Crayon Shin-chan – Female 2

This blog is going to examine the situation of female description in Crayon Shin-chan. This domain has attracted many scholars’ attention and they explored traditional feminine stereotypes involving placing females in a subordinate situation of male (Althusser, 1974, quoted by Caradeux and Salom, 2013). In Japan, women strives for equal rights such as education and workforce under the overarching patriarchal society (Kagawa, 2006). In this cartoon, some unequal arrangement of female character still exist, nevertheless, the situation of them is also improved along with the changing status of women.

Firstly, in the portrayal of main character family and some supporting roles, the mainstream dimorphic rule still remain unchanged that women are housewives who stays at home (Ledden and Fejes, 1897) while men working outside. For example, in Shin-chan’s family and his four friends families as well.

Shin-chan’s mother does housework

Shin-chan’s father works in office

Shin-chan’s frtiend’s (NINI) mother does housework

Secondly, Gökçearslan (2010) claim that male cartoon figures are more that that of female and the the percentage of female characters worked outside in all women is lower that that of male characters. However, these two distribution of female and male roles in Crayon Shin-chan are not that serious.

Supporting roles employment situation

Above chart is a statistic of all supporting roles in Crayon Shin-chan episode from 1 to 200. On one hand, the number of female characters (90) is more than that of male (52). On the other, 56.67% of women ever appear in working situation less than that of male supporting roles with a percentage of 76.92; nevertheless, the gap is not that large. Considering the job of female, most of them works as waitresses, nurse and salesclerks, but there also some women work as teacher, policewomen, doctor and so on outside of household. This can be treated as a unprejudiced representation of female in the area of employment with various occupations. In addition, the description here is better than several works that a research has shown only 13% of female cartoon characters work ( Gökçearslan, 2010).

Female Supporting Role – Nurse

Female Supporting Role – Female Golfer

Female Supporting Role – Salesclerk

Female Supporting Role – housewife

Thirdly, categorization, which is contrary to nominalization, is also worthy to discuss. This concept means a role is not portrayed by being herself or himself, but has to depend on others ( Gökçearslan, 2010). In Crayon Shin-shan, most of the female roles are in this category due to they don’t have personal traits and only exist relate to Shin-chan’s family. Female roles in this cartoon without name and individual personality establish a symbolic group of subordinate of men. In addition, as mentioned in previous blog, more than half of female supporting roles, more than 50% of them are designed to satisfy Shin-chan and his father’s desire. Those female maintain a symbol of beauty and other females who appear not young, slim and good-looking are employed to set off the beauty group.

lower right – (nana) beautiful sister; upper left – nana’s muscular female friend

Reference
Caradeux, D.A. and Salom, L.G. (2013). ‘Social Representation of Gender in Award-winner Short Films in Spain’ (from the proceedings of 5^th International Conference on Corpus Linguistics, 2013), Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 95, pp.126-135. doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.10.631

Gökçearslan, A. (2010). ‘The effect of cartoon movies on children’s gender development’ in Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2(2), pp.5202-5207. doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2010.03.846