Welcome to GLARe! Please feel free to read more about this site or its contributors, or dive into our posts!
If you are new to studying gender, language and animation, you might want to start with the posts on the basics:
For a bibliography of articles, textbooks and other sources in this field, please see our bibliography.
We hope that you will look at animation differently after spending some time here.
Animation often brings with it associations of fairytale tropes, cutesy characters, and family-friendly storylines (with the exception of a few innuendos for the parents). But the foul-mouthed animal-human hybrids of BoJack Horseman (Bob-Waksberg, 2014-2020) exemplify the ever expanding, highly whacky world of adult animation. Although it is massively under-researched in comparison to children’s animation (Mitkus, … Continue reading You Can Lead A Horse To Feminism But You Can’t Make It Think: ‘BoJack the Feminist’ and Nuanced Understandings of Gender in Adult Animation
When you first start reading about gender, arguably one of the most confusing concepts to grapple with is how the terms ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’, which may once have seemed overarching and definitive, are often discussed as plural ‘masculinities’ and ‘femininities’. These plural terms, whilst ubiquitous in academia, don’t seem to crop up too often in … Continue reading Why do we talk about masculinities and femininities?
“… Then a noble princess is not a human!” – Princess Kaguya As several other GLARe posts show, gender stereotypes are reflected in animated characters. When you place a Disney princess next to a prince, the differences are stark (take Sleeping Beauty below, for example). Traditionally, the princess might be polite and beautiful, taking a … Continue reading To be a ‘Princess’: Language, womanhood & social status in Studio Ghibli’s ‘The Tale of the Princess Kaguya’
Even if you’ve never heard of Revolutionary Girl Utena (Ikuhara, 1997), you’ll absolutely know something that’s referenced it, if not taken direct influence from it. From Steven Universe (Sugar, 2013-2019), The Owl House (Terrace, 2020-present) and She-Ra and The Princesses of Power (Stevenson, 2018-2020), to Pokémon (Yuyama and Tomiyasu, 1997–Present), Scott Pilgrim (O’Malley, 2004-2010) and My … Continue reading The Sapphic 90s anime that inspired Steven Universe and She-ra: a discourse-focused analysis of Revolutionary Girl Utena
