Chatty AF 239: Sanda Retrospective (WITH TRANSCRIPT)
Tony, Caitlin, and ANN’s Sylvia get together to talk about Paru Itagaki’s madcap dystopic LGBTQ romance battle shonen, featuring a sexy Santa Claus!
LGBTQ+ Tag
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How Just Like Mona Lisa uses speculative fiction to explore gender norms
Bundled in a melodramatic coming-of-age story, the storytelling sometimes falls into fraught tropes about genderqueer people, but it also raises some sincere philosophical questions and pointed commentary on the real world’s many gender paradoxes.
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Interviewing legendary gay manga artist Gengoroh Tagame at the de Young Museum
Tagame Gengoroh is a worldwide legend as a gay erotic manga artist, critic, and advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. Chiaki sat down to interview him about his career and the new exhibit featuring his work.
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Queer Self-Acceptance in Guilty Gear Strive
Testament, Venom, and Bridget’s growth in their personal plotlines runs parallel to the evolution of LGBTQIA+ representation in games, increasingly offering us a roster of nuanced, happy queer characters.
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Throw the Man Away With Me: Rejecting heteronormativity in Run Away With Me, Girl
Much of Run Away With Me, Girl is focused on how heteronormativity cruelly forces queer people to diminish who they are. Thank goodness that the story also envisions so much more for its heroines.
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Orb: On the Movements of the Earth and imagining radical futures
As I watched Orb’s various protagonists stake their lives against a violently oppressive religious institution, my real-life government grew alarmingly hostile toward my existence and those of my ilk. Watching Orb became an acutely personal experience, demonstrating the force with which established power structures will suppress truths that threaten their authority and how hope for radical change can be found through community and collective action.
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In Sailor Moon S and Revolutionary Girl Utena, butchness is vital fluidity
Utena and Haruka are butch female characters who are treated positively and hold center stage in their narratives, making them noteworthy even after all this time.
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BanG Dream! It’s MyGo!!!!!, Ave Mujica, and the Doll in Asian Feminism
Bang Dream: It’s My Go!!!!! and Ave Mujica challenge overly simple distinctions between fake and real that imagine Asian girls as doll-like constructs of femininity and marginalize trans women.
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Kamikaze Girls: An alternative and queer retrospective
The story of lolita-meets-biker-girl was formative to me in my high school years, and rewatching it recently with the Discotek release made me realize the impact it had on my gender, my sexuality, my friendships with others, my self-expression, and self-acceptance.
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Trans Safety and Education Resources
We’ve attempted to put together a list of resources for those feeling a similar sense of fear and powerlessness, in order to emphasize that we can and must protect one another as systems of power not only fail but persecute us.
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Cannibalism, the abject, and queering the narrative in Delicious in Dungeon
The main cast all cross, blur, or sit outside of social norms in some way, engaging in some taboo or another—heroes on the margins who are uniquely placed to engage with the abject horrors of the dungeon and transform them into something else through their unique, outsider perspectives.
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Visiting the CLAMP Exhibition in Tokyo to celebrate 35 years of the legendary manga collective
CLAMP is a creative group of four women who have produced a range of iconic manga across a variety of demographics, from shoujo to seinen. Their body of work was recently celebrated with a showing at the prestigious National Art Center.
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Shattering the Self: A conversation with Blood on the Tracks creator Shuzo Oshimi
Oshimi’s work has not lost its raw power and interest in toxic relationships. However, 2012’s Inside Mari marked a turning point: many of his later works explore the experiences of queer adolescents trying to escape from heteronormative, transphobic, and often misogynist ideas of how one should live.
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Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko! and the toxic workplace
While toxic workplace culture is originally presented as something that’s keeping the couple apart, ultimately the narrative ends up reinforcing it, asserting that finding happiness in love and expressing your own queer identity are less important than maintaining a conservative, capitalistic status quo.
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Hagio Moto’s Marginal and BL manga as feminist fabulation
With regards to her own work, Hagio Moto has often talked about how writing boy’s love manga freed her to explore kinds of stories that she felt like she couldn’t tell about female characters, and 1985’s Marginal is a particularly interesting example of how BL comics can be used to talk about women’s experiences of their own gender and the patriarchy.
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Coming of age as a queer teen in Okazaki Kyoko’s River’s Edge
River’s Edge features a range of queer representations within its central cast, from frank depictions of closeted life and homophobia to more ambiguous depictions of attraction, making it a layered piece of LGBTQIA+ media and a powerful time capsule of the state of queer representation and queer life in Japan during the 1990s.
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Parade Parade and the Phallic Woman Fantasy
Parade Parade is part of a long tradition of media, especially pornographic media, that fetishizes trans and intersex women as victims and perpetrators of rape. It is also somewhat unusual in its focus on lesbian and long-term relationships.
Because we marginalized women are considered too unsanitary for the societies we live in, we are forced to look to the margins of media for representation, even if it also dehumanizes us. The narrative violence of the film, to those of us who relate to Kaori’s position, is not at all unlike how the world outside of Parade Parade treats us trans and/or intersex women.
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Classmates and finding the humanity in clichés
In the afterword of the first volume of Classmates, Nakamura Asumiko wrote of her first BL series, “I wanted to go with something cliche, almost hackneyed.” It’s true, Classmates does indulge many of the standards of the genre. Instead of using these cliches as shortcuts, however, Nakamura uses the reader’s familiarity to build a framework for a humanistic, multifaceted story about queer intimacy, connection, and joy.
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Not Just Roses and Sparkles: Unpacking assumptions about shoujo through Hagio Moto’s work
Manga artist Hagio Moto’s work in particular opened my eyes to how versatile the iconic shoujo style can be as a storytelling tool—not just for romance, but for horror, mystery, and mind-expanding science fiction.
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From Takarazuka to Terayama: The influence of queer theater on Revolutionary Girl Utena
While the influence of theater on Utena isn’t subtle, knowing what specific strains of theater the show references would likely be lost on most viewers. Yet uncovering those histories can be like finding little Rosetta Stones to help you parse a show that prides itself on obscurity.
