Sounds Like Misogyny: Voicing Cross-gender Roles in Anime and Discourses Surrounding Female Fandom on 2channel

Critical/Queer Approaches to Language and Culture

Critical discourse analysis (hereafter CDA) "aims to investigate critically social inequality as it is expressed, constituted, legitimized, and so on, by language use."¹ In this vein of work, it is highly common for the researcher (the critical discourse analyst) to take an explicit stance, exposing discourse that perpetuates an existing social inequality, and call for its termination. These inequalities require some sort of unjust structure to exist that keeps one party in power and one without. However, these inequalities are not always necessarily bared for the world to see. Derogatory speech, blunt commands, and other similar forms, are fairly easy to notice, even for those unacquainted with critical studies. Yet power is not always manifested in such overt ways. For situations where inequalities are incorporated into everyday speech as a matter of course, fine-detailed analysis becomes necessary to uncover the dynamics at play. This is the "critical" portion of CDA, in that it questions "naturalized and commonsense versions of the world that support the status quo, as well as hegemonic worldviews that subjugate and appropriate any alternative to the established-order representations of reality."² Teun Van Dijk, in his role as the editor for the academic journal Discourse & Society, states: "Critical discourse analysts are not afraid to make use of their social knowledge that being black, being a woman, being young, or being the boss will most likely be evident from the way people write and talk. In other words, they assume that discourse may reproduce social inequality."³

In a similar vein, queer theory is often viewed as a narrowing of critical paradigms, with the starting point being "that the realm of sexuality is used as a starting point for its questioning practice."⁴ It stands to reason that these approaches seek to ascertain and reconceptualize the dominant practices and discourses which dictate our standards for gender and sexuality, and to highlight those negatively affecting people who are deemed to not meet these societal standards. As the dominant practices and discourses that perpetuate the heteronormative social contract are nearly omnipresent in our lives, the true task for the queer theorist "is not so much a matter of deciding what is Queer, but of choosing to view certain behaviors in a non-heteronormative light or from the perspective of the sexually marginalised."⁵ In this study, the queering that has taken place are female voice actors who have transgressed their traditional gender roles to voice male characters, and it will be ascertained how they are perceived, with particular focus on the rationales behind why or why not they are liked, and what role female fans have to play in their continued work.

Gender and Japanese Popular Culture

Many facets of Japanese popular media have become international sensations in recent decades; however, their popularity in situ has also continued to grow. In 2017, following a fifth straight year of growth, Japan's anime industry was worth over 2 trillion yen, or approximately 20 billion USD.⁶ Traditionally, the main participants in this market have been thought of as being male, and have historically been marketed to males.

The diehard fans of these media (and many other cultural phenomena) have been referred to in both contexts as otaku. Originally a semantic expansion of the polite address term "your house" or "you" in Japanese, the first published usage of this term comes from Nakamori Akio in 1983. He used it to characterize the people he saw at Comiket, the (now massive) biannual fan comic market in Tokyo. In his essay "Otaku no kenkyū" (Analysis of otaku), he observed the following: "Either bone-skinny as if from malnourishment, or laughing fat pigs whose foreheads seem to swallow up their thick-rimmed silver glasses … they are usually in the corner of the class with dark, gloomy eyes, trying not to stand out, they have no friends."⁷

While in theory the term otaku is gender-neutral, the general trend is to associate this term with men. The more common recent term to refer...