Description
Typically, gendered militarist narratives do not tolerate gender hybridity. Historically, there has been a strict separation between masculine and feminine roles: men protecting, women being protected/enabling their protection by supporting ‘their men’. This strict separation has even largely survived the inclusion of women into various militaries as war fighters: the women’s gender identity being recalibrated away from the feminine into the hypermasculine to mark them as exceptional women who proved the gendered militarist rule. However, there is a hybrid-gendered trope ubiquitous in Japanese popular culture, that features in modern gendered militarist narratives: the ‘beautiful fighting girls’ (sentō bishōjo). They are beautiful, young (sometimes infantile), immature, playful, and highly adept at, and prone to, ultraviolence. These characters trivialise and sexualise ultraviolence, and when female Japan Self-Defense Force (JSDF) personnel occupy these roles, they trivialise and sexualise military violence. In the context of Japan’s post-war ‘culture of antimilitarism’, JSDF ‘beautiful fighting girls’ in manga and anime present a pathway for military violence to be rehabilitated, helping cultivate a new societal consensus to support its post-Cold War security normalisation; and to re-establish a traditional gendered militarist narrative in Japan.
