DE GRUYTER MOUTON
Gendered expressions in a popular anime
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–
The phonological form ee instead of ai and oi: Ikenee. ‘I can’t go.’
–
The particle no followed by ka or ka yo for seeking confirmation or agree-
ment: Iku no ka (yo)? ‘Will you go?’
–
The AUX verb da for declaration followed by ga or ga na: Soo da ga (na).
‘It is so.’
3.3.2.2 Moderately masculine
–
The auxiliary verb da for declaration followed by na or yo na or ga na:
Soo da (yo)(na). ‘It must be so.’
–
The interrogative marker kai: Iku kai. ‘Will you go?’
The total number of SFFs used by the characters are: Jet (578), Spike (524), Faye
(301), and Ed (78). It should be noted that the female characters’ tokens are
proportionally smaller than those of the main male characters as they appear
in fewer episodes. Despite her occupation as a bounty hunter and her not-
so-lady-like mannerisms, including gambling, smoking, fighting, and reckless
driving, Faye’s physical appearance is undoubtedly ideally feminine to most
heterosexual males. Additionally, through her use of personal pronouns and
her use of strongly and moderately feminine SFFs (44 percent and 16 percent),
including multiple tokens of kashira and tonally rising wa, Faye linguistically
projects a strong use of JWL. According to Okamoto’s (1995: 304) naturalistic
data, the forms that are typically considered most feminine such as SFP wa
(with rising intonation) or kashira hardly occurred. Within her data of a total
of 1500 consecutive sentence tokens collected from ten female college students,
the students used wa twice and kashira only once. Okamoto (1995: 304) also
notes that the students used wa when quoting older women. Her findings sug-
gest that this form’s use is restricted to highly idealized JWL. Faye, who is sup-
posed to be using this idealized language, used forms that are reported to be
highly idealized JWL expressions such as kashira 10 times (8 percent) and wa
and its variants 58 times (44 percent) out of a total of 131 strong feminine SFF
tokens. Ed (from her computer hacker alias ‘Radical Edward’), despite being a
skinny, food-loving teenager who is often mistaken for a boy by other characters
in the show (including her own father) hardly uses masculine SFFs. Out of a
total 78 SFF tokens, she only used a strong masculine form ze once, while using
feminine tokens a total of five times (7 percent), preferring mostly the neutral
SFFs (72 tokens/94 percent). All in all, Ed’s boyish identity is due less to her
use of masculine forms than to the lack of feminine forms in her speech.
Generally, the female guest protagonists and side characters that are young,
attractive, and submissive used feminine SFFs more than other SFFs, while the
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DE GRUYTER MOUTON
62
Mie Hiramoto
opposite held true for the old, unattractive, and domineering female characters.
Additional examples of the former type include Katrina, the attractive irregular
character from Ep. 1 (Asteroid Blues) and Judy, the sexy host of Big Shot!, the TV
show which gives information on current high-profile bounties, and is viewed
regularly by the Bebop crew throughout the series. One exception to this gener-
alization of feminine SFF use is a female villain, Twinkle, who used markedly
more feminine SFFs (78 percent) than the neutral forms (22 percent). Despite
her usage of feminine SFFs heretofore reserved for younger, attractive charac-
ters, the aging Twinkle leads a group of monkey-like eco-terrorists, is referred
to as Mama by members of the group, and generally holds a motherly position
for her troop. Despite the nature of her occupation, she dresses in a feminine
way and speaks arrogantly by mixing feminine forms and diminutive forms:
(2)
Twinkle Murdock’s speech (Episode 3: Gateway Shuffle)
[to a big man eating an endangered species at a restaurant]
Booya? Ganymede no uminezumi wa, tottemo atama ga yokute, yasashii
doobutsu datte gozonji?
[Young man, are you aware that the Ganymede sea rat is a very intelli-
gent and kind animal, hmm?]
[to general public, before releasing a nerve-gas named Monkey Business]
Hohohohoho. Minna saru ni onari!
[(Haughty laugh.) I’ll make monkeys of you all!]
In the first excerpt, the address term booya usually refers to younger boys and
is insulting when used to address adults. The term gozonji is a polite form of
the verb ‘to know,’ but when used without the polite auxiliary interrogative form
desu ka?, gozonji by itself sounds diminutive. In the second excerpt, Twinkle’s
laughter, hohohohoho, marks polite femininity, but it can be interpreted as arro-
gant, especially considering that the sentence following it is an imperative. The
imperative verb here is onari, which is bimorphemic with the beautifying prefix
o- and the verb
naru ‘to be/to become.’ The beautifying prefix is often used in
polite nominal expressions, such as sushi vs. osushi ‘sushi’ vs. ‘sushi [+polite].’
Twinkle’s frequent use of the feminine SFFs may be an example of her arrogant
speech style. Many formulaic verbal expressions take the same prefix, as in
okiotsukete (lit. ‘
o + pay attention’), meaning ‘please take care,’ and
oyasumi
lit. ‘o + rest’, meaning ‘good night.’ When used in non-formulaic imperatives
the ‘o + imperative verb’ form, as with onari ‘become,’ sounds condescending
as it is not followed by the polite request ending, kudasai ‘please~.’ All in all,
Twinkle’s language use does not conform to a normative submissive feminine
category, as does that of the babe characters. Twinkle’s arrogant use of feminine
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