Gorgeous meditation of selves: Reparative work among fans of Sailor Moon

Abstract

We conceptualize the magical girl franchise Sailor Moon as a vehicle of healing or sharing love through interactions with selves and others. Following Eve Sedgwick's notion of reparative reading, we trace how this franchise of comics, animation, and related media and material forms has offered fans of all gender and sexual expressions resources of survival and ways to imagine and create queer worlds that can accommodate them. As an orientation, we reject what Sedgwick calls paranoid reading, which assumes problems must be lurking beneath the surface. In the case of Sailor Moon, such readings fixate on how the franchise reproduces girls and women as consuming subjects or consumable sex objects for boys and men. This ignores the queer potential of Sailor Moon and the reality of its diverse fandom. We trace two intertwined forms of healing: Sailor Moon mitigates misogyny through a praxis of love and care and rehabilitates masculinity by offering soft, nonpunitive scripts for feeling and attachment. In the accounts of Sailor Moon fans, we see imaginative responses such as identification with characters through art, dancing, and free play. Curating first-person narratives alongside scholarship, we reorient discussion of Sailor Moon, joining fan historian Erica Friedman in promoting new horizons of queer positivity and optimism.