Rhea Ashley Hoskin, MA candidateQueen`s University

Western Translations and the Transmogrification of Sailor Moon
Rhea Ashley Hoskin, MA candidate Queen’s University
Introduction
Symbolic Order
Sailor Moon began airing translations in the West throughout the 1990s and was cancelled
between between 1997-2003.
Blurring of cultural boundaries and binaries threatens to "overflow the boundaries" of "the self's
clean and proper body" (Shildrick).
The 5th and final final season of Sailor Moon, which involved the Sailor Starlights, was never
dubbed, adapted or completed in English - curiously leaving fans in an uproar to S.O.S.
(Support/Save Our Sailors).
The threat of 'non-normative bodies' is "anxiety of an inherent fluidity" generated by the
unpredictability of a body that does not behave in culturally contained ways .
Why, despite its popularity, did the network
decide against renewing Sailor Moon and
completing the series in the West?
Queer Characters
Reviewing Sailor Moon
The series seems recognizably heteronormative – but the original version of Sailor Moon reveals
queer characters, relations and a blurring of boundaries across sex, sexual and gendered
divides.
Optimum Productions, the Canadian company in charge of the English version of the show,
claimed that it was necessary to censor Sailor Moon in accordance with the Canadian RadioTelevision and Telecommunications Commissions.
Despite these claims, a spokesperson for the CTRC said that the agency has no guidelines on
queer content in children's programming.
Erasure and Systems of Power
Two main currents of power course through the seasons of Sailor Moon: White supremacy and
hegemonic heterosexuality.
Despite its Japanese origins, the character Sailor Moon is illustrated with "long blond hair and eyes
that take up at least one third of her face" (Grigsby).
Prior to Western contact, Japanese people "drew themselves with Asian features” (Grigsby). "After
contact with the west, particularly after World War II … they began to depict characters that are
supposed to be Japanese with Western idealized physical characteristics" (Grigsby).
In conjunction with the practice of dub localization, the images in Sailor Moon turn Japanese
culture into a form of consumable, palatable diversity for a white Western viewer: white,
heterosexually congruent characters that maintain White supremacist beauty standards.
Contrasting the initial consumablility of White supremacy evidenced in Sailor Moon, the characters
simultaneously interrogate hegemonic heterosexual congruencies from various fronts; effectively
making the series less consumable for a Heteronormative White Supremacist West.
Consider the queer depictions in Western television - these queers rarely pose a threat to dominant
power; they are portrayals of queers as easily containable, identifiable and play into Western
ideology of dichotomous "hetero/homo" binary.
Mainstream media that challenge multiple facets of systems of domination are rarely successful.
Sailor Moon challenges binary structures of sex, gender and sexuality and, once dubbed versions
could no longer erase these challenges, Sailor Moon was no longer televised in the West.
Queer Characters
Zoisite and Malachite - In the original Japanese version, Zoisite is
in a relationship with Malachite, both of whom are readable as cis
men.
In the English dubbed version, Zoisite is turned into a woman,
rendering the formerly queer relationship between the characters a
heterosexual one.
Sailors Uranus and Neptune - Amara, also know as Sailor
Uranus, is depicted as presenting or identifying masculinely.
When Amara transforms into a Sailor Uranus, her masculine
presentation turns feminine.
When the character Amara is introduced, the
other Scouts have crushes on her, thinking
that she is a boy. Amara tells the girls that
she doesn't remember ever saying she was a
boy at which point they question their
sexuality, deny their attraction to friends but
are drawn with hearts in their eyes and rose
petals in the wind whenever Amara is
around.
Amara/Uranus and Michelle/Neptune are
lovers. In the Japanese version, their
relationship is apparent. When dubbed over,
Michelle and Amara are "cousins" who are
allegedly "very close".
Fisheye - uses masculine pronouns, dresses as what might be considered a "woman" or
feminine presentation, frequently refers to themself as a woman or girl, is openly attracted to
men and "passes" as a woman.
Fisheye's gender-variance is masked once translated into
english; direct translations contrasting the 'dubbed-voices'
demonstrate the deliberate erasure of queer-identities. In
episode 140, Fisheye is chosen to be a fashion designer's
model. In the direct translation, the designer states that
Fisheye is a "miraculous person that surpasses
genders". Once dubbed, the designer says to Fisheye,
"you're beautiful and have a unique look". Later in the
original episode during a fitting, Fisheye rips off the garment
to reveal a masculine/male contoured chest. In the dubbed
version, the view of Fisheye's chest is cut so that the
audience can only see from the shoulders up. Scenes
demonstrating Fisheye's bodily signs of variance are cut/
cropped and Fisheye is changed into a stably gendered
woman.
This anxiety is heightened when one's sense of self control and ability to draw boundaries of
distinction between cultural binaries is put into permanent doubt.
The "Subject" is therefore threatened by the "Other”, whose presence poses a symbolic
endangerment by serving as a reminder of the "putative failure of [the Subject's] own
boundaries of distinction and separation"(Shildrick).
The queer characters of Sailor Moon threaten and
exposes the insecurity and vulnerability of
conventions of normativity. Normativity's hold on
"order, control, and self-determination is fragile
and uncertain" and is maintained by strategies
that uphold boundary structures (Shildrick).
Discipline and Erasure
Docile bodies do not challenge, go against or subvert dominant structures – they are those who
either fit , may be subjected, used, transformed, improved or are easily malleable into
hegemonic systems of normality.
Non-normative bodies "do not fit” and can be effectively positioned against docile bodies.
Sailor Starlights - appear during Sailor Moon's fifth season, the point where erasure of
queerness became impossible and where Sailor Moon was cancelled.
Hegemonic systems of power, including that of White Supremacist order and
heterosexual congruencies, require docile bodies.
On their "home-planet" the Sailor Starlights were women. On Earth, they embody masculinity,
male identities and sexually orient towards women. When they "transform" from their "earth"
male-bodies, into Sailor Starlights, they return to female-embodiment.
Historically, bodies that undermine dominant structures have been disciplined.
The transformation sequence of the Sailor Starslights
begins with what may typically be understood as a
masculinely/male countered body. The viewer
watches as the physical embodiment of the
Sailor Starlights weave between sexes, genders
and sexuality; essentially positioning these
characters against notions of stable identity.
Fluid identities became so complicated in Sailor Moon
that Optimum Productions could no longer erase their
variance nor account for their complexity.
Challenging Systems of Power
The queer characters of Sailor Moon represent what Moraga and Anzaldua describe
as "the queer groups, the people that don't belong anywhere, not in the dominant
world nor completely within [their] own respective cultures", in short, those who
cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the normal" (McRuer) the
"marked", "strange" and "abnormal" (Moraga and Anzaldua). These bodies "do not
fit, and because [they] do not fit [they] are a threat" (Moraga and Anzaldua).
The system of compulsory heterosexuality depends on a queer existence that is
contained; i.e., Hetero/Homo binary.
Failing to adhere to the "hetero/homo" binary through the fluidity of sexes and genders of its
characters, Sailor Moon threatens to expose queer existences that can never quite be
contained within this binary, illustrating how heterosexual's hegemony is always in
danger of collapse.
Non-normative bodies whose existence can be securely placed in polarized
categories, expose the permeability of said boundaries.
”It is precisely the introduction of normalcy into the system that introduces compulsion”. By
upholding normalcy by erasing queer identities that cannot be situated between
binaries, the cessation of Sailor Moon works to promote compulsory heterosexual
congruencies.
One form of discipline is through erasure, invisibility and representation.
"During the last two or three centuries bodies have been monitored (by disciplinary institutions
and by increasingly compulsory self- policing) for signs of behavioural and physical difference
that might impede their productivity; these signs of difference have been duly marked and, if
possible, 'transformed, and improved'" (McRuer).
Punishment has moved away from an immediate physical discipline toward a "certain discretion
in the art of inflicting pain, a combination of more subtle, more subdued sufferings, deprived of
their visible display”. In this way, discipline is tactic to assure the "ordering of human
multiplicities" (Foucault).
"Every system of power is presented with the same problem"; a noncomplaisant body that subverts the standard of normalcy and poses a
treat to dominant order (Foucault). Discipline can be considered a
"normalizing gaze" whereby surveillance monitors, classifies, conditions
and establishes a visibility through which one is differentiated and then
judged - a means of "training" bodies (Foucault). The erasure, censorship
and subsequent (in)visibility of non-normative bodies and identities is a
form of discipline. This discipline pertains to the ways in which nondocile bodies are suppressed or erased from the public view.
Conclusion and Discussion
Neither the Children's Television Charter nor the Youth Media Alliance takes issue with queer
content in children's television. Yet, societal discomfort with queer signifiers in children's
television are still quite prominent (e.g. Teletubbies' Tinky Winky, Spongebob Square Pants, Bert
and Ernie).
The erasure, eradication and invisibility of queer characters sends a specific message to queer
youth. How can a society claim to be concerned over queer suicides, while simultaneously
erasing the existence of queer role models from youth television?
The series provides what could be interpreted as
resistance to dichotomous conceptualizations of
sexuality, sex and gender; giving space to Youth to
understand the complexity of their and other's
identities; and a re-invisioning of gendered and Sexed
categories, offering queer youth imaginative possibilities
of creating their identity.
Queer characters in Sailor Moon are not translatable into
dichotomous Western thought - categories fail us and,
through their enforcement, the depth of meaning and
complexities of queer identities/desires are lost in
translation.