by Aidan Pang, PhD, Department of English

Japan’s voice-acting industry is a hotbed of “gender trouble.” A cursory glance at the credits for many popular anime such as Naruto (2002–2007), Fullmetal Alchemist (2003–2004), and One Piece (1999–) reveal that their male leads are all voiced by women. Of course, within the Japanese voice-acting industry, this is ordinary and even expected. Some female seiyu (voice actors) like Saiga Mitsuki and Park Romi often voice male characters even when male seiyu are available for the roles. So what does it mean when these women’s voices are preferable over the “real” thing? This seemingly common occurrence in the seiyu industry opens a conversation around a larger subject concerning vocal “ability” where “passing”—as male, as white, as straight, or as abled—is a site of daily conflict for many people whose voices belie their marginalized identities. More often than not, equity and inclusion in sound are often underprioritized in contrast to the visual. What these seiyu teach us is that the dissonance between what the body looks like and what the body sounds like demonstrates that what we hear can transform the way we conceptualize bodies and their subjectivities. 

While my research trip to Japan in 2020 was interrupted by the pandemic, the CSWS Graduate Student Research Grant allowed me to gather primary materials to further develop an affective politics of listening to reform ideas of subject and nationhood beyond Western conceptions of gender, sexuality, race, and ability. This project was a chapter of my dissertation that focuses on vocal genderplay in Japanese drama CDs. This particular medium is a booming market in Japan that encompasses a wide range of genres including talk CDs, BL (Boys’ Love) CDs, GL (Girls’ Love) CDs, otome (women-oriented) CDs, and doujin (self-published) CDs. But considering how genderplay is so prevalent in visual media, it is surprisingly rare in aural media. As the listener is only privy to the voice itself, it is perhaps this lack of visual stimuli that suggests that the voice, without imagery to contain it, may function as a powerful mode of transgression and transformation. In her discussion on queer listening, Yvon Bonenfant emphasizes the power in giving shape to the vocal body, as in such imagining, “We hear and feel a body: a peculiar sort of body [italics mine]” that is very much influenced by our own lived experience. For queer listeners, especially, drama CDs offer a space where gender bending may be more than just play. In this aural space, the voice has the potential to further complicate current renderings of gender, sexuality, and the body in real life. 

My case study was on the 2014 Japanese drama CD series Goes! as it is the first well-known occurrence of female-to-male gender play in this medium. This drama follows a reverse-harem format where the assumed female listener develops a relationship with seven possible male love interests. As an audio drama, the success of Goes! relies heavily on the ability of its male characters’ seiyu to appeal to its target audience of young women. But unlike other reverse-harem drama CDs that employ male seiyu, Goes! uses women, or more specifically women’s voices, to attract women listeners. Whether intentional or not, Goes!’s heterosexual romance is not so heterosexual after all. 

By having an all-female cast, Goes! provides a unique aural vantage point to examine not only how listeners negotiate the dissonance between “male” voices and the female bodies producing them, but also why they find such voices appealing. This audio drama dissociates the link between men and masculinity as it invites pleasure from a certain kind of male-coded voice that, most importantly, is cultivated by the female body. As Judith Butler illustrates in her concept of the heterosexual matrix, the associations of masculinity with male bodies and femininity with female bodies are not, in fact, natural phenomena, but rather configurations determined by heterosexual practice. Goes! offers other modes of being that do not rely on a rigid gender binary nor ones that are tied to heterosexual reproduction. As a result, this listening experience facilitates a shift in the listener’s aural orientation away from a traditional concept of masculinity and heterosexual romance toward othered modes of feeling in the world.

—Aidan Pang received a 2020–21 Graduate Student Research Grant from CSWS. 

References 

Yvon Bonenfant, “Queer Listening to Queer Vocal Timbres,” Performance Research 15, no. 3 (2010): 79. 

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge: New York, 2002), 194.