The central argument of this book is that the female gaze should not be taken for granted in the study of manga and other entertainment media, as an awareness of an active female gaze can broaden the range of ways in which we understand contemporary Japanese popular culture and how it has transformed transnational fan communities. This book argues that female readers and writers can find and create enjoyment and messages of empowerment even in works with flawed and problematic representations of femininity. The female gaze thus acts as a mode of resistant reading that allows alternative methods of interpreting the female characters and the gendered themes and issues of a text.weiterlesen