices. Though shōjo media is intended for girls, it has also been a genre occupied by male audiences and creators since the 1970s, where men began to turn to shōjo manga to explore their discomfort with male-dominated society.[15] The stylized representations of gender performance in shōjo media can be understood through repetitive images and ritualistic viewing practices. In other words, characters’ clothing as either a perpetual outfit or constantly changing style can inform the way audiences perceive that character’s gender. This is supported by Thomas Lamarre’s concept of “soulful bodies” to describe the affective experience of watching anime, in which “spiritual, emotional, or psychological qualities appear inscribed on the surface” of a character’s body.[16] In this way we can understand that character performance and visual style impose or subvert the shōjo myth—Ouran does both.
Written by Bisco Hatori, Ouran High School Host Club began as a serial manga, published in LaLa magazine as tankobon[17] between September 2002 and November 2010. The manga series spans 18 chapters, the anime series 26 episodes (2006), and the television drama 11 episodes (2012). Most recently, the manga was adapted to a live action musical in January 2022. The series is classified as both a “gender bender” and “reverse harem,” which will be explained later. Proclaimed as Hatori’s most successful series, it received a lot of attention globally. In 2019, she attended anime convention Anime Expo as a panel host, during which an attendee asked about Ouran’s gender and sexuality expressions. I quote Hatori’s response at length to demonstrate the creator’s progressive motivations for character construction:
I really feel that Ouran is really about relationships, individuality, and being yourself. That was always my intent. Being yourself also applies to your sexual orientation. For example with Kyoya, like I said before he had a cool prototype but he’s actually intense. I think that really applies to how people are multidimensional. With Haruhi, Haruhi has this ability to see past the facade and see who people really are. Playing off how people are more than one dimensional, that’s how I came up with her father.[18]
The main cast of characters includes leading female protagonist Haruhi Fujioka, the foolish prince and main love interest Tamaki Suoh, the forbidden lovers and twins Kaoru and Hikaru Hiitachin, the lolita boy Mitsukuni Honinozuka paired with strong and silent type Takashi Morinozuka, and the cool guy Kyoya Ootari. Tamaki, Hikaru, and Kyoya express romantic interest for Haruhi throughout the series; Tamaki is the concluded victor of Haruhi’s reciprocated affection. Other suitors make passes at Haruhi throughout the series, including a young woman from an all-girls school who attempts to be Haruhi’s first kiss and a future Yakuza-leader who develops interest in Haruhi while under the pretense that she is a boy. Haruhi occupies a gender fluid and sexually ambiguous space within the series: she declares in the second episode that she does not care whether others view her as a girl or guy, and sees every love interest as a serious potentiality. The noted multidimensionality of Ouran’s cast is one of the features that made the series so successful. It enters into a conversation with the shōjo genre and points out that tropes and stereotypes limit the expression and possibilities of characters.
For Ouran then, the identification and subversion of shōjo genre character stereotypes is the quality that makes the series important to critically engage with for U.S. readers. As Sarah Kornfield argues, “Gender Benders are created in Japan for Japanese readers, and then exported and translated for U.S. readers; as such, the cultural slippage for U.S. readers creates a space where gender-as-a-construct is more apparent than in mainstream U.S. entertainment.”[19] This space is the one that I perform my analysis in, calling out performances by Ouran’s characters as well as other visual symbols in which cultural slippage points to various constructs as myth, not nature. Furthermore, this series, in conversation with historical gender and sexuality conventions of Japanese art and media, has allowed for new territory to be claimed in shōjo media, which expands the possibilities for shōjo embodiment. This territory stakes out new possibilities for gender, sexual, and romantic performance, which matter for audiences who desire to experiment and identify with visual constructions that complement and complicate their own identities.
The main plot of Ouran begins and ends with a seemingly traditional, heteronormative (even patriarchal) romantic pairing between Haruhi and Tamaki. However, throughout the plot there are pleasurable moments of ambiguous gender, sexuality, and relationship-style boundary transgressions which demand a more complex understanding of the work than the show does. Though not unproblematic in some depictions of queer romance as a trivial curiosity or comedic relief, these moments support the expansion of the shōjo symbol to young males through identification with Tamaki, which will be discussed further in this essay. Several common tropes of the shōjo genre work throughout the main plot to bring the series to a satisfying conclusion for genre-expectant audiences while still doing important boundary work for U.S. audiences who have different gender, sexuality, and relationship-style constructs. In turn, I discuss the importance of the reverse harem genre as it relates to relationship-styles, and dansō identity as it relates to gender and sexuality boundary work.
The reverse harem is the opposite of a harem—a type of romantic partnership where one man has several wives, concubines, or partners,[20] which has great potential for delivering positive representations of queer and/or polyamarous pairings. In reverse harem manga, one woman has three or more love interests who compete for the protagonist’s affection through comedic gestures and sexually suggestive performances that range from accidental nudity exposure, kissing, and groping. Additionally, “the sex, gender, or orientation of the harem members is irrelevant as long as they exclusively, or at least primarily, are vying for the affections of the same individual—who may or may not reciprocate towards one, several, or none of these romantic rivals.”[21] Rattanamathuwong concludes about reverse harem manga from the 1990s that harems are most often “a sexualised space rife with heteronormative influences . . . homosexual or queer characters are sometimes allowed to transgress the boundary of their sexuality, yet their transgressions may solidify rather than destabilise gender binarism.”[22] Ouran has many features of the reverse harem but adds a unique twist that previously studied series do not: Haruhi, the main female protagonist, cross-dresses and performs in suggestively genderfluid and queer ways.
Conventional reverse harem features of Ouran include: (1) An (seemingly) ordinary young woman becomes surrounded by a generally elite, popular, and good-looking group of young men; and, (2) A homosexual or queer love interest.[23] Haruhi is surrounded by “the handsomest boys with too much time on their hands” who operate a host club that acts as “an elegant playground for the super-rich and beautiful.”[24] Her entrance into the host club begins as a financial debt, in which she breaks an expensive vase and must work for the host club to pay back the 8 Million Yen (US$72,000). However, Haruhi’s transgression into this elite space happens due to her academic merit, having received a scholarship to an elite private school that she applied to by herself. In addition, though Haruhi’s “harem” includes six men, only two become potential romantic partners—Tamaki and Hikaru. Though Kyoya can be identified at the very end of the series as a romantic rival due to his father’s interest in a marriage arrangement, he does not explicitly show romantic interest in Haruhi. Each suitor contends for Haruhi’s affection in consensual ways. Hikaru’s romantic attraction to Haruhi develops over the course of the series, culminating in a date that ends with neither party deciding to pursue a romantic relationship, for example. More fleeting romantic possibilities flow through the narrative, such as the rival Zuka Club leader Benibara, whose explicit sexual prowess is directed toward and reciprocated by young women. Though the concept of a harem is limiting and has negative connotations, the subversion of gender role expectations is one way in which gender and relationship boundaries are transgressed. The cultural slippage from Japan to the United States further creates space for U.S. audiences to see these performances as constructs, which invites the negotiation or rejection of previously mythic gender roles.
Though the romantic pairings in this show are mostly ambiguous and undeveloped, it presents opportunities of visual display that inspire non-monogamous pairing styles. This is an important aspect of the boundary work this series performs, as more positive non-monogamous representations give viewers a safe space to freely imagine, identify, and experiment with ideas they might otherwise be unable to process or develop. In the United States, representations of non-monogamous romance in the media are often relegated to narrowly defined, negative stereotypes of polygamous men who dominate wives and children.[25] In addition, reality shows that demonstrate youth experimenting with sexuality and romantic styles are often viewed as taboo, risque, and detrimental. Love triangles are a common trope that see distressed young women being passed back and forth between the hands of two competing men, often negotiating physical affection with both and being scorned by the other party when attachment to the rival is revealed. These narratives are disempowering and limiting stereotypes that contribute to a visual landscape that vilifies sexual and romantic expression outside the boundaries of what is considered normative: ie, heterosexual, monogamous pairings. For the duration of the series, Haruhi is in control of her romantic future, openly and confidently rejecting and choosing who she wishes to be with. Despite the rivalry that Tamaki and Hikaru are embroiled in, Haruhi remains unbothered and develops intimate connections with her host club friends at her own pace. This freedom of choice and expression is a positive and empowering performance that adolescents can engage with, again questioning the normative boundaries of gender and sexuality imposed on them through cultural myths.
The intersections of sex, gender, and sexuality culminate for Haruhi in an emerging gender identity that moves past rigid binaries in favor of open-ended, non-conforming expressions. Marta Fanasca (2019) published a study about dansō escorts in Japan, who are female-to-male crossdressers that are paid for spending time on dates with clients, generally women. The word dansō is translated as “male clothes” and is used to identify F-to-M crossdressers, often working in the Akihabara district of Tokyo:
Dansō identities represent the antithesis of stereotyped femininity in Japan. Their female masculinity is the opposite of what Japanese society expects of girls and women. Their aesthetic presentation, their gender identity, and for some of my informants, their sexual identity, can be read as a reaction against gender expectations, and broadly speaking, against Japanese patriarchal society which still allows women fewer possibilities of personal development compared to those available to men.[26]
For Haruhi, whose androgynous appearance and relaxed male gender performance, as well as ambiguous queer romantic pairings, point to the possibility of her being read as dansō. In episode 2, she states that she “does not care whether she is called a girl or boy,” and unlike her transgender father, does not comfortably apply her performances to one or another gender. In fact, her choice of clothing is often motivated by the male host club members, who force her to cross-dress in public for female clients, and force her to dress in highly feminine clothes during private events. Further, it is Haruhi’s work as a host club member that most exemplifies a dansō identity: like the Akihabara district escorts, she is paid for spending time with female clients while cross-dressing. The visual display of her character style, in instances like these, matter.
The visual production and resultant iconography of the anime series supports positive portrayals of non-normative gender performance, and adds depth and nuance to the signification of shōjo mythologies, which makes new performances and representations intelligible. Most anime is produced through a technique called limited animation, where there are fewer frames per second than the traditional projection rate for film—24, or full animation—12; it is a result of both creative direction and economic drive.[27] Limited animation is now the standard practice of production, Ouran being no exception, and uses approximately 8 frames per second. This technique creates an emphasis of character design through the flattening of planes and the reduction of detail in background image, as well as through animation techniques that focus on moving as few body parts as possible to convey motion. This resultant animation production technique focuses affective energy on the movement of soul, psyche, and brain—the interior which is visibly attached to a body.[28] The surface of the character is what communicates the soul: LaMarre’s soulful body concept, previously introduced. What’s interesting about this connection to Ouran is that in the series’ opening sequences, the characters move across cells of the colorized manga, propelled through the lyrical progression of the song by their gazes and a constant sliding, shifting, and pushing of the frame. The enlarged, animated eyes of shōjo characters are one way in which soulful body performance is enacted and creates meaning, imposing on the viewer to accept dominant readings, whether that actually happens or not. This liminal character agency, enacted through fleeting moments of their gaze, is how viewers identify with Haruhi. In the beginning of the series she often looks down, to the side, and unusually directly to the viewer. However, at the end of the series she confidently looks out at the viewer while dressed as a host club member, signifying acceptance of her identity and willing the viewer to believe in her performance as a shōjo.
Figure 1. Ouran High School Host Club manga, Volume 1, page 5. Haruhi’s initial androgynous/masculine appearance in the story. She enters Music Room 3, and shojo-hood, rejecting feminine gender performance. (Copyright: Ouran Koko Host Club © Bisco Hatori 2003/HAKUSENSHA, Inc.)
Another way that the visual field of Ouran imposes the shōjo myth is through the use of color. In the first episode of the series, Haruhi enters Music Room 3, which is painted in a silky light pink color. She is dressed as a frumpy, androgynous character with little intelligible gendered expression (fig. 1). All of the club members mistake her for a boy when she breaks a valuable vase, and thus she is forced to become a host club member to pay off her debt, which motivates her constant re-entry into the pink room. The visual construction of this opening scene is important as the colors of the walls of the host club room signify femininity, and I would argue, an environment of metaphorical vagina. This stage of adolescence is often a time of self-discovery and bodily maturation; thus, entering and re-entering this environment connotes Haruhi’s beginning reckoning with her gender identity as an adult with future responsibilities of work, family, and motherhood. Throughout the series Haruhi dresses as a boy in public spaces and as a girl in private spaces. She becomes more comfortable in this bifurcated gender expression, fulfilling both roles in specific contexts. In the series’ climax, Haruhi wears a period-style dress in public during a school event and ends up chasing after Tamaki, who is set to leave for France with his arranged fiancée. They both fall into a river, and emerge with Haruhi wearing a white slip, Tamaki holding her to his chest. The rebirth of Haruhi as the innocent maiden reconciles her discomfort with female gender expression, and they return to the music room to reunite with the other host club members. In the closing scene of the series Haruhi is dressed as a host club member, sitting in a chair surrounded by the other host club members in Music Room 3. Over a period of months of varied gender performances (see fig. 1, fig. 2, and fig. 3), Haruhi’s closing image signifies a both/and gender expression: she is androgynous, comfortable with both performances but never fully claiming one or the other as her total identity. It becomes a powerful performance that disrupts the shōjo myth and impositions of binary gender identification.
Figure 2. Ouran High School Host Club manga, Volume 1, page 52. Haruhi’s Middle School photo. Her gender performance is highly feminine at this age, on the cusp of entering her “shojo” years. (Copyright: Ouran Koko Host Club © Bisco Hatori 2003/HAKUSENSHA, Inc.)
The series’ most groundbreaking move is to position Tamaki, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed young man as a symbolic shōjo, where he comfortably expresses fluid play between and around the boundaries of masculinity and femininity from the traditionally read position of power: the white, heterosexual, male. Like Haruhi, Tamaki experiences the material loss of his mother—they are separated due to his father’s romantic transgression, Tamaki is a bastard and can only inherit his father’s empire if he never sees her again. At the end of the series, Tamaki has the opportunity to be reunited with his mother, if he accepts an arranged engagement with an aristocratic French woman. As previously described, Haruhi chases after the couple, urging Tamaki to return to school, and then falls off of a bridge and down into a river. Tamaki jumps after her, catching her midair and walking out of the river with her in her arms. What is significant about this scene is that they are both reborn from the water, cleansed of their past and the limitations set out on them. When Haruhi and Tamaki return to school, Haruhi becomes fully integrated into the elite circle: both Tamaki and Kyoya’s fathers champion their sons as Haruhi’s future husband. Tamaki becomes the master of his own destiny, unlike his father, able to choose his own romantic partner as opposed to the arranged marriage his father was unhappily set in.
Figure 3. Ouran High School Host Club manga, Volume 1, page 34. Haruhi’s masculine gender performance is realized through her servitude to the host club, whose members give her an expensive makeover. (Copyright: Ouran Koko Host Club © Bisco Hatori 2003/HAKUSENSHA, Inc.)
I would extend the water-born transformation further to say that by the end of the series, Tamaki can be identified as a symbolic shōjo because of his performance and visible proximity to Haruhi. He represents several key qualities of the shōjo, which include the loss of a mother figure, suspension within liminal space-time, cross-dressing, and limited gaze agency. In addition, Tamaki is full of love and optimism, he is expressive and sensitive, caring for others, and himself engaged in a love triangle at the end of the series.
Though Butler calls for the destruction of binary gender categorization, what is beneficial about Tamaki’s identification as a symbolic shōjo is that it creates space for men to enact what would otherwise be considered feminine gender performances. Because Tamaki is a tall, strong, and handsome young man with an idealized Western physical appearance, he exemplifies a desired heteronormative masculinity while also extending his gender performance past normative boundaries. While Haruhi’s gender performance, in and of itself, is an important aspect in the subversive success of the series, coupled with Tamaki’s gender performance it begins to show audiences that both normative gender roles can be transgressed with positive consequence. It is stories like this that allow us to “think [of] a world in which acts, gestures, the visual body, the clothed body, the various physical attributes usually associated with gender, express nothing.”[29] Expanding the shōjo symbol to a traditional space of power, the male subjectivity, allows transgressions into the space from others, therefore opening up new possibilities of equality, or better yet, the erosion of binary gender roles as an identifiable quality of inherent power and privilege.
There are many moments when Ouran High School Host Club shines as an example of the way forward in boundary work at intersections of gender, queer, and romantic identity—just as there are moments when the show retains signifiers of the shōjo genre that are problematic. I call attention specifically to the shōjo symbol as a site of constant struggle: for meaning, power, identity, control. It is a symbol loaded with hundreds of years of history that would sediment it as coding for the female sex. However, when representations such as Tamaki enact the shōjo myth, it’s possible to see a future where this previous sedimentation erodes, leaving space open for new meaning. Where before fixed gender categories called attention to binary differences—the shōjo is a girl—the inclusion of Tamaki as a boy into the symbol muddles the binary by showing that the symbol can be both/and. From there, it is easier to see how the labeling of Haruhi as dansō makes sense, which, as was previously explained, is a nonbinary gender identity. With the shōjo symbol wholly encompassing the normative gender binary system, the distinction between each becomes less important, leading into a direction where different gender identities might be encompassed within the symbol too, therefore fixing new ideas of what it means to exist in the world as a young person. A world where students like Haruhi can say they’re androgynous or dansō in an inclusive space that respects their fluid style of gender performance without needing to try to ascribe them to a binary category through dress style or romantic partnerships; a world where students like Tamaki can freely dance, sing, play the piano, and cry without needing to double down on “being a man” through heterosexual romantic interests and a protective attitude of every woman or child under his charge. In other words, a world where young people can freely express themselves without needing to reify their identity within the limiting, marginalizing, or oppressive binary categories offered. Yuri!!! On Ice (2016), for example, demonstrates the progression of the shōjo symbol to primarily performances by young men who are competitive figure skaters. A yaoi (boy-boy) love story, the show was heralded as groundbreaking in its serious depictions of both queer romance and feminized male performances. The ten-year difference between Ouran and Yuri!!! demonstrate that, over time, boundary work does create new possibilities.
Kendall Belopavlovich (they/them) is a Doctoral Candidate of the Rhetoric, Theory, and Culture program at Michigan Technological University. Working at the intersections of film and media studies, and Indigenous studies, Kendall is a settler scholar whose work bridges disciplines, knowledge systems, and communities. Their current research interests include Japanese anime and manga portrayals of Indigenous peoples; land acknowledgement statements and anticolonial institutional education and outreach; and intersections of queer-polyamorous-gender identity. They are the Indigenous Studies area chair for the Midwest Popular Culture Association. Their work regarding the adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans novel by James Fenimore Cooper as Japanese manga is being published in a forthcoming book edited by Dr. Kendra Sheehan entitled, Cross-Cultural Influences Between Japanese and American Pop Cultures: Powers of Pop. A writer in many regards, Kendall is the author of Bloody Awakening (2020), and Some Summer Nights (2023).
[1] Marta Fanasca, “Crossdressing Dansō/negotiating Between Stereotypical Femininity and Self-Expression in Patriarchal Japan,” Girlhood studies 12, no. 1 (2019): 33–48.
[2] Bancha Rattanamathuwong, “Queering the Harem: Queerness in Reverse Harem Manga and Anime,” Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics ahead-of-print, no. ahead-of-print (n.d.): 1–14.
[3] Jaqueline Berndt, Kazumi Nagaike, and Ōgi Fusami, Shōjo Across Media: Exploring “Girl” Practices in Contemporary Japan (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 2-3.
[4] Forrest Greenwood, “The Girl at the Center of the World: Gender, Genre, and Remediation in Bishōjo Media Works,” Mechademia 9 (2014): 239. https://doi.org/10.5749/mech.9.2014.0237
[5] Berndt, Nagaike, and Fusami, Shōjo Across Media, 1.
[6] Fanasca, “Crossdressing Dansō,” 36.
[7] Ibid., 37-38.
[8] Roland Barthes, and Annette Lavers, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 114.
[9] Ibid., 226.
[10] Stuart Hall, “Encoding Decoding,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (Routledge, 1993), 509.
[11] Ibid., 515.
[12] Ibid., 516.
[13] Ibid., 517.
[14] Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (Dec. 1988): 531.
[15] Berndt, Nagaike, and Fusami, Shōjo Across Media, 359.
[16] Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 201.
[17] Tankobon are standalone Japanese books, where most manga are published in anthologies that include many different stories.
[18] Lynzee Loveridge, “Ouran High School Host Club Manga Creator Bisco Hatori at Anime Expo 2019,” Anime News Network, August 2, 2019, https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2019-08-02/ouran-high-school-host-club-manga-creator-bisco-hatori-at-anime-expo-2019/.148776
[19] Sarah Kornfield, “Cross-Cultural Cross-Dressing: Japanese Graphic Novels Perform Gender in U.S,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 28, no. 3 (2011): 214.
[20] Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. “harem,” accessed December 14, 2021, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/harem
[21] “Reverse Harem Manga,” Anime Planet, accessed December 14, 2021, https://www.anime-planet.com/manga/tags/reverse-harem
[22] Rattanamathuwong, “Queering the Harem”, 12.
[23] Ibid., 5.
[24] See Ouran High School Host Club (2006): episode 1, Tamaki’s opening monologue.
[25] See, Sister Wives (2010-2011), and Big Love (2006-2011), for example.
[26] Fanasca, “Crossdressing Dansō,” 45.
[27] Lamarre, The Anime Machine, 187.
[28] Ibid., 203.
[29] Butler, “Performative Acts,” 530.
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