Christie Barber

Masculinity in Japanese Sports Films

This paper considers three recent Japanese sports films for young people, Feel the Wind (2009), Oppai Volleyball (2009) and Dive!! (2008), which employ a common sports film script to explore the ways in which masculinity is constructed, expressed and evaluated through participation in sport. Through depictions of masculinities that achieve subjective agency and acceptance by peers despite a lack of competence or victory in sport, these films disrupt the established relationship between masculinity, competence and dominance, and endorse non-normative models of masculinity. They also reflect the tensions between a desire for agency, social constraints and expectations, and the dominant ideology of masculinity. In so doing, they help to illuminate the ways in which gender is negotiated in relation to contemporary social and political conditions.

Masculinity, Makeovers, and the Ethics of Consumption in Japanese Films for Young People

This article examines three recent Japanese films for young people— Kyō, koi wo hajimemasu ( Today, I Will Fall in Love ), Paradise Kiss , and Runway Beat —that employ a common narrative strategy whereby interior development of the female protagonist is matched by a process of transformation through consumption, in the form of a makeover. The films code consumption as morally good in that the female protagonists, following this transformation, achieve some degree of subjective agency and find meaningful positions in their social worlds. Nevertheless, an examination of the process of transformation and of the depictions of the young men who initiate and control the transformations reveals that these films convey a problematic ethics of consumption.