Paper short abstract:

Against an LGBT Boom in the Japanese media in the last decade, this paper discusses what defines queer representation as ‘appropriate’ for public consumption. I argue that queerness is central to Japan's media, but rarely as the only clear reading of a series, keeping it at an ‘appropriate’ level.

Paper long abstract:

Amidst an LGBT Boom in Japan over the last decade, queer identities have seen greater focus in the media and politics, and with it has come debates over the ‘appropriateness’ of these representations for wider public consumption. This is defined through the interplay of a network of actors, from consumers to media corporations to political and legal institutions. Manga, anime, and TV Dramas that focus explicitly on same-sex romance and the lives of transgender individuals have grown in response to this boom, however its effects can also be observed in works that do not fall into this category, series that are not ostensibly queer. This paper discusses how ‘appropriate’ depictions of queerness are defined through a case study of major anime studio Kyoto Animation and their adaptations of Free! (2013-2022) and Sound! Euphonium (2015-present), franchises about competitive swimming and high school concert performance respectively. Both series are adaptations of novels first released in 2013, feature casts that are almost entirely of a single gender, male in Free! and female in Sound! Euphonium, and follow the narrative tropes of the sports genre. Drawing on Stuart Hall and his colleagues’ Circuit of Culture model, which theorises cultural production as the result of the interaction between production, regulation, representation, identity, and consumption, I argue these series are designed to pass both as completely cisheteronormative and extremely queer simultaneously. Based on my analysis of published interviews with Kyoto Animation creators and the merchandising practices that surround these series, I suggest that both readings are designed to be understood as valid, with neither being overwhelmingly privileged by the narratives themselves. How these works are then read, and the prominence of queerness within each franchise is defined in relation to each consumer and the frameworks of knowledge that they use to engage with these series. Queerness is a central part of the Japanese media and is consistently catered to within media works, even those that are not explicitly about it, but only so much as is ‘appropriate,’ rarely being left as the only unambiguous reading of a series.