drinian wrote:Yeah, my school (Duke University) also offered a course in anime last year. As an added bonus, the professor was a small, older Japanese woman named Yoda... had I taken it, I'm sure I would have slipped up and called her Master Yoda at least once.

2004 Fall AALL 152-01
GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN ANIME

The course will examine a wide range of contemporary Japanese animations that feature young girls (and some adult women), whose characterization and stories revolve around their status as fighters, facing off adversaries using their supernatural forces, martial arts skills, cyborgian prosthetics, and manipulation of varied robotic and other forms of weaponry. Fantastic narratives of heroic (predominantly male) youths fighting evil forces and myriad forms of threats to humanity have been a mainstay in sci-fi/fantasy comic and animations in Japan and elsewhere. Since around mid-1980s, however, there has been an explosion of Japanese anime and manga that feature teenage girls in the central heroic roles, constituting a whole genre of ?fighting girl beauties? (sento bishojo). While some animes featuring girl fighters specifically cater to female audience, a large portion of these works are based on manga serialized in journals published primarily for young male readership, and target male audience in their anime versions as well. The course will investigate how and why girl fighters have become such prominent and pervasive aspects of anime landscape by studying the history of contemporary anime and manga, commercial interests of producers and distributors, anime fans and their activities (e.g., including their production of fanzines and cultures of anime conventions/costume play events), and broader trends in Japanese popular culture. Through these discussions, we will consider what this particular genre of anime suggests about the construction of gender identity and sexuality in contemporary Japanese and global youth culture. The questions to be raised in the class would include whether these fighting girls may function not only as erotic objects but also as points of identification for male viewers; what kind of subject-position and viewing pleasures do these works offer to female audience; and how these works and their reception relate to the transformations of gender construction and attitudes on sexuality in contemporary Japanese society. Furthermore, in view of the global reach of anime today, we will discuss whether some of the analyses of the genre linked to the localized context of original production may have to be extended and/or altered as we consider their impacts on the audience outside of Japan.

Assigned anime included, IIRC, stuff like Chobits. I wasn't in the class.

Carl Horn wrote:HOLY macaroni and CHEESE! Do people actually get credits for this stuff? Shouldn't students be studying subjects where the knowledge of a professor could really help you--like the state of contemporary Islam, or Chinese microeconomic models? Especially when every semester means thousands of dollars more in student loans to repay?

The otaku is more frugal with the precious resource of intellect. He quietly uses his "transformations of gender construction" to beat off; he doesn't go around trying to get a B.A. out of it--much less tenure.

Timesplitter 01 wrote:You have to be kiddin that her name was Yoda

drinian wrote:
http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/Literature/faculty/tomiko

That picture is not very recent.

drinian wrote:

Carl Horn wrote:HOLY macaroni and CHEESE! Do people actually get credits for this stuff? Shouldn't students be studying subjects where the knowledge of a professor could really help you--like the state of contemporary Islam, or Chinese microeconomic models? Especially when every semester means thousands of dollars more in student loans to repay?

The otaku is more frugal with the precious resource of intellect. He quietly uses his "transformations of gender construction" to beat off; he doesn't go around trying to get a B.A. out of it--much less tenure.

Carl, I go to one of the top liberal-arts/research universities in the country. There's an old joke that the last bastion of Marxism was not the Soviet Union, but the Duke Literature Department (which co-sponsored this class). Apparently, from what I've observed here and by proxy at other top schools like Harvard, Yale, etc. is that we consider it part of our duty as elite institutions to subsidize "____ studies" departments, where you can fill in that blank with "Women's," "African-American," "Latino/a," and so forth, which serve to palliate, it seems to me, some sort of perceived guilt on the part of the founders of elite institutions, who belonged to none of these groups.

That's not to say that the liberal arts have no value -- I took an eye-opening anthropology course on West Africa, for instance, and the class in medieval English religious poetry I took brings up fundamental questions. They're all part of the school's larger goal of producing complete human beings (hence "the humanities") rather than closed-minded, irrational automatons. "Those who do not know the past are doomed to repeat it," etc. etc. For the record, that's something I believe in as a double history-comp.sci major.

Even so, that is luckily not all we do, and there are certainly courses on Islam and China (like the one I *am* taking this coming semester) that are much better-attended than courses like this, which the majority of students here don't even know exist.

Carl Horn wrote:It's just disingenuous guilt, over knowing a book I co-wrote, Japan EDGE, has been used for evil instead of good, becoming assigned reading in four university courses that I know of--at Keio, UC Santa Cruz, the University of Delaware, and the College of William and Mary. Actually, I majored in history myself at Pomona, but my thesis was on the shifting definition of militarism in U.S. occupation policies towards Japan--I would have been whacked with a stave, zazen style, if I had presented a proposal to write on anime. Having said that, I've found history continually useful in writing and editing on anime and manga--everything has a historical context, after all (of course, I'm sure if I had majored in geology, I would explain anime in terms of fracture planes and erosion processes instead ).

But I think the liberal arts don't necessarily broaden people's minds in of themselves; that is, I don't think it's the type of course or field of study that's important, so much as the attitude of the instructor. You could have a person teaching business management who encourages free thinking, and a person teaching sociology who only wants students to accept a single point of view. I was lucky that my professors--and some of them were in fact Marxists--never tried to demand I necessarily see things as they did, but instead encouraged me to think about not only the knowledge, but the interpretation of the knowledge.

Carl Horn wrote:It's just disingenuous guilt, over knowing a book I co-wrote, Japan EDGE, has been used for evil instead of good, becoming assigned reading in four university courses that I know of--at Keio, UC Santa Cruz, the University of Delaware, and the College of William and Mary. Actually, I majored in history myself at Pomona, but my thesis was on the shifting definition of militarism in U.S. occupation policies towards Japan--I would have been whacked with a stave, zazen style, if I had presented a proposal to write on anime.

Recently, Miyazaki and Anno took an extraordinary journey together, an air safari across the Sahara in a vintage plane, which retraced the path of aviation pioneer and author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Landing in the middle of that desert from whose winds Ghibli takes its name, the two posed for a picture on a dune, striking the statuary poses of bearded, bespectacled leaders of the revolution. Miyazaki, with the dignity of a grey suit, the shade of a sensible hat, points straight ahead. Anno, in a black pullover, his bare head covered with scraggly curls, raises his arm high in the air; after a moment you realize he's doing an Ultraman pose. Sorry - it's not "look upon my works, ye might, and despair", because anime is just in the hands and the imagination; there's nothing ever there to see but the man. And it's not like they're going to stick around waiting to be covered by the sand - father or son, they've got places to go still. Whatever place you want to put them, they'll leave that somewhere behind. They prefer anywhere.

http://www.gwern.net/docs/eva/1996-newtype-anno-interview wrote:But that doesn't mean never going through computer-aided drawing. I just wanted to show that, as far as animated drawings as a means of expression went, using sketches could work. I meant a message to those misguided fools who have expressions like: 'since it is not on celluloid, it is unfinished' or 'because it's not on celluloid, it is slapdash'. To destroy at all costs the kind of ideas that I myself had held. Once you hold the prejudice that you can't use anything but cels to represent characters, you've finally become a fetishist... the first time we showed this was through what the 'lines' in episode 16 narrated.