Paper short abstract:

Based on discourse analysis of two significantly popular "LGBT-friendly" Japanese TV dramas and audience's responses, this research aims to discuss about media representation and its contribution and limits to gender and sexual equality.

Paper long abstract:

In comparison to previous works, recent Japanese TV dramas tend to represent less discriminated images of LGBT community/people. For instance, the success of the drama series "Ossan's Love" and "What did you eat yesterday?", both of which are love comedies about male homosexual relationships, demonstrated a significant change in the representation of LGBT in Japanese media. It is undoubtable that it reflects generally shared LGBT-friendly attitudes among Japanese audience. However, the attitudes do not necessarily lead to an LGBT-friendly society. By analyzing the popularity of current Japanese TV dramas about homosexuality and the development of LGBT movements in Japan, I aim to examine to what extend media representation contributes to the realization of equal treatment of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities.

First, based on an overview of Japanese TV dramas about homosexuality and related research, I focus on two drama series whose popularity is especially worth noticing, i.e. "Ossan's Love" and "What did you eat yesterday?". The former was ranked among Twitter's trending topics in Japan and its popularity led to the release of a film continuation and the drama's second season. The latter was a screen adaptation based off a best-selling BL manga. Both of the dramas provided positive gay images for Japanese audience so that opened up an opportunity for more open discussion about homosexuality in public. More importantly, sexuality-related issues such as sexual identity, coming out, and same-sex marriage described in these dramas demonstrated dialogues with the gender and sexuality structure in contemporary Japan.

Next, by conducting discourse analysis of news coverage and interviews about these dramas as well as audience responses on Twitter, I aim to clarify how both audience and producers together constructed the image of hope for an LGBT-friendly Japan. I will especially focus on audience's tweets mentioning gender and sexuality to clarify how they imagine gender and sexual equality in the context related to these dramas.

Following the arguments above, this research attempts to discuss the process in which the hope for an LGBT-friendly utopia represented in TV dramas is being realized in/through audience's discourses.