How An Anime Made Me A Feminist, by Markgraf aged 24 and a bit

Team BadRep were sent a writing prompt this month: What is your favourite film or TV series, and why? If it’s what you’d call ‘feminist-friendly’, what about it appealed? If it isn’t, how does that work for you, and are there nonetheless scenes, characters and so on that have stayed with you and continue to occupy a soft spot for you as a feminist pop culture adventurer?

Now stop asking such awkward questions.

Gather ’round, Internet; let me tell you the tale of how I became a feminist. It’s a good one, I promise. Take a seat, please! Open your mind-hatch and brace yourselves for my infosquirt.

(How many articles have I opened like that? ALL OF THEM)

I discovered that I was a feminist at university. I was nineteen. It took an enthusiastic, fiery, inspirational woman with icy blonde hair and a stack of books about gender and queer theory explaining to my class that feminism was, you know, Feminism, and not, in fact, the exclusive reserve of stereotypical humourless Second Wave womyn-born-womyn fanatics.

This came as a great relief to little transgender me, and highlighted that everything I thought about sexuality, gender expression and the nature of equality neatly fitted under the feminist banner. What a relief! So that made me a feminist, because I held those views. And those beliefs were almost unanimously implanted in my psyche by an anime called Revolutionary Girl Utena at the age of about fifteen.

They love each other very much. Did I mention how gorgeous this series is?

An anime? I hear you cry! An anime? Being feminist? An animé?, your incredulous cries ring loud through the intertubes to my desk, what, the Japanese cartoons that are full of the degradation and exploitation of women, where the source material contains less-than-consensual sex and the American dubs sanitise out all the lesbianism? Surely not.

Where did all this incest come from?:(

Well, actually, yes. It’s true as treacle. Readers who’ve seen it will already know why, of course, but let’s take this from the top – be warned, people who haven’t seen it: here be spoilers.

Revolutionary Girl Utena is a shoujo (“girls'”) animé set in a high school. It’s all very sweet to start with; you’ve got the hero (Utena) and her best friend, and you’ve got the absurdly powerful school council. And then there’s a heavy injection of what-the-fuck when you meet the Duelling Theme. There’s a mechanism in place for long, convoluted reasons, whereby selected Duellists – designated by rings – duel (with swords) to win the Rose Bride as a prize. Her name is Anthy, and her entire purpose is to be a fought-over, won-and-owned slave.

So far so messed up. But it’s fucked up for a purpose. The hero, Utena, has a prince complex. She wants to – literally – be a prince that rescues princesses – that’s her gender expression. She cross-dresses habitually and is frequently described as “a tomboy” (despite actually being quite femme), and she falls in love with Anthy, primarily by wanting to save her. The whole series is full of fluid, ambiguous gender expression and sexuality, and it’s treated and handled in a non-sensational, perfectly intelligible way. Nothing is mysterious or exotic – it is just the way it is.

The greatest thing about Utena, however, is that it tells the story of a woman who desires and ascribes to an atypical gender expression and her struggle to make her gender expression fit and work in a world that is vehemently and viciously opposed to it – and wins. Sort of. Utena’s own end (and I’m sorry for the spoilers here) is sacrificial and tragic, but in sacrificing herself she saves and liberates her friends who go on to live and love as they want. It’s not your average coming-of-age, adolescence-is-hard story: there’s pitch black themes of rape and sexual coercion in there that are painful and harrowing to watch, but resolve themselves. It’s a story of survival, but it’s not just a story of female survival. There’s Utena who is absolutely not your average girl, and there’s Mamiya and Miki, both femme men, and survivors of the destructive obsession of others.

Mamiya

So I fell madly in love with it, as I’m sure you’ll understand, because it was a thing that showed me that there was hope for me, as a trans* person, because here was a whole series full of atypical gender expression that just existed, neither as a joke nor as a plot point. It also demonstrated to me me that it is possible to fight and vanquish your ascribed social role. It’s a story of seeing oppression and unfairness and fighting it with every fibre of your being. Utena literally gives her life to liberate Anthy from her sexual degradation, slavery and torment because she cannot live in a world that would condone and support such condemnation. Every time I watch the series to the end (and it’s bloody long!) I end up in floods of tears and with a profound desire to march around town shouting at people.

Usually I draw things instead. But, you know, the desire’s there.

I absolutely recommend Revolutionary Girl Utena to you guys – I mean, it’s not without its problems, nothing is – because of how powerful and liberating it is to watch, but I caution you that the themes get darker than the forgotten recesses of hell and some bits are genuinely hard to watch. Each character is sympathetic, but flawed to fuck, and no-one emerges at the other end untarnished – and that’s perfect. Everyone fights and is wounded, because that’s how life is. Everyone’s got a streak of trauma or viciousness in them, because that’s how people are. Despite its weird, fantastic elements, it’s very engrossing and believable – and that’s what makes it so effective. It deconstructs the idea of rigidly set, gender-ascribed roles in an allegorical tale full of people. Flawed, understandable, hurting people.

And that is why I am a feminist. Because my adolescence was spent watching the adolescence of Utena. Do seek it out. It’s incredible. And deeply, deeply weird, but we all love that.

Images courtesy of Giovanna at the fantastic Empty Movement Utena fan resource.