University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2013 The Female Gaze in Contemporary Japanese Literature Kathryn Hemmann University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Asian Studies Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons Recommended Citation Hemmann, Kathryn, "The Female Gaze in Contemporary Japanese Literature" (2013). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 762. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/762 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/762 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. The Female Gaze in Contemporary Japanese Literature Abstract The female gaze can be used by writers and readers to look at narratives from a perspective that sees women as subjects instead of objects. Applying a female gaze to discourses that have traditionally been male-dominated opens new avenues of interpretation that are empowering from a feminist perspective. In this dissertation, I use the murder mystery novels of the bestselling female author Kirino Natsuo and the graphic novels of a prolific four-woman artistic collective called CLAMP to demonstrate how writers are capable of applying a female gaze to the themes of their work and how readers can and have read their work from the perspectives allowed by a female gaze. Kirino Natsuo presents a female perspective on such issues as prostitution, marriage, and equal employment laws in her novels, which are often based on sensationalist news stories. Meanwhile, CLAMP challenges the discourses surrounding the production and consumption of fictional women, especially the young female characters, or shojo, that have become iconic in Japanese popular culture.