It's Awesome 70s Shoujo Week!
Oct. 9th, 2010 04:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanetThis week I've been really enjoying reading the posts that starlady38 and marshtide have been serving up on 70s shoujo manga (most recent only linked here; check around!). I wanted to contribute too, but sadly I've read very little 70s shoujo manga beyond Rose of Versailles. Then I remembered: ah, Kaze to Ki no Uta! I've watched the anime, at least, I'll dig up my notes on that! I went to my files. There were no notes. So I decided to watch it again and write some. This essay...thing...is the result.
Kaze to Ki no Uta Sanctus –sei naru kana [The Song of Wind and Trees Sanctus –can this become holy?] Dir. Yasuhiko Yoshikazu; manga by Takemiya Keiko. Yamato Video, 1987.
Ah, the 19th-century French boy’s school. For drama, aestheticism, sexual identity crises and ironic uses of Catholic imagery, there’s nothing like it –at least, not when it comes to early shounen-ai. Case in point: Kaze to Ki no Uta, the pioneering, Shougakukan award-winning shounen-ai manga serialized by Takemiya Keiko from 1976-84. In 1987 it was adapted as an OAV aimed squarely at Takemiya’s fanbase -that is, people who already know the manga. Luckily, there’s a fansub out there by “The Techno-Girls” with lengthy background/translation notes at the start for the uninitiated (a.k.a. me). That’s what I’m drawing on here.
The Kaze to Ki no Uta OAV traces the reminiscences of Serge Batouille, a half-Gypsy noble who returns as an adult to his boarding school Laconblade and falls, softly as the falling leaves that are the film’s repeated motif, into memories of his teenaged encounter with the precocious, seductive Gilbert Cocteau. Gilbert is basically the school slut who sells his body in exchange for term papers. He has become the focus of a rivalry over who “owns” him between two older students, Jack Dren and Max Blough. Good-hearted, pure-minded Serge walks right into the thick of things, and now finds he must: a) keep Gilbert from destroying himself, and b) deal with his own growing attraction to Gilbert, despite the guilt it causes him and the accusations he faces from homophobic classmates. From what I've heard, there is less overt trauma in the OAV than the manga –at least, no one becomes a drug-addicted prostitute in this version. But the atmosphere is still melancholy, with Serge caught in a state of suspension between accepting and rejecting his feelings. He is unwilling to have sex with the emotionally-shattered Gilbert, but thrilled to lie with him in bed in a hurt/comfort capacity, experiencing a sort of chaste, drifting ecstasy. Blurred water-colour backgrounds and a refrain about lost youth and memory make the whole thing very “aesthetic” in a way that could be either touching or corny, depending on your cynicism level and tolerance for 80s animation.
Now, I don’t think Kaze, for all it deals with the negative impacts of homophobia, can be taken as a gay manifesto by any means. It bothers me that the OAV has to find a “cause” for Gilbert’s homosexuality in childhood abuse by a sadistic uncle. And gays never get a happy ending, oh no, of course not. It’s always angst and strife to a soundtrack by Chopin.
But on the other hand, this story isn’t actually dealing with the real-world problems of gay men, is it? It’s about a quasi-historical French boarding school, after all, a fantasy setting of enclosure and artificially-heightened emotions. And the characters’ bodies are androgynous, their sexuality diffuse and stylized into little more than a pose, gesture or glance. Pronouns aside, visually they are not men or even boys: in full-frontal nude shots they are tastefully blank.
I don’t think censorship is the only cause for such androgyny (a factor, yes, but not the sole factor.) And I don’t think they appear so girly because the characters are actually “girls” –namely the female author and readers projecting their feminine psychologies onto male images. There have been a lot of articles like Fusami Ogi’s “Gender Insubordination in Japanese Comics (Manga) for Girls” that claim m/m relationships in manga “create a secure sexual gaze for shojo, who by convention lack libidinal agency” (183) by using nominally male characters to help them work through budding feelings about their own bodies and relationships. The problem there is that these bodies and relationships are always assumed to be straight. Says Saito Tamaki: “we can say that women are fundamentally heterosexual beings…Yaoi readers are not trying to possess the homosexual relationship in yaoi texts; they are trying to identify with the phallic relationship itself” (Otaku Sexuality, 236). Argh!
No, what I’m saying is, classic shounen-ai works like Kaze to Ki no Uta depict not male or female gendered bodies, not straight or gay absolute opposed essences, but literally Bodies without Organs: ways of generating and moving desire across the stratifications of societies that embody power in particular ways. (Societies plural, because there’s the Japanese context of the manga/anime's production and then the European setting to consider.) It’s not just same-sex desire that’s interesting here, but desire that moves across the sex/gender complex into a paradoxically asexual, androgynous sensuality. It’s…how can I say it…an other-sexed desire, not hetero- or completely homo-, nor even necessarily -sexual as we understand it. It’s the passage between these polarized positions we are expected to occupy. It's Serge and Gilbert, just drifting through space.
For that reason, I like these kinds of early shounen-ai stories better than more explicit contemporary “BL” works. For all that they seem apolitical and aestheticized, there’s some potential in those unformed bodies and unresolved relationships that speaks to me more clearly than any goal-directed manifesto could. Problematic? Yes. Worth thinking about? I hope so!
Kaze to Ki no Uta Sanctus –sei naru kana [The Song of Wind and Trees Sanctus –can this become holy?] Dir. Yasuhiko Yoshikazu; manga by Takemiya Keiko. Yamato Video, 1987.
Ah, the 19th-century French boy’s school. For drama, aestheticism, sexual identity crises and ironic uses of Catholic imagery, there’s nothing like it –at least, not when it comes to early shounen-ai. Case in point: Kaze to Ki no Uta, the pioneering, Shougakukan award-winning shounen-ai manga serialized by Takemiya Keiko from 1976-84. In 1987 it was adapted as an OAV aimed squarely at Takemiya’s fanbase -that is, people who already know the manga. Luckily, there’s a fansub out there by “The Techno-Girls” with lengthy background/translation notes at the start for the uninitiated (a.k.a. me). That’s what I’m drawing on here.
The Kaze to Ki no Uta OAV traces the reminiscences of Serge Batouille, a half-Gypsy noble who returns as an adult to his boarding school Laconblade and falls, softly as the falling leaves that are the film’s repeated motif, into memories of his teenaged encounter with the precocious, seductive Gilbert Cocteau. Gilbert is basically the school slut who sells his body in exchange for term papers. He has become the focus of a rivalry over who “owns” him between two older students, Jack Dren and Max Blough. Good-hearted, pure-minded Serge walks right into the thick of things, and now finds he must: a) keep Gilbert from destroying himself, and b) deal with his own growing attraction to Gilbert, despite the guilt it causes him and the accusations he faces from homophobic classmates. From what I've heard, there is less overt trauma in the OAV than the manga –at least, no one becomes a drug-addicted prostitute in this version. But the atmosphere is still melancholy, with Serge caught in a state of suspension between accepting and rejecting his feelings. He is unwilling to have sex with the emotionally-shattered Gilbert, but thrilled to lie with him in bed in a hurt/comfort capacity, experiencing a sort of chaste, drifting ecstasy. Blurred water-colour backgrounds and a refrain about lost youth and memory make the whole thing very “aesthetic” in a way that could be either touching or corny, depending on your cynicism level and tolerance for 80s animation.
Now, I don’t think Kaze, for all it deals with the negative impacts of homophobia, can be taken as a gay manifesto by any means. It bothers me that the OAV has to find a “cause” for Gilbert’s homosexuality in childhood abuse by a sadistic uncle. And gays never get a happy ending, oh no, of course not. It’s always angst and strife to a soundtrack by Chopin.
But on the other hand, this story isn’t actually dealing with the real-world problems of gay men, is it? It’s about a quasi-historical French boarding school, after all, a fantasy setting of enclosure and artificially-heightened emotions. And the characters’ bodies are androgynous, their sexuality diffuse and stylized into little more than a pose, gesture or glance. Pronouns aside, visually they are not men or even boys: in full-frontal nude shots they are tastefully blank.
I don’t think censorship is the only cause for such androgyny (a factor, yes, but not the sole factor.) And I don’t think they appear so girly because the characters are actually “girls” –namely the female author and readers projecting their feminine psychologies onto male images. There have been a lot of articles like Fusami Ogi’s “Gender Insubordination in Japanese Comics (Manga) for Girls” that claim m/m relationships in manga “create a secure sexual gaze for shojo, who by convention lack libidinal agency” (183) by using nominally male characters to help them work through budding feelings about their own bodies and relationships. The problem there is that these bodies and relationships are always assumed to be straight. Says Saito Tamaki: “we can say that women are fundamentally heterosexual beings…Yaoi readers are not trying to possess the homosexual relationship in yaoi texts; they are trying to identify with the phallic relationship itself” (Otaku Sexuality, 236). Argh!
No, what I’m saying is, classic shounen-ai works like Kaze to Ki no Uta depict not male or female gendered bodies, not straight or gay absolute opposed essences, but literally Bodies without Organs: ways of generating and moving desire across the stratifications of societies that embody power in particular ways. (Societies plural, because there’s the Japanese context of the manga/anime's production and then the European setting to consider.) It’s not just same-sex desire that’s interesting here, but desire that moves across the sex/gender complex into a paradoxically asexual, androgynous sensuality. It’s…how can I say it…an other-sexed desire, not hetero- or completely homo-, nor even necessarily -sexual as we understand it. It’s the passage between these polarized positions we are expected to occupy. It's Serge and Gilbert, just drifting through space.
For that reason, I like these kinds of early shounen-ai stories better than more explicit contemporary “BL” works. For all that they seem apolitical and aestheticized, there’s some potential in those unformed bodies and unresolved relationships that speaks to me more clearly than any goal-directed manifesto could. Problematic? Yes. Worth thinking about? I hope so!
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Date: 2012-02-18 04:25 pm (UTC)