Popular Culture and Workplace Gendering among Varieties of Capitalism: Working Women and their Representation in Japanese Manga

Abstract

Female empowerment is a prerequisite for a just and sustainable developed society. Being the most developed non-western country, Japan offers an instructive window onto concerns about gender worldwide. Although overall gender equality is advancing in Japan, difficulties remain, especially in achieving equality in the workplace. We draw on theories of ontological commitment and the psychology of fiction to critically analyse the role of popular culture -in this case manga -in the reproduction of gender inequality in the Japanese workplace. We present examples of four of the most popular mainstream manga aimed at working men and women in Japan and show how women are depicted. We argue that the hyper-mediated fictional realism of representative tropes generates an ontological commitment to characters and narratives among consumers that reinforces the reproduction of a culturally exceptionalist national political economic space, one of whose essential defining characteristics is a gendered workplace. Our research suggests important implications for researching the relationship between culture, in all its forms, and spatial variation in persistent institutional biases among varieties of capitalism.

Extreme work/normal work: Intensification, storytelling and hypermediation in the (re)construction of ‘the New Normal’

“…Others in high-intensity occupations develop extreme personalities which can alter and confuse personal and social features such as gender norms, at least temporarily. In the Japanese manga Hataraki-man (‘Workaholic man’), a female journalist turns on her ‘man switch’ to go into ‘hyper male work mode’ when deadlines loom (Matanle et al, 2014: 482–3). Extreme/normal or edgework thus overlaps with contemporary debates into the ‘post-human’ (Braidotti, 2013), as distinctions between human, technology and animal species are blurred or erased.…”

Constructing Women’s Leadership Representation in the UK Press During a Time of Financial Crisis: Gender capitals and dialectical tensions

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“…Traditional gender perceptions manifest more conspicuously in boys' and men's manga, in which female characters use a stereotypical feminine speech style more frequently than has been reported for natural speech (Unser-Schutz 2015). Working women in best-selling men's manga are typically portrayed as either excluded from careers or negatively constructed as being too masculine (Matanle, Ishiguro, and McCann 2014). Stereotypical gendering may also occur on the creator's side, as manga authors are likely to draw for audiences of their own gender.…”