Shakespeare Mangafied

Gender and Japanese Visual Language

Abstract

This paper discusses a graphic adaptation of William Shakespeare’s comedy, Twelfth Night (2011), produced by the British publishing company SelfMadeHero and explores how the metaphors in this manga negotiate gender constructions. With reference to Schmitt’s investigation of metaphor and gender (2009), Cohn’s analyses of Japanese Visual Language (2010, 2016) and a brief historical overview of shojo manga – a genre mainly aimed at girls and female adolescents – I argue that Shakespeare’s complex metaphors used in the manga version should be (re)interpreted along the lines of both Japan’s cultural history and the development of the shojo genre. The analyses of selected scenes demonstrate that allegedly stereotypical visualizations are not always as clichéd as they might appear and have to be perceived outside Western concepts of gender. Moreover, this paper emphasizes the necessity to consider the space, time and genre transfer between Europe and Asia, between the English Renaissance and the twenty-first century and between the Shakespearean drama and the medium of the comic. The current investigation particularly addresses the question of how the visual metaphors of the Shakespeare manga negotiate gender constructions of the Elizabethan drama. This paper concludes that not only metaphor and gender but also genre need to be understood as highly conventionalized schemata in order to avoid ‘doing gender’ by focusing on oppositional metaphors only.