The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn't a Guy at All: Queerness, Gender, and Maureen Murdock's Failure

Continuing with my streak of only covering Japanese media (I swear it is not intentional) I will be analyzing The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn't a Guy at All. This recent manga hit follows the friendship/love story of main characters Aya Oosawa (girly girl) and Mitsuki Koga (androgynous nerd) and deals with a lot of gender presentation stuff. 

As you can tell from the very specific title, Oosawa mistakenly thinks Koga is a guy due to her masculine appearance wearing casual clothes while part-timing at her uncle’s music store. Eventually Oosawa realizes the guy she is crushing on is actually her female classmate Koga and chaos ensues. Okay, not actually. Oosawa is upset at first because Koga didn’t tell her and it was lowkey trickery but they get over it and go back to being friends… 

So here comes my argument: the heroine's journey simply does not work for women who, either purely in terms of fashion or within their lifestyle, lean more masculine/androgynous. By framing masculinity and femininity as something a character can have a balance of, Murdock completely ignores queer identities that choose to lean one way or another. 

Koga, as a child, has a disdain for wearing skirts and doesn’t mind being a little different from her skirt-wearing classmates. But kids began teasing her and daring her to wear one, and upon refusing to, she faced more bullying making her own best friend turn against her saying she wished Koga could be normal for once. To Murdock this could be the shift away from the feminine… but this is not the case. Rather than rejecting the feminine out of feelings of inferiority, Koga merely does not like wearing skirts, an early indicator of her stylistic preferences. Continuing onto the identification with the masculine, to Koga, engaging in more traditionally masculine activities like listening to hard rock and liking masc-emo clothes does not come about from a place of wishing to please the patriarchy. She wears a skirt to school each day, per the arguably outdated rules driven by a patriarchal system. 

Koga goes through a road of trials in the form of her music-making journey and she begins to accept herself more despite a few setbacks involving more teasing from others. And thus perhaps the illusory boon of success can be represented by her realizing she has lived too long fearing what others think of her and trying to fit in. She has been betraying her values, living under oppression because she is forced to conform each day to femininity. Yet as Murdock frames this, the next step for Koga would then be to recoil with her feminine side, forget her “learned” masculine traits, and integrate the feminine back into her life along with the healthy masculine. Thus forming a perfect union. 

By expecting the female protagonist’s journeys to play out in this way, Murdock fails queer women. Koga’s natural inclinations towards behaving and dressing in a more masculine manner were never driven by the patriarchy. In fact, the big ending to her arch comes when she boldly defies school rules and begins wearing the male uniform pants to school instead of the women’s skirt. Now, the manga is still ongoing and perhaps we will see Koga embrace more feminine things but that is unlikely. For many masculine queer women and characters, a shift towards the masculine is a heroine's journey itself and there is already so much nuance to their identity that the idea of a “union” between the masculine and feminine is the least of their problems in terms of inner struggle. 

It is at this late point in my blog I want to bring up the love interest/friend of Koga, Oosawa who never wavers from her girly girl, or as the author describes gyaru, identity. She represents a young woman who fully embraces femininity, not because of the patriarchy (she is not looking to impress a man… the opposite actually) but because she likes to be feminine. I think this is an incredible representation of femme lesbians and Murdock fails again to represent women who feel fully comfortable in their femininity, feeling no need to embrace masculine traits or conform to the patriarchy. 

All in all, Murdock’s model is perfect. It is perfect for cis-het women dealing with the patriarchy as white society knows it. This is in no way an angry rant and I don’t really think she was thinking about lesbian culture in any way while making the model; rather I just noticed that a favorite book series of mine with two female protagonists did not fit within this model of the female protagonist's journey.

Thank you for reading! Be gay, read manga.