What do you think?
Rate this book
Straight from the Heart: Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shojo Manga
Manga is the backbone of Japanese popular culture, influencing everything from television, movies, and video games to novels, art, and theater. Shōjo manga (girls’ comics) has been seminal to the genre as a whole and especially formative for Japanese girls’ culture throughout the postwar era. In Straight from the Heart, Jennifer Prough examines the shōjo manga industry as a site of cultural storytelling, illuminating the ways that issues of mass media, gender, production, and consumption are involved in the process of creating shōjo manga.
With their glittery pastel covers and focus on human relationships and romance, shōjo manga are thoroughly marked by gender―as indeed are almost all manga titles, magazines, and publishing divisions. Drawing on two years of fieldwork on the production of shōjo manga, Prough analyzes shōjo manga texts and their magazine contexts to explain their distinctive appeal, probe the gendered dynamics inherent in their creation, and demonstrate the feedback system that links producers and consumers in a continuous cycle of "affective labor." Each chapter focuses on one facet of shōjo manga production (stories, format, personnel, industry dynamics), providing engaging insights into this popular medium. Tacking between story development, interactive magazine features, and relationships between male editors and female artists, Prough examines the concrete ways in which shojo manga reflect, refract, and fabricate constructions of gender, consumption, and intimacy. Straight from the Heart thus weaves together issues of production and consumption, human relations, and gender to explain the unique world of shojo manga and to interpret its dramatic cultural and economic success on a national―and increasingly global―scale.
With their glittery pastel covers and focus on human relationships and romance, shōjo manga are thoroughly marked by gender―as indeed are almost all manga titles, magazines, and publishing divisions. Drawing on two years of fieldwork on the production of shōjo manga, Prough analyzes shōjo manga texts and their magazine contexts to explain their distinctive appeal, probe the gendered dynamics inherent in their creation, and demonstrate the feedback system that links producers and consumers in a continuous cycle of "affective labor." Each chapter focuses on one facet of shōjo manga production (stories, format, personnel, industry dynamics), providing engaging insights into this popular medium. Tacking between story development, interactive magazine features, and relationships between male editors and female artists, Prough examines the concrete ways in which shojo manga reflect, refract, and fabricate constructions of gender, consumption, and intimacy. Straight from the Heart thus weaves together issues of production and consumption, human relations, and gender to explain the unique world of shojo manga and to interpret its dramatic cultural and economic success on a national―and increasingly global―scale.
184 pages, Paperback
First published November 22, 2010
6 people are currently reading
179 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 31, 2013
A disappointingly shallow introduction to the shojo manga industry, focusing on one publisher, with a slightly more in-depth look at one title, "Gals." Most of the book consists of an explanation of how shojo manga artists get into the business (in Japan) and work with their editors. Unfortunately, the author apparently wasn't allowed much on-one-on access to the artists (a fact she apologizes for) and apart from "Gals" there's little specific information about any particular manga or manga artist. It also very much reads like an academic thesis, with bland prose and a lot of overexplanation and repetition to pad out the thin material ("in this chapter I will discuss the following..."). For a much superior book on the same topic, read Sharon Kinsella's "Adult Manga".
December 2, 2024
3.5 stars
Straight from the Heart is an ethnographic study that looks at the main four manga shojo publishers in Japan. There are some interesting points in this and I am mainly using it for research, so I'm not necessarily coming at it from an enjoyment angle. Some chapters were more interesting than others and had great portions of research. There were also chapters that I wished delved more into gender and how that plays a part in the manga that is being published. It was all very much to the point and there were no major analyses or connections to break genre barriers. I kept being told how publishers approach shojo manga as being something that looks at human relations, which I believe to be true, but that publishers, artists, and editors also think about the heart of girls, and it's all very gender binary which I find to be so strange because shojo manga is one of the few spaces where gender norms can be tossed aside and often are, so I'm confused. There was one page where the author mentioned the gender barriers being broken with the creation of the tomboy character, but it didn't appropriately look at or deconstruct gender binaries despite using Lady Oscar from The Rose of Versailles as the tomboy example. It was not the research I wanted, but I can gather some stuff from this book.
Straight from the Heart is an ethnographic study that looks at the main four manga shojo publishers in Japan. There are some interesting points in this and I am mainly using it for research, so I'm not necessarily coming at it from an enjoyment angle. Some chapters were more interesting than others and had great portions of research. There were also chapters that I wished delved more into gender and how that plays a part in the manga that is being published. It was all very much to the point and there were no major analyses or connections to break genre barriers. I kept being told how publishers approach shojo manga as being something that looks at human relations, which I believe to be true, but that publishers, artists, and editors also think about the heart of girls, and it's all very gender binary which I find to be so strange because shojo manga is one of the few spaces where gender norms can be tossed aside and often are, so I'm confused. There was one page where the author mentioned the gender barriers being broken with the creation of the tomboy character, but it didn't appropriately look at or deconstruct gender binaries despite using Lady Oscar from The Rose of Versailles as the tomboy example. It was not the research I wanted, but I can gather some stuff from this book.
May 12, 2011
Detailed ethnography of shojo magazine production in Japan. Very big on the publishing houses, not much contact with the mangaka and none unmediated (editors always present). Priceless. I do wonder about some of the class differences between mangaka and editors -- she talks about age/gender in terms of status, but all the editors seem to be college graduates whereas the mangaka seem to start straight out of high school. In the US that would be a huge class indicator, but I'm not sure if it's the same in Japan, especially for women.
January 1, 2013
Scholarly and very interesting study of the shojo manga publishing industry. I learned a lot of things I did not know about the role of manga magazines in the Japanese publishing market, the way new artists are recruited and developed, and the gendered nature of the kids' manga world (shojo vs shonen).
December 5, 2015
a decent and not too overbearing commentary on how gender is portrayed in the shoujo genre of manga, would recommend to anyone interested in gender theory within the animanga context
abstinence
January 11, 2022If you know the lyrics to Christina Aguilera's song "What a Girl Wants" you have the extent of Prough's arguments and observations in this book.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews