The Girl at the Center of the World: Gender, Genre, and Remediation in Bishōjo Media Works

In the sculpture garden at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center stands a most curious piece. Deborah Butterfield’s Woodrow (1988), a sculpture cast in bronze, depicts a skeletal horse-like figure constructed entirely out of what appears to be wooden sticks, logs, and branches. The statue catches the eye with its arresting appearance, but what truly holds the attention is its accompanying inscription. In it, the sculptor describes her early experiences making “horses out of real mud and sticks . . . to reflect how much a horse is part of his environment.” This statement is interesting for the way that it reflects a common perception about animals: that they lack sufficient distance from their environment and thus do not have access to the world as such, in the manner of human beings. As Martin Heidegger argues, “a stone is worldless. Plant and animal likewise have no world; but they belong to the covert throng of a surrounding into which they are linked.” ¹ The environment that plants and animals inhabit is not a world, with the full expanse of possibility and potentiality implied by the term. Or perhaps, as Akira Mizuta Lippit puts it, animals do inhabit a world of sorts, “but this world is not their own: it is another’s world.” ² It is our world, humanity’s world: a world secured for our benefit by means of our faculty of language. We speak and listen in the abstract thoughts enabled by language, thus affording us the ability to conceive of the future: to anticipate, to fear, to hope, to dream.³

This essay seeks to address the topic of origins by analyzing the agency of the shōjo, the ever-cute emblem of femininity who circulates through multiple spheres of anime and manga fandom. Like the animal, the shōjo finds herself cast as an integral part of her environment, lacking distance from it. Here, however, the environment in question is not that of “nature”—the environment of rocks, plants, and animals. Rather, it is a mediated environment, an environment constructed from media. When we differentiate the shōjo as a concept (characters in media) from the shōjo as a class of human beings (girls, or women in a more general sense), we do so on the basis of the signifiers of her mediation: the quality of a line that forms a portion of a facsimile of a face (or a particular arrangement of lines), the layout in which she presents herself on a page (surrounded by bouquets of lilies and halftone), the manner in which she operates through narratives, or the presence of a generic signifier. When we speak of the shōjo as a concept, then, we implicitly reference what Thomas Lamarre refers to as “a gap between girl and image.”⁴

But though the shōjo remains as enmeshed within her environment as the animal does within its own, she may not entirely lack agency because of it. For while the animal may lack access to language, it does not sacrifice the ability to reemerge in the world because of that. Rather, the animal privileges other forms of communication, other modes of knowledge, other means of accessing the world and the future. “Animals,” Lippit writes, “and their capacity for instinctive, almost telepathic communication . . . put into question the primacy of human language and consciousness as optimal modes of communication.”⁵ They invite consideration of the potential of the unconscious and, by extension, the cinema.⁶

Similarly, the shōjo reaches out into the world through her gaze, re-emerging from the page or the screen to address the viewer, to make demands, to promise potentialities and futures untold. She speaks across the boundaries of language and culture, unveiling with each glance something of the structure of the hypermediated world we humans choose to construct and inhabit.

To explore this unveiling, this paper will examine the mechanisms through which the shōjo’s gaze operates in The Garden of Sinners (2008–11, Kara no kyōkai)—a media saga comprising seven theatrical films and...