This post has content warnings for: onimai piss jokes.
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in reply to @highimpactsex's post:
Great stuff as always. Forgive me if you've spoken on this before, but what do you think makes Gender Trouble unreadable? I've only encountered it in annotated digestible excerpts but have intended to crack it open properly at some point.
This is really interesting, thank you for sharing your analysis! I'm also contemplating this in relation to Catcher in the Rhyme, where the pervy humor isn't really in the camera or the storytelling, it's introduced by the characters themselves. Utsugi's dirty jokes are just another facet of her being true to herself, and become a defining character trait all on their own, at least as much as her being trans; it lets her be just as weird and messy as everyone else, and fits her into the extant comedic archetype of "cute girl with her mind in the gutter". It's a bold approach to take, and I'm still really enamored with it!
thank you for writing this! it's the clearest framing i've seen of a lot of what i love about onimai and why it resonated when a lot of less-twisted gender stories fell flatter. i really do think the sweet life scenes and the funny perverse scenes are inseparable, like light and shadow- it's only through seeing her own childishness and messiness (through comedy etc) that both she and the reader are able to accept those sides of her, and from there do something new with them and grow. the transition from heavily neet fetish comedy towards the start to a more balanced slice-of-life (with some fetish comedy) felt really poignant to me- there's a scene where mahiro tells miyo she doesn't need to be ashamed of the things she loves, and the story feels like a testament to what's possible through acceptance of what you love, especially when it's weird.
Don't think it's quite the same, but I've found Shintaro Kago's eroguro work, particularly in terms of humor, interesting in a similar way. Dementia 21 in particular seems to use its humor to explore aging and elderly care
Kago’s work may be more in line with the trends of eroguro that emerged in the 1920s and 30s where ironic eroticism was paired with commodity fetishism of the human body as a reaction to the rise of metropolitan sectors within capitalist Japan. This kind of “biopolitics” pairs well with his single art pieces that often transform and meld female body parts into metropolitan structures like skyscrapers, railroads, and utility pipes. Mark Driscoll’s book on the subject is very good.
Ooo I need to check that out! I haven’t seen Kago’s art pieces!
Yep, that’s the one! You can find it on the Internet Archive for free though (and libgen if you feel so inclined). I recommend also just googling “Shintaro Kago art” and you’ll get a lot of good examples. He tends to post them freely on Twitter.
"Onimai seems to suggest that the fantasy of age regression and age in general might play a huge factor on how we define gender."
This bit really struck me as someone who's increasingly considering him(?)self non-binary. I think there's a certain sense in which young bodies are considered somewhat less gendered than adult bodies, and if at least one appeal to age regression (or the fantasy of an eternal youth more generally) is this recovery of a (presumed) more baseline androgynous body.