As Julie D. O’Reilly states in “The Legacy of George and Bess: Sidekicks as Normalizing Agents,” sidekicks and love interests both serve to “normalize” their respective heroes; at the same time, each character within the pairing has clearly delineated roles and genders, thereby enforcing heteronormative tropes. The sidekicks show that the superheroes are capable of friendship and/or surrogate parenthood; however, the sidekicks tend to be equally entrenched in the world of caped crusaders and, thus, emphasize the roles of rescuer and savior while often creating homosocial and homoerotic subtexts. On the other hand, the love interest’s main role is to serve as the home base, the place wherein these heroes can be grounded. In the end, though, the love interest will follow clearly delineated gender roles, whether they function as a supportive monogamous significant other or the flirtatious occasional sex partner, and these relationships will, typically, be heterosexual. What happens when these roles are consolidated into a single character? How are prescribed gender roles rewritten in these instances? In the case of the anime Samurai Flamenco, gender roles and narrative roles are deconstructed and rewritten into new androgynous versions of their former selves.
About the presenterNathaniel Fuller
Nathaniel Fuller is a PhD student in English at Morgan State University. His research interests include children’s and young adult literature ecofeminism, multicultural literature, popular culture, queer and gender studies, and creative writing. His current research agendas examine intersectionality, ideology, and gender performance in contemporary queer multicultural young adult novels.