Let us recall the line of development outlined in the previous installment: female unconscious subject → desiring subject (gender performativity) → social individual. In that essay, we approached Takashima Zakuro, a key character in Subahibi, principally through psychoanalysis and poststructuralist feminism. We analyzed her as an unconscious subject and a desiring subject—the first half of our conceptual axis. Of course, the essay also left some questions unresolved: its insufficiently clear account of subjectivity, its avoidance of genders other than female, its neglect of real-world practice, and so on. I will try to answer these questions through an analysis of other characters in Subahibi.
Preface
At the end of the previous essay, a brief psychoanalysis of Zakuro’s desire offered an explanation of the fluidity of women’s sexual orientation. This fluidity has two aspects: gender anchoring in the female subject’s construction of self-identification, and gender anchoring in the construction of desire. Yet the approach and its results dismantled the very elements that constitute women as women. If women’s gender identification is itself fluid, where does the legitimacy of “woman” as a concept come from? Post-Lacanian feminists began attending to gender fluidity in an attempt to dissolve the residual “sexism” of second-wave feminism. Queer theorists, led by Judith Butler, stand out in particular.
Meanwhile, discussions of sex and gender have moved from “subjectivation” to “desubjectivation,” and now to a state in which “desubjectivation” and “resubjectivation” coexist. A plural, empirical perspective on the political practice of sex and gender is now unavoidable. More important than psychoanalysis, then, is a close examination of how characters draw on individual experience to exercise agency as subjects and engage in political practice—especially how individuals under oppression adapt to and resist an oppressive environment. Here I approach this reconstruction through radical and liberal perspectives.
I. Gender Performativity and the Emergence of “Futanari”
Let us follow the camera into the game’s second chapter. Here, the perspective of a key protagonist, Mamiya Takuji, gives players an overview of the whole affair. Takuji is the person players intuitively take to be the game’s male lead. He is also the chief culprit behind the school’s mass suicide. Many labels attach to him: paranoiac, narcissist, manic madman, evil cult leader. At the start of the game, however, all we see is his weakness. He has a slender body, is afraid to act, and is sensitive and suspicious. Learned as he is, he is hopelessly lost in the imaginary world of two-dimensional culture. He secretly loves Takashima Zakuro from the next class and is abused and bullied by the school thugs and another protagonist, Tomosane. His father’s early death left him dependent on the maternal Other from childhood. His mother not only disciplines him harshly but directs all his desire toward the dark, mysterious “White Lotus Cult,” foreshadowing the later emergence of his “savior personality.”
The game’s second chapter is very long and touches on almost every gender-related issue. Here, we will first concentrate on the displacement of Takuji’s desire, focusing on his character and the scenes of his sexual perversion. Three are particularly memorable: first, the —— scene in which he is forced to dress as a girl to please men; second, his —— scene with Riruru, the “futanari of his imagination”; and third, the imagined —— scene between him and Otonashi Ayana. The first involves the power and violence implicit in gender interaction and will be discussed in detail below. The third concerns Takuji’s narcissistic fantasy and Ayana’s complicated identity as the incarnation of a transcendent being, which is not central to our discussion of gender. Takuji’s sexual relationship with Ayana can also be glimpsed through his relationship with Riruru. We will therefore begin with the bodily relationship between Takuji and Riruru.
From the outset, the first-person account of Takuji’s mental activity lays his paranoid character bare. He is extremely self-centered and interprets every move others make in the most extreme terms. When Zakuro appears before him in all her innocent exuberance, his desire is quickly awakened. He constructs a series of fantasies, coveting her virgin status in particular. At this point, he is a typical heterosexual with a thoroughly male-chauvinist mindset.
After witnessing Zakuro’s suicide, Takuji undergoes a series of changes. As the first witness to her death, the already sensitive and fragile Takuji is pushed to the brink of losing his reason. At the same time, the dead Zakuro invades the vessel called “Takuji” in search of her object of desire, Yuki, further disrupting the balance between his personalities. Takuji goes mad, sinking endlessly into persecutory delusions and religious reveries. Later, guided by the game author’s incarnation, Otonashi Ayana, he accepts divine revelation, becomes a prophet, and begins the “savior’s” path of revenge.
At this point, Takuji’s “2D wife,” Riruru, takes Zakuro’s place as a new object in which his desire can temporarily find a home. What is Riruru like? In his eyes, she is a magical girl with a signature single ponytail, a floaty white dress, and a flamboyantly patterned wand. She is animated and exuberant, forever talking about “love and justice.” In the story—that is, in Takuji’s delusions—Riruru comes from the two-dimensional plane into the three-dimensional world, helping him elaborate his religious cosmology and pushing the story ever deeper into the abyss.
Now comes the interesting part. When Riruru wants to have sex with Takuji, she lifts her skirt, revealing the phallus. The figure confesses to him that it is a futanari. Takuji, in savior mode, happily accepts this premise and has intercourse with her. From a traditional conception of gender, if the transition into madness has not affected Takuji’s sexual orientation—if he remains heterosexual—the best explanation is that he completely severs the connection between Riruru’s phallus and her gender, concentrating instead on the feminine signs she presents. Yet this line of thought exposes a further paradox in his desire. If a straight heterosexual man like Takuji chooses to overlook Riruru’s phallus, then the anatomical pen-nis cannot itself anchor gender identity. It is equivalent to other signs that arouse desire, or is displaced by them. Only the Gestalt of “futanari,” a structure composed of both female and male signs, ultimately arouses Takuji’s desire. The scene dramatically reveals a rupture in Freud’s text: “The phallus, as a privileged and generative signifier, itself arises from a series of instances of erotogenic body parts … the phallus belongs to no particular body part; it is essentially transferable.”12
Riruru could be called the embodiment of the completeness of Takuji’s desire. His desire for her rests on shared experience and a shared metaphysical purpose. This also covertly exposes the unreliability of propositions about sexual orientation. What excites Takuji is not Riruru’s female appearance but her “identity.” Such situations are by no means rare in real life. If we focus on these strange sexual preferences and investigate the origins of what is at issue in them, we inevitably begin to question the binary classification of gender.
Judith Butler would probably take an interest in a text like this. Indeed, the trouble with heterosexuality is not confined to Takuji and Riruru: many stories about feminine boys display it too. In the previous essay, we focused on the fluidity of Zakuro’s sexual orientation as a woman, but left a question at the end: what does “woman” mean here? Why should women alone be fluid, and not men? Such questions expose the residual essentialism of psychoanalytic feminists such as Irigaray and Cixous. As Ann Rosalind Jones points out, Cixous and other feminist scholars place excessive trust in the purity and unity of the female body. They overlook women’s interaction with society and the differences among women’s identities, while also dehistoricizing the production of gender.3 The existence of the futanari not only unsettles the reliability of the female body; it also exposes the failings of the binary construction of gender. It challenges the dual system of sex and gender established since Beauvoir.
Through her examination of the utterly marginalized intersex people who exist in real life—the truly “futanari”4—Butler further argues that sex, understood as an identification that invokes a “prediscursive” essence, simply does not exist. All sex is retroactively produced by discourse. An authenticity untouched by social construction is inconceivable, making the opposition between gender and sex an illusion. Moreover, even if the absolute separation of gender and sex has progressive significance, it leaves an inviolable physiological dimension outside the study of gender, confining all discussion to gender itself. As meanings proliferate, gender finally dissolves itself. Those seeking a determinate meaning end up turning once more to sex as an explanatory framework. To prevent its own dissolution, gender must find its basis of classification in sex. Whether or not it is linked to the anatomical body, then, gender always divides people into the totalities of women and men. The result is that gender repeatedly reinforces the male–female binary, excluding queer people from discursive power.5
Abolishing the distinction between sex and gender is thus not merely an archaeology of knowledge, but a strategy of deconstruction. On this basis, Butler mounts a systematic attack on psychoanalysis. She first accepts Lacan’s account of the unconscious subject, but criticizes and sublates his thought in at least two respects.
First, she criticizes its phallocentrism. An archaeology of Lacanian theory discovers that the mirror stage, its starting point, is already caught in a male gaze. In his subsequent discussion of the phallus’s function, Lacan unreflectively imports the heterosexual matrix into his examination of the ** taboo. Even though he goes further than Freud in distinguishing the phallus from the pen-nis, he still defines desire through the heterosexual paradigms of “having” and “being,” thereby overemphasizing the phallus’s role. Worse still, psychoanalytic discourse, represented by the formulas of sexuation, has itself become what J. L. Austin calls performative language: it interpellates subjects and reinforces heterosexual ideas.6
Second, Lacanian thought is preoccupied with the unconscious subject. Yet sex/gender is not an abstract, metaphysical question, important though psychoanalysis is. It is a concrete question of identity in practice. Rather than concentrating on the unconscious subject, we should focus on the subject’s gender performativity.
Butler holds, first, that “pure nature” can appear only in the Real, untouched by language; distinguishing sex from gender is therefore meaningless. Second, adopting Bourdieu’s and Austin’s ideas, she explores the linguistic symbolic system behind authority, replacing “the speaker speaks discourse”—“I speak”—with “discourse speaks the speaker”—“it speaks me.” She subsequently takes on Derrida’s criticism, revises this to “discourse and speaker speak one another,” and begins a sociological turn. Third, and most importantly, she adopts Foucault’s understanding of knowledge and discursive power as constitutive of subjects: the human body is produced through the repeated citation of discourse. What we call “gender” is expressed in this production; it is purely “performative.” We say “performativity,” not “performance,” because there is no “performer” behind the “performance.” The performance precedes the performer and shapes them. The subject is thus produced; there is no essence behind it. Essence arises on the surface that is the performative “body.” The so-called pen-nis, then, is only a prop for performativity. Whether to choose it depends solely on the posture the body needs to adopt and the action it needs to take. What truly constrains the subject is the external symbolic order—paternal law.
In one respect, Takuji’s sexual desire for Riruru and Otonashi Ayana expresses a disavowal of paternal law. When he goes mad, the morality and ethics within him collapse completely. In their place emerges the desiring subject of the hardcore otaku and savior. He sees his objects of desire not as male or female but simply as objects. “Gender,” as a criterion emphasized by traditional morality and ethics, consequently dissolves. “Sex” takes over the master’s position from “gender.” Only now, in this most marginal of places, can Takuji and his followers—marginal people who represent a “failure of citation”—liberate themselves. In a sense, this is precisely a way out offered by Freud’s philosophy of civilization, realized within a story, in an ideal, isolated place, albeit in a somewhat disappointing form.
The disappointment lies in Takuji’s failure to complete a transformation of his heterosexual perspective and regard the futanari configuration, with its mixture of male and female anatomy, as a whole object of desire. He remains in the position of the one who gazes and possesses. His sexual perversion achieves only an initial trespass of desire; his fantasy of himself as a castrated man remains heterosexual. As I said in the previous installment, Mamiya Takuji once again pledges allegiance to paternal law through his identity as savior. His transgression ultimately points toward the “superman”—the primal father—not the “common people.”
Taken as a whole, Butler’s critique of Lacan is of course incomplete. She misunderstands, for example, the elusive connection between “phallus” and “pen-nis” in his theory, and her feminist position precedes her critique of the phallus. Perhaps the key to understanding Butler, then, is not the route through Lacan but the route through Foucault, particularly the sociological turn of her later theory. Rather than remaining entangled in psychoanalysis, she is more concerned with “how people practice their sexuality”: the subject’s freedom to enact gender performativity. This concerns how sexual minorities find a philosophy by which to live, struggle against mainstream society, and gain a foothold in mainstream discursive power. Whether or not one accepts queer theory, sexual minorities must base public participation and the defense of their rights on personal identity if they are to gain recognition.
II. Gendered Power
1. “Male Homosocial Desire” and Hegemony
Although psychoanalysis offers a philosophical way of interpreting sexual desire and sexual subjectivity, a more crucial question cannot be ignored: how does the subject live and act in a reality already touched by the symbolic order? Scholars with a sociological orientation are more concerned with this question. The French sociologist Michel Wieviorka assesses Lacan’s thought as follows: “… consciousness, and with it personal responsibility, are excluded from subjectivity, ultimately to the benefit of internalized external demands or pre-existing demands.”7 In other words, Lacanians disregard the reality of subjects’ outward agency, or are unwilling to regard them as actors in the sociological sense. Instead, they reduce them to a contaminated unconscious. Here we see a conflict of paradigms between psychoanalysis and a sociology of the subject.
To examine social action, we must extend outward from the inner realities exposed by Lacanian analysis, bringing what Lacanians regard as the “Other” into a whole that can be understood empirically. There is no need, then, to dwell on the mysteries of a character’s unconscious desire. We should attend instead to the convictions a character holds and the actions they take on that basis. Chapter Two’s treatment of sexual power and Chapter Three’s yuri branch form a “double act” through which to understand individual action.
In the game’s most frenzied first chapter,8 we reconstruct the whole course of the collective school incident through the protagonist Mamiya Takuji’s eyes, witnessing both his madness and his cold severity. We are, of course, not without sympathy for what he has endured. He grows up in an extraordinarily oppressive household, is bullied for his feminine disposition from middle school onward, and is then battered by the trio of school thugs and by Tomosane in high school. His mind and body bear enormous pressures. Witnessing Takashima Zakuro’s death finally becomes a crucial trigger for their eruption. The first chapter barely touches on Takuji’s upbringing, but we can still register some key details: the sense of inferiority and timidity he developed from childhood, his classmates’ mockery of his lack of manliness, and his venting the anger accumulated through bullying onto female objects, using shameful slut-shaming to protect his dignity as a “man.”
Many anime, manga, and game narratives about bullying offer a certain intuitive account: those who are bullied often redirect the conflict toward someone weaker, while someone initially considered weak must overcome the strong through a dramatic conflict and become strong in turn. A common psychological explanation is displaced aggression—“kicking the cat.” Bring in a gender perspective, however, and the explanation changes. Takuji and Zakuro both experience school violence but handle it very differently. Confronted with the unpleasantness of reality, Zakuro uses delusion to escape the slut-shaming branded into her unconscious, yet the content of those delusions wanders freely and aimlessly. Takuji’s delusions, by contrast, have a relatively clear direction: he vents dissatisfaction and rage onto imagined female objects.
In the first half of the story, we periodically see Takuji masturbating while imagining Zakuro giving him her body. But when he gathers rumors on the flimsiest evidence—actually still his own delusions—that Zakuro is not a virgin, he feels intensely humiliated and enraged. He goes on to imagine a series of scenes in which she is insulted and persecuted, filling the walls of his secret base with appalling phrases such as “Not a virgin—go die.” Before he goes mad, he appears to the player as a useless otaku steeped in pornographic fantasy. He shuts himself away in his dream-space, refuses public participation, and uses mass-produced cultural commodities to construct the purity of his imagination and desire. His understanding of individual women is narrow, his delusions extreme: now he sees them as angels and goddesses; now he degrades them into something worse than “shit.”
At this stage, Takuji not only fears that Zakuro might not be a virgin; he spins a spontaneous word of concern from Minakami Yuki into limitless fantasies of ——, disparaging her as a “filthy woman” who wants to have sex with him. The rotten straight-male chauvinism in his bones is unmistakable. It also hints that his desire for futanari after he goes mad remains phallocentric at its core.
What is interesting, though, is the earlier traumatic event: Takuji’s sexual assault by boys from his school. The scene horrifies many straight men. His male bullies force him to steal Zakuro’s skirt from the girls’ changing room, then make him put on girls’ clothes and —— for them. Nishimura, one of his tormentors, becomes still more “excited” by the cross-dressing. This depiction of —— has some similarities to the depiction of —— between Takuji and Riruru. Nishimura’s desire, for example, is further awakened once Takuji dresses as a girl. Takuji becomes the object that triggers the perpetrator’s sexual perversion, performing the deconstruction of the pen-nis associated with feminine boys and futanari. It is precisely here that Butler’s queer transgression occurs: in this fictional —— scene, Takuji becomes a marginal other, an abject object.
Yet the sex here is fundamentally different from the sex between Takuji and Riruru. Takuji is forced to put on girls’ clothes and —— for Nishimura. In this fictional scene, performativity is compulsory. That makes it difficult to discuss this supposed transgression apart from power. The difference between the sexual relationships “abuser–Takuji” and “Takuji–Riruru” is that the former is an act of “torture.” Nishimura holds power and administers the bullying; Takuji is stripped of power and endures it. The root of Takuji’s victimization, in turn, is that he is male but has a “woman-like” disposition. It makes him marginal to the “boys’ club.” That club is sustained by what Sedgwick calls “male homosocial desire.” This is not male homosexuality in the ordinary sense, but a bond indirectly formed through the exchange of women.
Psychoanalysis describes the structure of our desire as a binary: the “desire to be” and the “desire to have.” The desire for identification connects with the boy’s early experience of identifying with his father. It manifests itself in boys’ liking for Transformers, racing cars, toy guns, and other “manly” things: the aim is to become them. The “desire to have” connects with the heterosexual identification constructed in adolescence. It manifests itself in boys’ attraction to the opposite sex and their fascination with figurines and “moe girls”: the aim is to possess them. Generally speaking, homosexual men undergo a perversion in which the desires to identify and to possess point to the same place. The homosexual man thus has the identities of both sexual subject and sexual object. Male homosocial desire—male bonding—by contrast, arises through the refusal to become a sexual object. To maintain masculine friendship between men, objects of desire that do not meet masculinity’s demands—women—must be abjected to the subject’s margins. Relations between men are always bound together through narratives about the phallus, a feminine being. This peculiar triangular relation signals a split within male social groups.9
What Takuji displays is precisely a lack of the “desire for identification.” Once it enters society, this lack is no longer a matter of “failed personal development”; it is intimately connected to the social environment. The abusers play a crucial role. Precisely because Nishimura and his companions are the more active, assertive party, they command more power and capital. They can define what makes a “real man”—hegemonic masculinity—and what has the qualities of an exchangeable thing and of “womanliness.” Second, power includes control over others. To satisfy their desire for power further and consolidate the boys’ club, the abusers must find ways to exclude the “different boy.” At the micro level, they deploy bodily violence: insults and abuse. At the macro level, institutional state violence—hospitals, schools, prisons, and so forth—is enlisted to correct deviants. Yet in games of this broadly sekai-kei kind, linking intimate relationships directly to world-scale crises, these institutions of power are absent as a whole. Bodily violence is the only means of exclusion left. To push that violence to its extreme, the perpetrators must attack the body’s most private part——.
Moreover, for Nishimura, simply regarding Takuji as a failed man is dangerous. If Nishimura continues to regard him as male, sooner or later biological sex will force him to acknowledge that Takuji could become the “1,” the top, while he himself could fall into the position of the “0,” the bottom. What men fear most is becoming a sexual object. That means losing power, falling from the throne of domination. They reject ancient Greek-style same-sex love, reject homosexual love in every form, and foreclose every possibility of becoming a sexual object in order to maintain their position as sexual subjects.10 To sustain this over time, they must continue to uphold heterosexual hegemony until it becomes internalized as a premise of action and an intentional process. Thus, almost as though escaping reality, Nishimura only overcomes his unrecognized anxiety and exposes his desire once Takuji puts on girls’ clothes and becomes a woman in his eyes. Once he becomes a “woman,” Takuji can no longer be a sexual subject.
At the same time, this power relation does not mean that the perpetrator occupies the center of power. What actually exercises power is the symbolic order that precedes the violent subject. The perpetrator may be entirely unaware of his unconscious desire for power and castration anxiety. This is a crucial distinction between traditional and poststructuralist conceptions of power. In the game, we should notice that what really defines Takuji’s feminization is not “the girls’ clothes on him” but “his putting them on.” The former is a “state”; the latter a “posture.” Unlike a static description of a state, posture is connected more closely to the subject’s “compulsory performativity”: Takuji kneels on the floor, his eyes innocent, and —— for the standing Nishimura. Nishimura gives him orders while enjoying himself. Afraid of the consequences of resistance, Takuji finally persuades himself to please him and gives up resisting.
Takuji’s malice toward Zakuro and Yuki, together with the process of his rape, reveals the chain through which the discourse of power is cited. Among men under the mainstream gender order, Takuji’s disposition is out of place. Yet in front of actual women—or those with feminine traits—he indulges in vulgar associations and a swollen sense of his own superiority. Perhaps this reflects society’s gender preferences and the chain through which lost power is clawed back elsewhere. We can hardly guarantee the purity of any sexual relationship: before sex can fulfill its liberating erotic function, institutional structures are already hovering like specters over social relations. Under the sway of power, —— between men is not necessarily sublime homosexual love. Still less can we say that a man in the “0” position deconstructs gender signs simply by pretending to be a woman. This is no more than another transplantation of heterosexual hegemony, something that even culture aimed at women finds hard to avoid. At this stage, culture’s desire for liberation and its actual shackles remain locked in an ambiguous zero-sum game.
Perhaps we should consider more carefully what stands between unequal lovers: a piece of candy, or a cup of “black tea”?11
Coming Next
It is precisely by awakening his savior personality that Takuji refuses the citation of secular discourse. This opens the next stage of our analysis. In the final installment, we will discuss two scenes. First, the bullying of Wakatsuki Kagami: we will see how the original script uses a narrative trick to achieve an astonishing master–slave reversal. Second, we will return to the Girls’ Love route of Chapter Three, with Zakuro as protagonist, comparing Kimika and Zakuro’s Girls’ Love with that of the prologue and discussing its real-world practice. This will complete my tribute to a work that has had an enormous influence on me.
