Sexuality in Gungrave
Feb. 11th, 2012 04:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiGungrave as an Asexual-Positive Text
The anime, Gungrave, offers a refreshingly balanced view of sex. While acknowledging sex as important, it is a rare example of a text that does not exaggerate the importance of sex within a healthy society. (Mind you, Gungrave in no way presents a healthy society, but its narrative stance does show healthy attitudes toward sex.) In addition to modeling balanced attitudes toward sex as an aspect of human society, the anime provides a strong asexual role model in the character of Brandon.
Spoilers Follow
The Norm
As far as I can make out, contemporary Western society's default attitudes toward sex reflect three main beliefs, all of which place sex in a position of preeminent importance to human life. (I discuss aspects of this more fully in my essay on Boston Partnership.)
1) The Allegory of Love (to use C. S. Lewis's phrase) tells us that the most important relationship anyone will ever have is with their romantic soul mate, one's relationship to whom must be fundamentally grounded in romantic sexual attraction. (There is a lip-service exception to this for parent-child relationships, but while they are lauded, they are comparatively rarely represented as central in our popular culture.)
2) Freudianism (a simplification) argues that sex is the root of the human psyche. It is the defining drive of everyone from birth if not before. Civilization was invented to curb this drive, and psychological health/neurosis is largely shaped by how one learns to curb/express/repress this drive in socially accepted ways.
3) Sin: Here's the old idea (thank you, Apostle Paul) that sex is inherently sinful at least outside of reproductive marriage and, even there, celibacy is "more pure." Now, few people today believe this (outside of some religious communities), yet our popular culture has an odd belief that a lot of people believe it. Hence, we still get a vast array of "transgressive" texts touting sexual activity and sexuality in general as counterculture, subversive, courageous, etc. and deserving of great social attention. (I'm not saying this is never valid, but for something "subversive" it certainly is pervasive!)
I think each of these beliefs is, to some extent, socially harmful. The first vastly limits the range of acceptable human relationships and often pushes people into bad relationships because they are "romantic/sexual" and, therefore, supposed to be the answer to everything. The second is as ridiculous as Descartes's contention that animals are unthinking machines. Freud did make some excellent contributions to our understanding. Yes, children do have sexuality. Yes, aspects of civilization (marriage, etc.) were obviously created to control sex/reproduction. But to say the human psyche is based on sex is to undervalue gargantuan swaths of human motivation: love, fear, beauty, loneliness, security, etc., etc. The third point stokes an outdated discourse. It evokes Foucault's observation of a multiplication of discourses around sex that keeps us from discussing more socially critical things, like poverty and climate change.
Gungrave
Gungrave is a fantasy/alternate universe story about two friends in the mafia (Harry and Brandon) who fall out with each other and, after much shooting and revenge, eventually reconcile. Gungrave adheres to none of these beliefs about sex. It does not regard romantic/sexual partnership as automatically the preeminent social relationship. It does not depict the human psyche as predominantly shaped by sex. And it does not maunder on about the sin of regarding sex as sin. Instead, it presents sexuality as an important aspect of human life while allowing for great diversity in sexual attitudes, practices, and taste without making value judgments about these differences as aspects of sexuality per se. It regards sex, inherently, as a neutral-to-positive force that can be deployed to good or bad purpose. In this way, sex is no different than, say, our ability to speak or create technology.
Now, Gungrave is far from a queer theory utopia. It presents a misogynistic society, in which women are much more sexually defined than men, and the attitudes I note above are more available for men than women. By the same token, it presents a heteronormative society in which homosexuality is silenced--if not completely absent. More on this presently. Still, its range of acceptable sexualities is impressive.
Harry
Harry is a highly sexualized person. We meet him in his teenage years already something of a gigolo and very proud of his sexual prowess. By implication, he goes on to romance many women before settling down in a traditional marriage with Sherry, which is marked by strong, and apparently mutually satisfying, sexual desire.
Harry is a man of vast and varied flaws, but his basic sexual identity is presented as neutral-to-positive. He sometimes deploys it for bad purposes: to scam women. And in one case, his sexual exploits are used to highlight his ruthlessness: when he sends Brandon to shoot an entire office full of people while a woman he once took to bed cowers (incidentally) in a corner. His failing, though, is not that he had sex with her but that he has Brandon shoot all her coworkers. But he also deploys his sexuality for the good: he has, in the main, a loving and satisfying relationship with Sherry, and he is probably telling the truth when he says he's very good in bed.
Some Other Married People
Various other characters are presented as having or having had positive sexual relationships in the context of marriage: Bear Walken is a grieving widower with a daughter (Sherry). Big Daddy and Maria, despite a significant age difference, have a fairly happy, if brief, marriage, which produces a daughter.
Problematic Gayness
No one in Gungrave is explicitly gay, but there is some implication that Lee favors men. Unfortunately, this implication comes in the form of his latter day extreme sadism, in which he attains a seemingly sexual satisfaction from dismembering young men. Obviously, this is not good sexuality. It does, however, have interesting implications. No one in Lee's immediate circle objects to it, which indicates that Harry's latter day mafia is very corrupt. But there is a kind of corruption that allows killing (even torture) without necessarily quashing homophobia of the "kill him but don't kiss him" variety, to invoke Victor, Victoria's mafia, and this isn't it. No one objects to Lee choosing men. Now, before he became an obvious sadist, Lee might well have still favored men, and if so, no one ostracized him for it, which says something, perhaps, about the relative generosity of sexual freedoms even in this very heteronormative social space.
Bunji?
The anime tells us nothing about Bunji's sexuality, which is telling in itself. He matters as an important character regardless of his sexual status. Sexuality is simply not germane to the central parts of his life the story delves into.
The Asexual Protagonist
And then there's Brandon. The story does not explicitly tell us that Brandon is asexual, but it is easy to read him that way. He is romantically deeply in love with Maria, but sexual desire seems to play little part. As a shy boy, he scarcely touches her. And while this might be chocked up to his native reserve, as an adult, he feels his separation from her as "wanting to see her" and "no longer being able to hear her voice": none of his imagery is sexual. Even when he pictures her in his mind, his thoughts generally focus on her face and never sexualize her body.
Maria is Brandon's only romantic interest. When he first falls for her, his friends are flabbergasted that he's actually showing interest in a woman, and there is no implication that there is anyone else (seriously or casually) throughout the rest of his life. As one disparaging (but amusing) reviewer on IMDb put it, Brandon dies a virgin, comes back from the dead, and then dies a virgin again. Many a true word.
Virginity Is Neither Childish nor an Illness...
...but you wouldn't guess it from our mainstream pop culture. The received narratives of virginity in someone over, say, 20-25 fall into the following camps:
1) Sex=adulthood, so virginity=childishness. See, for example, on Buffy Xander's reply to Andrew's Star Warsian ramblings that he's obviously never had any sex (not one of Buffy's better moments as a piece of social commentary). See, too, the teacher in Loveless.
2) Virginity=neurosis/illness. Thank you, Freud. John Mack, whom I love, deploys this one against T. E. Lawrence. The idea is that anyone who has normatively surmounted the Oedipal whatevers will become a normatively sexually active young adult; therefore, anyone "of a certain age" who is not sexually active must be socially unaccepted, sexually traumatized, hormonally ill, etc.
3) Virginity=mystical innocence. We still see this one around in high fantasy, surrounding the mystical properties of virgins that make them attractive to dragons, vampires, etc. (Confer "childishness.")
4) Virginity=frigid bitterness. This, of course, is mostly deployed against women, though there's probably a home for Snape in here.
Brandon springs gloriously free of all these stereotypes. (Amazingly, so does Maria, who is presumably a virgin till her late 20s.) Brandon, by the time he's in his 20s, is a very mature young man in many respects. He has many responsibilities; he has seen many of life's horrors. He is certainly not an innocent: he kills people for a living. There is no evidence that he's sexually traumatized (and some behavioral evidence that his formative childhood years were stabler than Harry's), and he is physically very healthy and normatively attractive. And while he is quiet, reserved, and superficially cool, he is neither frigid nor bitter. (In fact, he could have Maria anytime he wanted; he chooses not to.)
Now, Brandon's sexual choices are no more unproblematic than Harry's. In choosing not to be with Maria, for example, he deeply hurts her for years. But just as Harry's crime is not casual sex but a casual attitude toward people, Brandon's "crime" is not rejecting Maria but failure to communicate clearly with her in a timely fashion.
Harry, too, springs free of all the virginity stereotyping. One presumes he can't be blind to the fact that Brandon doesn't have sex, but he never criticizes him for it or suggests he should be different--apart from lightly encouraging him to pursue Maria, whom Brandon is in love with. In their teenage years, Harry specifically tells their friends not to give Brandon a hard time about scoring with Maria but to let him follow his own "style." Just as Brandon accepts that sleeping around is part of Harry's identity, Harry accepts that not sleeping with anyone is part of who Brandon chooses to be. Their unproblematic acceptance of each other's sexualities is one of the marks of their true friendship--and of healthy attitudes toward sex on both their parts.
Meanwhile, Other Things Are Happening
But sex, while it has an important place, is not central to Gungrave. The story is fundamentally about a platonic friendship, a Boston partnership, as I've elsewhere called it, that is, a life partnership in which sex is not (as in the allegory of love) a necessary and defining characteristic.
Love relationships are based on love, which may--but need not--importantly involve sex. The most important relationship in Sherry's life is her romantic/sexual relationship with Harry. Sherry is very important to Harry too--and points to the animators for remembering to have him die with his wedding ring on--but his life is defined by his friendship with Brandon, as Brandon's life is defined by Harry. Bear Walken's most important relationship is with Sherry, his daughter. Bob and Lee's most important relationship is their presumably platonic friendship with each other. Maria's loyalties are probably about equally divided over the course of her life between Brandon, Big Daddy, and her daughter, Mika--because it's possible to have life-defining love for more than one person, and in more than one type of relationship, too.
These are all obvious statements about human relationships. Anyone who has close family and friends knows from experience that love relationships are varied and multiple and, generally, at most a few involve sex. Yet our popular culture's emphasis on sexuality tends to downplay this obvious fact of life to the detriment not only of asexuals but to all of our non-sexual relationships. This is getting better. And many texts besides Gungrave provide solid role modeling of a more comprehensive and balanced view of human relationships. But it is still an uphill battle, and solid endeavors such as this series are necessary footholds on the climb.
The anime, Gungrave, offers a refreshingly balanced view of sex. While acknowledging sex as important, it is a rare example of a text that does not exaggerate the importance of sex within a healthy society. (Mind you, Gungrave in no way presents a healthy society, but its narrative stance does show healthy attitudes toward sex.) In addition to modeling balanced attitudes toward sex as an aspect of human society, the anime provides a strong asexual role model in the character of Brandon.
Spoilers Follow
The Norm
As far as I can make out, contemporary Western society's default attitudes toward sex reflect three main beliefs, all of which place sex in a position of preeminent importance to human life. (I discuss aspects of this more fully in my essay on Boston Partnership.)
1) The Allegory of Love (to use C. S. Lewis's phrase) tells us that the most important relationship anyone will ever have is with their romantic soul mate, one's relationship to whom must be fundamentally grounded in romantic sexual attraction. (There is a lip-service exception to this for parent-child relationships, but while they are lauded, they are comparatively rarely represented as central in our popular culture.)
2) Freudianism (a simplification) argues that sex is the root of the human psyche. It is the defining drive of everyone from birth if not before. Civilization was invented to curb this drive, and psychological health/neurosis is largely shaped by how one learns to curb/express/repress this drive in socially accepted ways.
3) Sin: Here's the old idea (thank you, Apostle Paul) that sex is inherently sinful at least outside of reproductive marriage and, even there, celibacy is "more pure." Now, few people today believe this (outside of some religious communities), yet our popular culture has an odd belief that a lot of people believe it. Hence, we still get a vast array of "transgressive" texts touting sexual activity and sexuality in general as counterculture, subversive, courageous, etc. and deserving of great social attention. (I'm not saying this is never valid, but for something "subversive" it certainly is pervasive!)
I think each of these beliefs is, to some extent, socially harmful. The first vastly limits the range of acceptable human relationships and often pushes people into bad relationships because they are "romantic/sexual" and, therefore, supposed to be the answer to everything. The second is as ridiculous as Descartes's contention that animals are unthinking machines. Freud did make some excellent contributions to our understanding. Yes, children do have sexuality. Yes, aspects of civilization (marriage, etc.) were obviously created to control sex/reproduction. But to say the human psyche is based on sex is to undervalue gargantuan swaths of human motivation: love, fear, beauty, loneliness, security, etc., etc. The third point stokes an outdated discourse. It evokes Foucault's observation of a multiplication of discourses around sex that keeps us from discussing more socially critical things, like poverty and climate change.
Gungrave
Gungrave is a fantasy/alternate universe story about two friends in the mafia (Harry and Brandon) who fall out with each other and, after much shooting and revenge, eventually reconcile. Gungrave adheres to none of these beliefs about sex. It does not regard romantic/sexual partnership as automatically the preeminent social relationship. It does not depict the human psyche as predominantly shaped by sex. And it does not maunder on about the sin of regarding sex as sin. Instead, it presents sexuality as an important aspect of human life while allowing for great diversity in sexual attitudes, practices, and taste without making value judgments about these differences as aspects of sexuality per se. It regards sex, inherently, as a neutral-to-positive force that can be deployed to good or bad purpose. In this way, sex is no different than, say, our ability to speak or create technology.
Now, Gungrave is far from a queer theory utopia. It presents a misogynistic society, in which women are much more sexually defined than men, and the attitudes I note above are more available for men than women. By the same token, it presents a heteronormative society in which homosexuality is silenced--if not completely absent. More on this presently. Still, its range of acceptable sexualities is impressive.
Harry
Harry is a highly sexualized person. We meet him in his teenage years already something of a gigolo and very proud of his sexual prowess. By implication, he goes on to romance many women before settling down in a traditional marriage with Sherry, which is marked by strong, and apparently mutually satisfying, sexual desire.
Harry is a man of vast and varied flaws, but his basic sexual identity is presented as neutral-to-positive. He sometimes deploys it for bad purposes: to scam women. And in one case, his sexual exploits are used to highlight his ruthlessness: when he sends Brandon to shoot an entire office full of people while a woman he once took to bed cowers (incidentally) in a corner. His failing, though, is not that he had sex with her but that he has Brandon shoot all her coworkers. But he also deploys his sexuality for the good: he has, in the main, a loving and satisfying relationship with Sherry, and he is probably telling the truth when he says he's very good in bed.
Some Other Married People
Various other characters are presented as having or having had positive sexual relationships in the context of marriage: Bear Walken is a grieving widower with a daughter (Sherry). Big Daddy and Maria, despite a significant age difference, have a fairly happy, if brief, marriage, which produces a daughter.
Problematic Gayness
No one in Gungrave is explicitly gay, but there is some implication that Lee favors men. Unfortunately, this implication comes in the form of his latter day extreme sadism, in which he attains a seemingly sexual satisfaction from dismembering young men. Obviously, this is not good sexuality. It does, however, have interesting implications. No one in Lee's immediate circle objects to it, which indicates that Harry's latter day mafia is very corrupt. But there is a kind of corruption that allows killing (even torture) without necessarily quashing homophobia of the "kill him but don't kiss him" variety, to invoke Victor, Victoria's mafia, and this isn't it. No one objects to Lee choosing men. Now, before he became an obvious sadist, Lee might well have still favored men, and if so, no one ostracized him for it, which says something, perhaps, about the relative generosity of sexual freedoms even in this very heteronormative social space.
Bunji?
The anime tells us nothing about Bunji's sexuality, which is telling in itself. He matters as an important character regardless of his sexual status. Sexuality is simply not germane to the central parts of his life the story delves into.
The Asexual Protagonist
And then there's Brandon. The story does not explicitly tell us that Brandon is asexual, but it is easy to read him that way. He is romantically deeply in love with Maria, but sexual desire seems to play little part. As a shy boy, he scarcely touches her. And while this might be chocked up to his native reserve, as an adult, he feels his separation from her as "wanting to see her" and "no longer being able to hear her voice": none of his imagery is sexual. Even when he pictures her in his mind, his thoughts generally focus on her face and never sexualize her body.
Maria is Brandon's only romantic interest. When he first falls for her, his friends are flabbergasted that he's actually showing interest in a woman, and there is no implication that there is anyone else (seriously or casually) throughout the rest of his life. As one disparaging (but amusing) reviewer on IMDb put it, Brandon dies a virgin, comes back from the dead, and then dies a virgin again. Many a true word.
Virginity Is Neither Childish nor an Illness...
...but you wouldn't guess it from our mainstream pop culture. The received narratives of virginity in someone over, say, 20-25 fall into the following camps:
1) Sex=adulthood, so virginity=childishness. See, for example, on Buffy Xander's reply to Andrew's Star Warsian ramblings that he's obviously never had any sex (not one of Buffy's better moments as a piece of social commentary). See, too, the teacher in Loveless.
2) Virginity=neurosis/illness. Thank you, Freud. John Mack, whom I love, deploys this one against T. E. Lawrence. The idea is that anyone who has normatively surmounted the Oedipal whatevers will become a normatively sexually active young adult; therefore, anyone "of a certain age" who is not sexually active must be socially unaccepted, sexually traumatized, hormonally ill, etc.
3) Virginity=mystical innocence. We still see this one around in high fantasy, surrounding the mystical properties of virgins that make them attractive to dragons, vampires, etc. (Confer "childishness.")
4) Virginity=frigid bitterness. This, of course, is mostly deployed against women, though there's probably a home for Snape in here.
Brandon springs gloriously free of all these stereotypes. (Amazingly, so does Maria, who is presumably a virgin till her late 20s.) Brandon, by the time he's in his 20s, is a very mature young man in many respects. He has many responsibilities; he has seen many of life's horrors. He is certainly not an innocent: he kills people for a living. There is no evidence that he's sexually traumatized (and some behavioral evidence that his formative childhood years were stabler than Harry's), and he is physically very healthy and normatively attractive. And while he is quiet, reserved, and superficially cool, he is neither frigid nor bitter. (In fact, he could have Maria anytime he wanted; he chooses not to.)
Now, Brandon's sexual choices are no more unproblematic than Harry's. In choosing not to be with Maria, for example, he deeply hurts her for years. But just as Harry's crime is not casual sex but a casual attitude toward people, Brandon's "crime" is not rejecting Maria but failure to communicate clearly with her in a timely fashion.
Harry, too, springs free of all the virginity stereotyping. One presumes he can't be blind to the fact that Brandon doesn't have sex, but he never criticizes him for it or suggests he should be different--apart from lightly encouraging him to pursue Maria, whom Brandon is in love with. In their teenage years, Harry specifically tells their friends not to give Brandon a hard time about scoring with Maria but to let him follow his own "style." Just as Brandon accepts that sleeping around is part of Harry's identity, Harry accepts that not sleeping with anyone is part of who Brandon chooses to be. Their unproblematic acceptance of each other's sexualities is one of the marks of their true friendship--and of healthy attitudes toward sex on both their parts.
Meanwhile, Other Things Are Happening
But sex, while it has an important place, is not central to Gungrave. The story is fundamentally about a platonic friendship, a Boston partnership, as I've elsewhere called it, that is, a life partnership in which sex is not (as in the allegory of love) a necessary and defining characteristic.
Love relationships are based on love, which may--but need not--importantly involve sex. The most important relationship in Sherry's life is her romantic/sexual relationship with Harry. Sherry is very important to Harry too--and points to the animators for remembering to have him die with his wedding ring on--but his life is defined by his friendship with Brandon, as Brandon's life is defined by Harry. Bear Walken's most important relationship is with Sherry, his daughter. Bob and Lee's most important relationship is their presumably platonic friendship with each other. Maria's loyalties are probably about equally divided over the course of her life between Brandon, Big Daddy, and her daughter, Mika--because it's possible to have life-defining love for more than one person, and in more than one type of relationship, too.
These are all obvious statements about human relationships. Anyone who has close family and friends knows from experience that love relationships are varied and multiple and, generally, at most a few involve sex. Yet our popular culture's emphasis on sexuality tends to downplay this obvious fact of life to the detriment not only of asexuals but to all of our non-sexual relationships. This is getting better. And many texts besides Gungrave provide solid role modeling of a more comprehensive and balanced view of human relationships. But it is still an uphill battle, and solid endeavors such as this series are necessary footholds on the climb.
