Louis Chanina (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
grayestofghosts) wrote2024-01-03 03:37 pm
grayestofghosts) wrote2024-01-03 03:37 pm
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Sailor Uranus's Gender... Again
So I just saw the monthly "Is Haruka/Sailor Uranus genderfluid" post on Reddit and they're at it again, arguing about how gender works in Japan vs the west and lots of quibbling over terminology of what did or did not exist in 1994 when the character was invented.
I think it's very tiring to read this because regardless of the creator's intent, Haruka Ten'oh is probably the clearest, unambiguous, most simply read genderfluid character I've seen in a lot of media. Sometimes Haruka is a girl, and sometimes Haruka is a boy, and she's enough of a girl that she's in the 'girl only' group of sailor scouts, but also enough of a boy that she lives through her private school system as a boy in a boy's uniform without any of this presentation being questioned. This is different in the anime, apparently, which I have not seen all of, where she clearly denies being a boy at some point, but in the manga the read is startlingly unambiguous, and the waffling is from people who deny that gender fluidity is possible or real, and want to couch her existence in safer terms, like 'really' being a girl who likes to dress in boy's clothing.
And, like... I do think there's a huge cop out here when labeling characters as 'only' butch lesbians vs genderfluid, transgender, etc. Because the pervasive labeling of a character like Haruka as a butch lesbian is never a real analysis of her identity but always couched in making her safer and simpler to understand to a cis audience, when this is not the reality that actual butch lesbians who are actively read as men in real life situations experience. The 'only a woman in man's clothing' has been a label to soothe cis people and has not protected butch lesbians from gendered and sexual violence for their existence and does not necessarily reflect their views on their own genders. There's multiple writings by butches on how they don't feel like women, and they feel like men forced to live in some kind of liminal space or otherwise not women, and how they feel like they can't actually express this. This is not to discount possible butches who do see themselves as women in men's clothing, but to shove off a character into the category of 'butch' does not mean that they are devoid of gendered feelings, complexity, and interiority that would make a cis audience uncomfortable, and Haruka's actions do demonstrate that whether the audience likes it or not, regardless of any vocabulary used. Gendered subcultures like butch, genderfluid, nonbinary, etc are historically very fluid but this does not mean the formalized gender is correct, just that it is a forced choice forced by a society that cannot tolerate ambiguity.
I'd call Sailor Uranus genderfluid but she could be read as butch. But she's not 'just' butch. She's not 'just' anything.
I think it's very tiring to read this because regardless of the creator's intent, Haruka Ten'oh is probably the clearest, unambiguous, most simply read genderfluid character I've seen in a lot of media. Sometimes Haruka is a girl, and sometimes Haruka is a boy, and she's enough of a girl that she's in the 'girl only' group of sailor scouts, but also enough of a boy that she lives through her private school system as a boy in a boy's uniform without any of this presentation being questioned. This is different in the anime, apparently, which I have not seen all of, where she clearly denies being a boy at some point, but in the manga the read is startlingly unambiguous, and the waffling is from people who deny that gender fluidity is possible or real, and want to couch her existence in safer terms, like 'really' being a girl who likes to dress in boy's clothing.
And, like... I do think there's a huge cop out here when labeling characters as 'only' butch lesbians vs genderfluid, transgender, etc. Because the pervasive labeling of a character like Haruka as a butch lesbian is never a real analysis of her identity but always couched in making her safer and simpler to understand to a cis audience, when this is not the reality that actual butch lesbians who are actively read as men in real life situations experience. The 'only a woman in man's clothing' has been a label to soothe cis people and has not protected butch lesbians from gendered and sexual violence for their existence and does not necessarily reflect their views on their own genders. There's multiple writings by butches on how they don't feel like women, and they feel like men forced to live in some kind of liminal space or otherwise not women, and how they feel like they can't actually express this. This is not to discount possible butches who do see themselves as women in men's clothing, but to shove off a character into the category of 'butch' does not mean that they are devoid of gendered feelings, complexity, and interiority that would make a cis audience uncomfortable, and Haruka's actions do demonstrate that whether the audience likes it or not, regardless of any vocabulary used. Gendered subcultures like butch, genderfluid, nonbinary, etc are historically very fluid but this does not mean the formalized gender is correct, just that it is a forced choice forced by a society that cannot tolerate ambiguity.
I'd call Sailor Uranus genderfluid but she could be read as butch. But she's not 'just' butch. She's not 'just' anything.