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Conference Agenda

The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.

Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)

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Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).

Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:20am EDT

Daily Overview

Session

Sounding the Other
Session Chair: Mike Levine

Presentation 3

Transmedia Women’s Bodies in Japanese Anime Voices

Cheuk Ling Yu

University of California San Diego

Through a case study of Japanese anime voice dramas, this paper explores a transmedia approach to address the ongoing heteronormative, binary, and patriarchal production of women’s bodies in contemporary Japanese anime. Women’s preference for the vocal and men’s preference for the visual have been ends of a historically embedded binary constructed by anime production companies. Japanese anime fans and scholars of popular media have correlated the growth in anime voice production since the 2010s with the rising status of Japanese women audiences. Women audiences have growing product choices, such as voice dramas, radio shows, and audio technology to pursue their aural fantasy. They also form communities and gain public spaces to share their support for anime voices. Based on ethnographic fieldwork from 2023 to 2025, as well as historical materials from interviews, social media, and journal articles, this paper presents a paradox in this liberation of women audiences through voice.

This paper references “ornamentalism” (Cheng 2018), which recognizes Asiatic feminine bodies as “superficial, detachable, migratory” ornaments, in the context of contemporary multimedia Japanese anime. In doing so, I trace how women audiences listen to their body parts from the female character’s perspective in interactive voice dramas (or “Situation CDs”). These voice dramas target women audiences with the goal of “serving” them with male voices. Situation CDs mute the female protagonist to allow the woman listener to project herself onto her, while male voices fill the CD, instructing the female character's actions and interacting with her different body parts. By focusing on how women audiences listen to their feet, ears, and skin, I argue that men’s voices mold the body of the female character and, simultaneously, that of the woman listener. By examining women’s transmedially scattered bodies, this paper decenters visuality and the masculine gaze, problematizing the separation between the fictional anime world and the real world in theorizing the mediatized influences on women’s bodies. It suggests voice as an analytical medium that emphasizes a transmedia approach to address the production of women’s bodies in contemporary multimedia culture, not as metaphorical, but as materialized and metonymic.