Mitsuha Gender Roles

Gender roles, societal expectations for the duties of the man and woman, while are not emphasized, are unequivocally prevalent throughout Your Name. Mitsuha is emotionally restricted by their environment, taught to be demure, poised and not cause complications. Their father, the epitome of the male breadwinner of the family is charismatic with the townspeople and runs a successive campaign for the role of mayor. During a press conference, the mayor notices Mitsuha walking by and immediately snaps at them to stop slouching. Instead of feeling embarrassed on Mitsuha’s behalf, an older woman was impressed and comments that the mayor was strict with his family. To take this further, Mitsuha’s father is never seen to be in the kitchen, leaving all of the cooking to Mitsuha and their grandmother. However when Mitsuha transitions, they start losing their former inhibition for passivity, being quicker to defend themselves, but also become easier to anger due to their dissatisfaction in how their

All their outward displays of femininity, interests in the fine arts such as needlecraft and artistry are supported by Miki, Tsukasa and Takagi. However, Taki lacks a person of authority and wisdom to advise them as Mitsuha did with their clairvoyant grandmother. Due to the lack of guidance during Taki’s journey to find themselves, they concurrently repress their femininity and eventually resort to believing that they were mentally ill and confused. Kelso describes this phenomenon as she finds that rarely do gender variant children who “report histories of gender dysphoria and cross-gender behaviour . . . grown up to be transsexual” or gender-fluid (1063). Taki’s path to self-reconciliation involves the piecing together of their mental state eventually allowing them to differentiate between the memories originally thought to have been fantasy and their true gender-fluid