Hey, you’re a girl?: Gendered expressions in the popular anime, Cowboy Bebop Abstract
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DE GRUYTER MOUTON Gendered expressions in a popular anime 63 and polite features fails to meet the norms of ideal JWL. As with personal pro- nouns, the female characters hardly use the masculine SFFs. Other than Ed, who uses ze (a strongly masculine token) once, only two out of a total of 19 female characters use masculine SFFs. One is V.T., the heavy metal queen who also uses ze once. The other is Sister Clara, an orphan keeper who manages a handful of wild homeless children in a ghetto (Ep. 24: Hard Luck Woman). Her usage of the masculine SFPs is limited to zo (strongly masculine) and dana (moderately masculine) once each. Male characters hardly use the feminine SFFs. The main characters, Spike and Jet, use the SFFs almost identically – about 50 percent of the masculine and 50 percent of the neutral SFFs. Among the masculine forms, they mostly use the strongly masculine tokens including the SFPs ze and zo, imperative verb endings, and vowel coalescence ee instead of ai and oi. Overall, they had the highest percentage of masculine token usage out of the 144 male characters. All guest protagonist male characters, including the soft ones such as Gren, a gay saxophone player (Eps. 12 & 13: Jupiter Jazz 1 & 2), and Whitney, Faye’s old love interest (Ep. 15: My Funny Valentine), do not show any feminine SFF tokens. As long as a male character speaks in an idealized masculine form, he is given a normative role. For example, Gren, an openly gay character mentioned above, is portrayed as a mainstream male character and speaks as one would expect a man to speak. In the following excerpts, Faye and Gren discuss his homosexu- ality openly while Gren continues to employ masculine speech throughout. (3)
Ep. 12: Jupiter Jazz 1 [at a bar] FAYE:
Atashi wa mitame hodo karui onna janai wa. [I’m not as simple as I seem, Mr. Saxophone.] GREN:
[Women aren’t my style. Sorry.] [after deciding to go to Gren’s house] GREN:
Kantan ni shinnyooshite ii noka? [And you trust me, just like that?] FAYE:
[You said you weren’t interested in women.] The contrast between Gren’s use of the masculine SFF noka and Faye’s use of feminine forms such as atashi (1PP), wa (with rising intonation, SFP), and desho (SFF) is quite easily seen. In addition to Faye’s feminine linguistic behavior discussed above, she uses the sentence-initial filler, ara, which, although not quantified in this study, is also feminine. On the other hand, when a male character speaks JWL, this flouting of gender norms is highlighted, and such Authenticated | ellmh@nus.edu.sg author's copy Download Date | 2/13/13 12:05 AM DE GRUYTER MOUTON 64 Mie Hiramoto characters are depicted as strange or heretical. The only male characters in the entire series who speak women’s language are a group of transvestites in Ep. 12 (Jupiter Jazz 1). The story is set on Jupiter’s moon Callisto, where no women reside. Spike is in search of his estranged girlfriend Julia and ends up meeting a transvestite named Julius during his search: (4)
Ep. 12: Jupiter Jazz 1 JULIUS:
Shitsurei ne! Juria janai wa, Ju-ri-a-su, Juriasu yo! [Sorry sailor, I’m not Julia. Ju-li-US. My name’s Julius.] SPIKE:
[My mistake.] JULIUS:
[Y’know, Gren’s really the one who might be able to help. I’ve seen him with women on occasion.] J’s FRIEND: Ara, okyaku? [Oh, a customer?] JULIUS:
Chigau wayo. Doomitemo nonke desho? Sa, basho kaemasho. [‘Fraid not, darling. Can’t you see he’s straight? C’mon. Let’s try another corner.] In this excerpt, Julius uses the strongly feminine SFFs wa and wayo as well as the moderately feminine SFF desho. The feminine sentence-initial filler ara used by Julius’s friend additionally serves to demonstrate JWL use very effectively considering their limited presence in the show. This non-normativity is based on simplistic assumptions that are attached to superficial interpretations of the characters’ sexuality. In the last line, Julius calls Spike nonke, a common jargon among homosexuals referring to a straight person (Abe 2004: 208). However, the belief being described here, that a straight male only desires a straight female, is the sexual ideology of hegemonic heterosexuality. Straight men may or may not desire transvestite men especially, as this particular episode repeat- edly shows, considering the comments made by frustrated men on a womanless planet. Moreover, transvestite men’s sexuality cannot be based on their appear- ance alone, outside the idealized world of anime (see Valentine 2003 for detailed discussion). There is an element of erasure in Julius’s use of the term
masculinity), and as a non-normative male who dresses like a woman and is apparently a sex-worker who takes male customers, his use of feminine SFFs justifies this comment. Authenticated | ellmh@nus.edu.sg author's copy Download Date | 2/13/13 12:05 AM Yüklə 233,01 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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