Well, hello! Welcome to the grand opening of Shojo Power! A Feminist Analysis of Sailor Moon and More. This is a blog dedicated to feminist analysis of the Japanese anime/manga Sailor Moon, other girl oriented anime, and Japanese culture.
The seed for this blog was planted in June 2013 during the first convention dedicated solely to Sailor Moon, Senshi Matsuri. At the con, I presented a powerpoint presentation on the topic of Sailor Moon & Feminism. I had a great time presenting it and the attendees were already well versed in Sailor Moon and feminism. What I didn’t expect was the sheer excitement from the attendees–even though any one of them could have done this panel, they were still super excited that someone had decided to do one! That’s when I realized that although are so many amazing geeky, feminist blogs and tumblrs etc out there, there might be room for one more. Heck, I had so much material from my presentation that I didn’t talk about, where was I going to put it all?!
To that end, here’s what I hope to achieve with Shojo Power!
1) To provide in-depth feminist analysis of Sailor Moon in all its incarnations–including the new anime airing sometime in Winter 2013/2014
2) To amplify the voices of Sailor Moon fans, particularly the lady voices
3) To provide feminist analysis of other girl-oriented anime
4) To be a bridge between Western feminism and Japanese feminism
5) To have a ton of fun talking about Japanese and Western culture!
I hope you all will come on this journey with me–I expect this will be a huge learning process, but I hope all of us can have fun too! I have a day job to pay the bills so I won’t be able to post every day, so I’m aiming to post every Monday morning at 9am sharp EST. I realize this post is landing on a Friday morning, so I hope Friday will become a regular posting day too.
But there’s no need to wait! I’ve been a busy bee and I already have posts on Sailor Moon and DOMA as well as a non-Sailor Moon movie review of Hentai Kamen (not to be confused with Tuxedo Kamen). My first order of business is to rework my powerpoint presentation into individual posts. I already have the first post in this series done which is Does Sailor Moon Pass the Bechdel Test? (My mother really wants to see the powerpoint presentation so you can even share these posts with your mother too! MUAHAHA.)
Are there any topics you want Shojo Power! to cover? Be sure to leave them in the comments!
As a long time Sailor Moon fan, I am looking forward to your posts!
Thank you! ^_^