Straight from the heart : gender, intimacy, and the cultural production of shōjo manga

Manga is the backbone of Japanese popular culture, influencing everything from television, movies, and video games to novels, art, and theater. __Shojo 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 __shojo 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 __shojo manga__. With their glittery pastel covers and focus on human relationships and romance, __shojo 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 __shojo manga,__ Prough analyzes __shojo 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 __shojo 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. "The contents of shojo manga have long offered a magical world to girl readers, especially in the golden age of the 1970s. Contemporary manga such as Gals! capture readers' attention with tales of daring girls who lead extraordinary lives within ordinary environments. Straight from the Heart offers a firsthand view of the manga publishing industry, delineating its history and exploring the numerous ways it tries to bring girls into the fold, first as reader/consumers and later, as manga artists and/or readers of magazines for women. We need books like this to use in the classroom that help students analyze this popular medium."--Jan Bardsley, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill