A Cycle, Not a Phase: Love Between Magical Girls Amidst the Trauma of Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Abstract

A Cycle, Not a PhaseLove Between Magical Girls Amidst the Trauma of Puella Magi Madoka Magica Kevin Cooley (bio) The specter of the mahō shōjo (magical girl) fuses the form and content of animated narratives. She gains power not from a comic book fall into a vat of chemicals, or a bite from a magic-science spider, but from the genre itself. Like the gender role she so extravagantly over-performs (and out-performs), she is, to borrow from Judith Butler's terms to describe gender itself, a "panicked imitation of a naturalized idealized self."1 In imitating herself, the magical girl is drawn time and again to the metatextual icons of her performance—the over-pronounced eyes, the glitzed-out sailor suit, the spectacle of transformation—that bring her into legibility. She is the idea of a human constructed completely out of human-made, but nonhuman, actants—not just formal elements of animation such as light, sound, visual icons in acrobatic conjunction, and transparent cels (whether hand-drawn or digital); but of content elements: skirts, sailor suits, magic powers, and transformation spectacles. As Kumiko Saito claims, "Although the visual rhetoric of power relies on feminine implements like frills and long hair, it is becoming increasingly difficult to equate representations of the magical girl's gender with biological sex" because the magical girl participates in "a new configuration of gender that wields its power in its youthfulness and cuteness."2 Both in spite of—and because of—all the otaku-baiting and the fetishizing and the heterosexualized fan service of the larger "beautiful fighting girl" category she belongs to: that of the magical girl—that evocative and evil-fighting, sailor-suit-clad young woman who so often transforms from an average schoolgirl to a celestial being with magic powers—is and always has been wrapped up within a variety of queernesses. Certainly, the glamorous body modification and hyperstylized wardrobe changes invite and emit questions about the dominant imaginary of the human body and animation's ability to reconceptualize it. But a magical girl is also so often prone to overtly falling in love with her sailor-suited companions. What is it about this mythological type that has so consistently pushed back on the heterosexual imaginary of [End Page 24] the body, and that so regularly produces characters ranging from the ambiguously but evocatively queer to conformity with LGTBQ+ categories? Why is the queerly saturated mythological type of the magical girl so infectious, both as part of a staple of Japanese popular and visual culture and through its transnational circulation, where the magical girl has inspired western cartoons like Steven Universe, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and Star vs. the Forces of Evil to enact animation's latent inborn ability to give shape and motion to otherwise unthinkable sexualities? As visual culture so often does, the magical girl provides all of the tools we need for understanding her gendered interventions within the archetype's own visual conventions. But if framing the precarious ontology of the magical girl in theoretical terms does anything to expedite our theorizing of her gendered intervention, it would help to say that her dynamic identity is fueled by the paradigmatic relations between units of language. In short, the cartooned visual language in which the magical girl participates is one that eschews photorealistic film's devices, and in doing so, it prefers relations between units of language defined by absence. More specifically, we might call these different relations the present, but declined, possibility of using other signs to articulate something of language (in this case: the visualized existence of the magical girl). As Ferdinand de Saussure frames it, this paradigmatic relation "unites terms in absentia in a potential mnemonic series."3 Certainly, as an art of fairly linear narrative storytelling, the visual languages of cartooning that write or draw the magical girl into existence also rely on that foil of paradigmatic relations: syntagmatic relations which, as Saussure writes, immediately suggest how "an order of succession and a fixed number of elements combine present elements in sequence to make additive meaning."4 But by reveling in the paradigmatic relations of animation—as is visually embodied...