Cardcaptor Sakura – Bitch Flicks

The Female Gaze: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts from our Female Gaze Theme Week here.

The Female Gaze: Dido and Noni, Two of a Kind by Rachel Wortherley

Directors Amma Asante and Gina Prince-Bythewood illustrate that when a story is told through the eyes of the second sex, themes, such as romance, self-worth, and identity are fully fleshed out. By examining an 18th century British aristocrat and a 21st century pop superstar, it proves that in the span of three centuries, women still face adversity in establishing a firm identity, apart from the façade, amongst the white noise of societal expectations.

Thelma and Louise: Redefining the Female Gaze by Paulette Reynolds

The violence may decrease as the movie progresses, but Thelma, Louise – and we – become comfortable about their actions as the film winds down, because they were now tapped into our veins, nourishing our battered spirits with acts that said, “See? We recognize your anger, cause we’re angry – and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

How Catherine Breillat Uses Her Own Painful Story to Discuss the Female Gaze in Abuse of Weakness by Becky Kukla

The female gaze is more than simply “reversing” the male gaze; it allows for a questioning of why the male gaze is so inherently built into cinema and why women are aggressively sexualised within cinema. With Abuse of Weakness, Breillat attacks both of these concerns whilst also actively encouraging identification with Maud – our female protagonist.

The Capaldi Conundrum: How We Attack the Female Gaze by Alyssa Franke

In any fandom based on visual media, fangirls are attacked because of the way the female gaze is misunderstood and misrepresented.

Murder Spouses and Field Kabuki: The Female Gaze in NBC’s Hannibal by Lisa Anderson

The show treats the bodies of living women with the same respect that it treats those of dead ones.

The Male Gaze, LOL: How Comedies Are Changing the Way We Look by Donna K.

The body is no longer a Lacanian reflected ideal, it is a biological mess that often exists beyond anyone’s control. The effect of this convention is two-fold–a bait and switch of expectations but also the creation of a sense of biological sameness: man or woman, everybody poops. By placing the body in a biological space instead of a symbolic one, physical comedy is questioning the visual tendencies of subconscious desire.

Please Look Now: The Female Gaze in Magic Mike XXL by Sarah Smyth

The trailer offers a kind of meta-advertisement, recognising the very marketing strategies that attracted people, including women, to the previous film. Cutting between clips of the men performing various routines, the trailer includes the line, “We didn’t want to show the best parts of the movie in this trailer but it was very very hard to resist,” before inviting the audience to #comeagain this summer.

No, You Can’t Watch: The Queer Female Gaze on Screen by Rowan Ellis

The desire to show a complex version of yourself seen with male characters in the Male Gaze, alongside a desire for a complex version of your partner seen with male recipients of desire in the Female Gaze, combines in the Queer Female Gaze to produce sexual and romantic relationships often rooted in friendship.

“Everything Is Going To Be OK!” – How the Female Gaze Was Celebrated and Censored in Cardcaptor Sakura by Hannah Collins

In other words, there was a concerted effort to twist the female gaze into a male one under the belief that CLAMP’s blend of hyper-femininity and action would be unappealing for the male audience it was being aimed at.

Catherine Breillat’s Transfigurative Female Gaze by Leigh Kolb

Breillat’s complete oeuvre (which certainly demands our attention beyond these three films) delivers continually shocking treatment of female sexuality presented though the female gaze. She wants us to be uncomfortable and to be constantly questioning both representations of female desire and our responses to those representations, and how all of it is shaped by a religious, patriarchal culture.

Jo March’s Gender Identity as Seen Through Different Gazes by Jackson Adler

The male gaze either holds Jo back from the start, or else shows an “educational” transformation from an “unruly” female into a “desirable” young woman who knows her place.

Pleading for the Female Gaze Through Its Absence in Blue is the Warmest Color by Emma Houxbois

The female gaze, such as it exists in a world that denies its existence, is an insular one that exists between Adele and Emma as opposed to how the film itself is shot. The film presents the case for the female gaze by examining what happens when it’s withheld.

Women in a Man’s World: Mad Men and the Female Gaze by Caroline Madden

In fact, many of the clients grow to appreciate the benefit of the female gaze, making their products truly (for the most part) appealing to women. This makes more profit than the false patriarchal ideas of a woman’s wants and needs. With the character of Peggy, Weiner is able to let us see the advertising world from the female gaze to criticize the falsehood that lies in selling female products with a male gaze.

Just Not Into It: Why This Female Gazer Opts Out by Stephanie Schroeder

I choose to only support women-centered film and TV efforts as a funder, promoter and, indeed, gazer, if the intent, casting, storyline, and other elements are female-positive. There’s really just too much misogynistic and women-negating/woman-hating media in the world for me to do otherwise.

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and Scares Us by Ren Jender

Amirpour’s camera (the magnificent cinematography is by Lyle Vincent) lingers over Arash’s beauty–his high cheekbones and large, long-lashed eyes under a dark, curly version of James Dean’s pompadour–in a way few male filmmakers would.

When the Girl Looks: The Girl’s Gaze in Teen TV by Athena Bellas

In this moment, then, Elena is completely relieved of the conventional position of girl-as-object, and is therefore able to occupy a different position as a desiring subject. By purposefully making herself invisible, Elena momentarily evades and perhaps refuses to be defined by the adult male gaze that governs girlhood.

The Female Gaze in The Guest: What a View! by Deirdre Crimmins

Pinning down what makes the camera use a female gaze can be a little tricky, as we have all lived within the male gaze for so long. It is commonplace to see women on display disproportionately while male characters go fully clothed. The gaze’s assumption of heterosexuality also carries over to the infrequently used female gaze, making it slightly more visible. It is this consumption of the male body in The Guest which initially establishes the film’s gaze as female.

Shishihokodan: The Destructive Female Gaze of YA Supernatural Action Romantic Comedy by Brigit McCone

Recognizing the function of Ice Prince/Wolf in YA SARCom implies the continual defeat of the Whore as structural necessity in male writings also – as a pursuing character she must be resisted to generate sexual tension, regardless of whether the male author is Team Madonna or Team Whore. The destructive impact on the self-image of female viewers is pure collateral damage, just as our SARCom is poisonously emasculating for male viewers.

“Everything Is Going To Be OK!” – How the Female Gaze Was Celebrated and Censored in ‘Cardcaptor Sakura’

This guest post by Hannah Collins appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

With their starry eyes, cutesy costumes, Barbie-esque features, and catchphrases overflowing with dreamy positivity, the magical girls of the shoujo (girls) genre of anime might not seem like the most feminist of heroines upon cursory glance. Yet, the plucky sorceress’ of such cult classics as Sailor Moon can be seen an emblematic of a counter-movement of female action heroes in Japanese culture – the antidote to the hyper-masculinity of the shonen (boys) genre.

This assessment by no means disregards the problems of the magical girl genre – infantalisation; fetishisation and glorification of hyper-femininity – and shoujo characters with their typically doe-eyed innocence can be easily corrupted to cater to a specific male fantasy of virginal femininity. However, the work of the all-female team of manga/anime creators known as “CLAMP” not only combats these issues, but also, as Kathryn Hemmann in The Female Gaze in Contemporary Japanese Culture writes, “employs shŌjo for themselves and their own pleasure.”

I became a fan of CLAMP – like most people of my age – in the 1990s. As a child, my introduction to the wonderfully weird world of Japanese cartoons consisted of the standard diet for most children of that era: Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Dragon Ball Z. Imported, dissected, re-dubbed, and re-packaged to suit the tastes of a Western audience, and more specifically, a male audience. But amongst the shouts of “Gotta Catch ‘Em All!” and “Kamehameha!” there was one show that really left a lasting impression on me. It was about a little girl gifted with great power through capturing and using magical “Clow” cards. She wasn’t muscly; she wasn’t self-assured; and she certainly wasn’t male. She was Sakura Kinomoto, the show was called Cardcaptors (Cardcaptor Sakura in its original Japanese format), and it was my first exposure to both CLAMP and the magical girl or “mahou shoujo” genre they helped to popularise.

Like most adolescent heroes, Sakura seems hopelessly ill-equipped to begin with, and yet her sheer determination to achieve her full potential sees her through to becoming a magical force to be reckoned with without ever surrendering her loving personality. Rather than conforming to the “strong female character” stereotype that implies that women must act more masculine to achieve truly equal footing with male action heroes, Sakura’s power stems from traits considered more conventionally feminine: love, empathy, and pureness. Even her wardrobe changes into unapologetically girly battle outfits aesthetically reinforce CLAMP’s refusal to bow to a male audiences’ preferences.

These themes of romance and friendship are a core part of the story development and instrumental in the viewer’s investment in the characters. Through Cardcaptor Sakura, CLAMP explores the complexities of both platonic and romantic female love – both heterosexual and homosexual – from an almost exclusively female perspective. As Sakura pines over her older brother’s best friend (who unbeknownst to her, is also his love interest) Sakura’s best friend Tomoyo pines over her. Tomoyo, who lives a rich and sheltered life in a female-centric household, seems to live vicariously through Sakura. Upon discovering her secret heroics at night, she begins to capture Sakura’s adventures on camera and even provides her with her signature battle costumes, which cause Sakura huge embarrassment. Yet, at the risk of hurting her friend’s feelings, she grudgingly wears them anyway.

As the show develops, we are shown more and more just how deeply Tomoyo’s feelings run. In episode 11, Tomoyo gives Sakura a rare tour of her impressive mansion home, including a cinema room in which she confesses that she watches her recordings back of Sakura in battle constantly. It seems that Tomoyo is as much a part of the audience to Sakura’s life as we – the viewers – are. It also strikes me that this obsessive behaviour might translate entirely differently if Tomoyo were male.

Tomoyo’s idolisation of Sakura is far from veiled, and yet it is not revealed to be unmistakeably romantic until Episode 40, in which Sakura must capture a Clow card that makes people dream about their hidden desires. Sakura, Tomoyo, Syaoran Li (Sakura’s rival and love interest) and his cousin Meilin visit a fun fair. Sakura and Meilin team up to play a Whack-A-Mole game and Tomoyo – as usual – picks up her camera to film Sakura in action. Suddenly, the Clow card appears in the form of a glowing butterfly and lands on Tomoyo’s shoulder. Tomoyo falls into a dream sequence, in which we see her deepest desire play out through her eyes. On a pink background of falling cherry blossom, copies of Sakura dressed in Tomoyo’s outfits call her name and dance playfully around her. We are shown a shot of Tomoyo’s face – staring in awe at first, and then relax into a smile. “I’m so happy!” she says to herself, and runs toward the dancing copies of Sakura – still filming.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAx_vfayMTw”]

It seems like an odd moment to be sexually awakened – watching your crush play a Whack-A-Mole game at a fun fair – and perhaps if the show had been targeted at a more mixed audience (or the characters were older) this moment might have been filled with more obvious sexualised content. But through Tomoyo’s own eyes, CLAMP visually summarise the complex feelings of romance, admiration, obsession, and innocent love she feels for Sakura. Not only this, but as Sakura dances continually out of Tomoyo’s physical reach, the implication becomes one of wanting something you know you can never have. Tomoyo knows by now of Syaoran’s feelings for Sakura and like a true friend encourages their romance for the sake of Sakura’s happiness rather than her own.

This “doomed” romance trap seems to be a family curse, as we discover in episode 10 that Tomoyo’s mother appeared to also be hopelessly in love with Sakura’s mother (her cousin). Similarly, Sakura’s mother didn’t return her cousin’s feelings as she was in love with an older man (Sakura’s father) in the same way that Sakura is attracted to Yukito – an older boy. Both mothers are absent from their lives – Sakura’s mother through death, and Tomoyo’s through continual business trips – yet their daughters seem fated to play out their romantic histories.

Suffering from a bout of nostalgia, I decided to revisit the show as an adult, first in it’s Americanised form, and then the original Japanese version to compare the differences. I was shocked to discover that in an effort to make the show fit the perceived needs of their rigidly defined demographic of young boys, the executives at Kids WB had hacked all elements of “toxic” feminisation from it – romance, homosexuality, and the agency of Sakura has a protagonist (even her name is removed from the title) – dramatically reducing the run-time from 70 to just 39 episodes. In fact, if they had been able to “maximise” their cuts, the show would reportedly have run for merely 13 episodes. In other words, there was a concerted effort to twist the female gaze into a male one under the belief that CLAMP’s blend of hyper-femininity and action would be unappealing for the male audience it was being aimed at. In Japanese Superheroes for Global Girls, Anne Allison quotes this from an executive from Mattel, “[…] In America, girls will watch male-oriented programming but boys won’t watch female-oriented shows; this makes a male superhero a better bet.”

Whilst moaning about all this to my partner recently, I asked him if he had watched the dubbed version of the show as a child. He said that he had, but didn’t realise until he was older that the show had probably been intended for girls. I asked him if he remembered being turned-off that the show’s hero was a little girl as opposed to the ultra-masculine characters of his favourite childhood anime, Dragon Ball Z. His totally undermines Mattel’s assumptions about the show’s gender appeal: “I thought Sakura was really cool. In fact, I loved her so much I begged my mum for roller-skates that Christmas so that I could skate around to be like her.” Even more affirming than this is the fact that whilst the dubbed version of the show ended up being cancelled, the original Japanese one ran to its intended conclusion; spawned two films; and inspired two spin-off series using the same characters – Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle and xxxHolic.

Sadly, by “butching” Cardcaptor Sakura up to be squeezed into the TV schedule alongside Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z, Western children were deprived of the tender and emotionally complex storytelling and character development behind all the magic and swordplay – and even from getting a satisfying ending to the show. It seems that whilst Japanese children are considered mature enough to deal with female superheroes, complex pre-pubescent emotions, and LGBTQ+ representation from a female perspective, Western children are unfortunately not treated with the same respect or intelligence.

Sources

The Female Gaze in Contemporary Japanese Literature, Kathryn Hemmann.

On Writing (Strong) Female Characters, Daniel Swensen.

Magical Girls: Empowered or Objectified? Wiki for SC2220: Gender Studies for University of Singapore.

The Americanisation of Cardcaptor Sakura, Actar’s Reviews.

Hannah Collins is a freelance illustrator, writer, Feminist, anime nerd, and Britney Spears apologist. You can read more of her writing on gender in pop culture at Fanny Pack and her on own blog.