My Twitter has been on flames regarding PriPara, so I thoughy I’d see what it’s about. I doubted I’d get through more than three episodes, but instead have made it to #60 in a few weeks. There is plenty of funny anime, but rarely is a show as much fun to watch as PriPara. (Warning: this post contains spoilers for the easily spoiled.)
Even better, PriPara asks some interesting political questions. In the first season, it is stated several times that “only girls can enter PriPara”. But the question is, what is “girl”（女の子）in this case?
Ookanda-sensei and Lala’s mother are obviously women, but are they “girls”? Obviously for the purposes of entering PriPara they are, so girl-hood is not connected to age or profession.
The cases of Leona and Hibiki are more interesting. Leona is sex-wise male, but hardly seems to identify as such gender-wise (beyond wearing boys’ uniform at school), and got her PriTicket along with everyone else. So for purposes of PriPara, the entrant’s biological sex appears to be irrelevant, and Leona is almost without questions accepted as a girl by everyone in nearly all situations. (I think this is quite a bold statement for a mainstream children’s show to make.)
Hibiki on the other hand is initially identified as male and perceived so by others, though sex-wise (s)he is female; despite this, (s)he can enter PriPara, so it appears that the criteria for entry isn’t (socially constructed) gender either. However, it’s unclear how s(he) identifies him/herself, and later becomes identified as female.
Finally, Falulu is technically not even human, which seems to put reference to any sort of biological property beyond question. However, Falulu (and by extension the mini-Falulus and Gaalulu) might legitimately be seen as a special case; it’s unclear whether she can even exist outside of PriPara.
What’s interesting is that (particularly compared to an “average” idol series), there is a distinct lack of “male gaze” in PriPara. Obviously the audience (inside PriPara) is all-“girl” with the exception of Meganii [1], and while there appear to be male fans watching PriPara on TV, no one seems to pay them any attention on the inside. I’d be pressed to say that there is any fan service directed at male viewers of the series either [2]. Hibiki, who is the most “manly” character in the series, is shown spending a lot of time rating others for her own purposes, but her references are to their ambition (or lack of it) and idol skills, not to their physical or other intrinsic attributes.
Perhaps we could say that “girl” in PriPara is not defined by any identity of the self, but rather through the “way of looking” of the candidate entrant.
In defining the male gaze, Mulvey (1975) writes (in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema):
The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.
Of course, the objective of idol-hood and PriPara is nothing but to-be-looked-at-ness. But the “gaze” which is accepted (or perhaps better to say “enforced”) is not the projection of (male, heterosexual) desire, but something else. It would be hard to call it the female gaze or any sort of homosexual gaze, so let’s call it the PriPara gaze. It is the “owners” of this gaze who constitute “girl” for the purposes of PriPara.
Footnotes
[1] Meganii is a curious aberration. While he is part of the “system”, he is neverthless the recipient of (primarily heterosexual) favor from the participants. But this appears to be a kind of “pro forma” heterosexuality, which is never referenced outside Meganii’s physical apperances. In contrast, Leona sending chocolates to Meganii on Valentine’s Day is a plot point of one episode. From the viewpoint of anime production, perhaps Meganii is there so that viewers (and probably even more importantly, the parents of the target audience) can be convinced that this is a “normal” show, which wouldn’t do anything suspicious like challenge traditional gender roles.
[2] Some might argue that the Marilyn Monroe poses in the second season’s ending constitute a kind of fan service. I would rather consider it trolling, since Marilyn is pretty much the personification of a woman defined by the male gaze. (For trolling experience, series director Moriwaki also directed the masterpiece of BPO-baiting, Oruchuban Ebichu.)