The theme of my midterm playlist assignment is “subversion of gender roles, lesbianism, and sword fighting”. This is a topic that aligns very well with many of my interests, and I’ve been exploring it on my own time particularly sparked by my interest in the anime Revolutionary Girl Utena. Selecting the episodes of the theme was pretty easy for me since I constantly look for Utena references in media I watch, particularly when it is in the realm of anime as it is decently commonplace, especially when a female character is subverting gender norms or having a lesbian love interest, which are some of my favorite things. I thought it would only make sense to start off with Rose of Versailles as it is the oldest media I mentioned but also the most influential and an important precursor to Utena, and for the rest of the examples I chose ones that either referenced Utena like Steven Universe, and Rondo of the Sun and the Moon or took the symbolism of sword fighting and used it to prove a similar point like Little Witch Academia (although it is worth mentioning that the creator the the show worked on Utena as well, animating the show’s iconic opening sequence). 

The connections to gender is all throughout the media, most of these pieces of media I chose have gender at the center, and many of them gender and lesbianism. When it comes to gender in pop culture, especially in a place like Japan where gender roles and a depart from those gender roles is even more scandalous than here, these pieces of media that dissect that and the intersectionality between queerness and gender roles they often have to find ways to convey the gender roles being broken or subverted and so sword fighting in media, with its magical stakes and completely fictional yet historically masculine, especially in Japanese culture is the perfect tool to subvert the audience’s expectations of gender. The reading by Schrock and Schwalbe Men, Masculinity and Manhood Acts helps to cement the idea of props being used to masculinity in media, “Young males also learn that gender identities are signified by using appropriate props. Initially, much of this identity work is done by parents, as newborns and toddlers are equipped" ( Schrock and Schwalbe 281), but also that these props are used to create acts and shows of manliness that enforce the media’s way of portraying masculinity which is “as assertive and aggressive, rarely nurturing, and more likely than female characters to work outside the home", and also "more likely than female characters to be athletic, aggressive, and heroic" (Schrock and Schwalbe 283). In the media I chose these expectations of masculinity are subverted by being carried out my female characters, and the shows of traditional masculinity, particularly in front of a female love interest really cement this idea of a woman doing all of the man’s jobs. 

Another reading important for this idea is Halberstam's Female Masculinity, particularly about "when and where female masculinity conjoins with possibly queer identities, it is far less likely to meet with approval. Because female masculinity seems to be at its most threatening when coupled with lesbian desire,. . .I concentrate on queer female masculinity almost to the exclusion of heterosexual female masculinity" (Halberstam 371). How female masculinity especially combined with lesbianism is the most threatening to patriarchal societies. This is not a new idea in the slightest, even the ancient Greeks thought of it much the same, in a Greek dialogue there’s a quote from Pseudo-Lucian's Erotes in which the speaker talks about lesbianism in an interesting manner, “let them have intercourse with each other just as men do. Let them strap themselves cunningly to contrived instruments of lechery, those mysterious monstrosities devoid of seed, and let woman lie with woman as does a man…And how much better that a woman should invade the provinces of male wantonness than that the nobility of the male sex should become effeminate and play the part of the woman” (Erotes 28). The problem the ancient greeks had was the woman assuming the gender roles associated with men, and how women loving women was nothing more han a bogeyman or a joke to terrify the reader away from the notion of male-male love. This sort of thing is also feared in Japan and also many western societies, men fear women not needing them, and assuming their own gender roles, the idea of women being with women isn’t as fearful as women being with women who are exhibiting masculinity, which is was Halberstam was getting at. In all the intersection of gender role subversion, lesbianism, and sword fighting have an interesting and pervasive niche in pop culture that I have always loved to explore.