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 comprise 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 a growing number of product choices to pursue their aural fantasy and form communities to share their support for anime voices. Drawing from historical and ethnographic materials, this paper presents a paradox in this “liberation” of women audiences. I reference “ornamentalism” (Cheng 2018), which recognizes Asiatic feminine bodies as “superficial, detachable, migratory” ornaments, in the context of contemporary multimedia 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). Situation CDs target women audiences with the goal of “serving” them with male voices. By focusing on her feet, ears, and skin, I argue that men’s voices mold the body of the female character, and simultaneously that of the woman listener. Through examining women’s transmedially scattered bodies, this paper 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.

Gachiakuta is an anime/manga that is heavily inspired by 1970s Black graffiti culture. The manga first debuted in 2022, but the conversation surrounding the work's cultural identity intensified with the release of the anime adaptation in 2025. Almost immediately following the initial episodes, widespread discussions erupted across TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit from the Blerd (Black nerd) community discussing the distinct and unprecedented "Blackness" of the show. There was an overwhelmingly positive reception from Blerd communities on the portrayal of the cultural identity and Black characters within the anime. This paper explores and expands on this discussion, asking how a work conceived, written, and produced within a Japanese cultural context obtains, sounds, and projects Black American cultural identity. Furthermore, who has the authority to constitute this “Blackness”, the representation through the audiovisual, or the interpretation from the audience? By putting ethnographic research in conversation with Stuart Hall’s “Theory of Representation”, I map how the responses of the Blerd community are a reception to hearing and seeing their cultural identity through this Japanese curated world. I argue that this positive reception by Blerd communities speaks to historic understandings of representation within anime. Too often, within mainstream media landscapes, Blackness has been rigidly confined, flattened, and reduced to a set of damaging stereotypes, portraying a lack of nuance and multidimensionality. Gachiakuta, conversely, provides a space for Blackness to be fluid, allowing for this adoption of an authentic black cultural identity in Japanese storytelling.

This paper situates voice as an ontological tool for understanding the imaginary politics of BIPOC or Blerd (Black Nerd) relationships with mukokuseki anime characters, figures drawn or written as ethnoracially ambiguous. The practice of imaginative black coding, assigning race to a fictional character without physical embodiment or artistic transformation, rubs against the mukokuseki’s assumed statelessness in the minds of individual consumers; however. the ethnic and racial ‘claiming’ of characters online remains unresolved and usually relies solely on visual or narratological elements in anime. Considering the affective role voice acting plays in anime consumption helps delineate the racial, ethnic, and gendered politics of representation and real-world existence. Through my case study, I question how the voice reinforces or antagonizes imagination while pushing against the malleable borders of anime as an ethnically homogeneous genre. In teasing out one interlocutor’s Afro-Latinidad connection with Mirko from the anime series My Hero Academia, I connect character interpretation to histories of Afro-Latinx representation and life experiences while tying her voice to others online in their discussion of who and what Mirko is. Research on Mirko and her voice actor shows that voice is not only part of the complicated process of meaning-making in anime but also a construction many have to mediate. I argue that the voice is a performative and discursive object that signifies corporeal and racial subjectivities, further intensifying the affective-transformative relationship between BIPOC anime fans and characters for possibilities of racial interiority and sincerity.

In online anime fan discourse, fan service (the inclusion of unnecessary scenes that oversexualize female characters) is a common discussion topic due to its prevalence in various popular anime series, typically those marketed to male audiences. The male-oriented series Rent-a-Girlfriend is often ridiculed for its close adherence to the male gaze (Mulvey 1975), whereas the male-oriented series My Dress-Up Darling is praised for its transgressive outlook on gender and love. Lamarre’s analysis of Chobits, a male-oriented romance series, differs from earlier psychoanalytic analyses of anime because he makes a strong case for analyzing interrelations between the structures - the physical/technological forms - and the surfaces - ideologies, e.g., gender - of anime, not just the ideologies alone (Lamarre 2009). However, discussions of fan service and gender representations, in both academic and non-academic contexts, focus on visual and narrative modes, seldom highlighting the aural. This leads me to ask: can fan service be heard? In other words, can (male) desire be mediated through sound? In a similar manner to Lamarre, I use the male-oriented series Rent-a-Girlfriend and My Dress-Up Darling as starting points to investigate how heteronormative ideologies of gender are mapped onto sound/music through semiotic association, particularly in the opening songs and scenes depicting sexual arousal. I make a focused contribution to the psychoanalytic approach and recent academic discourse on digital mediations of music (Born 2022). My investigation ultimately reveals the (in)capacity of sound to situate a listener within a gendered ideological position.