Chances are, if you know anything about anime or manga, you’ve heard about JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (JJBA). JoJo’s, which is written and drawn by famed mangaka Hirohiko Araki, was first published in the Weekly Shonen Jump magazine in 1987, and it has found tremendous popularity in both Japanese and Western audiences. The series has gained an even wider audience since the early 2010s when it was adapted into an anime. Despite all of the acclaim that the series has garnered, fans and detractors of JoJo’s constantly start discourse about various aspects of the show, one of which is the perceived masculinity (or lack thereof) of its protagonists. To understand why the masculinity of the protagonists is a hot topic, I’ll be drawing from readings from this class to examine how their masculinity may be perceived.  

Background Information 

To understand the varying levels of masculinity of the protagonists, you must first know a bit about the series. To explain it in a brief and (relatively) spoiler-free manner, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is an action-fantasy series that follows the exploits of the Joestar family. The series so far has been broken up into nine parts, the first of which focuses on Jonathan Joestar. The following parts each feature a new protagonist that is typically related to Jonathan in some way, and while there are some thematic differences between the parts, with some being grandiose adventures and others more slice-of-life, every part in JoJo’s follows the formula of a protagonist defeating evil and overcoming their obstacles. There are noticeable differences between the different parts of JoJo’s, though, as the parts vary in the fashion or fighting styles that characters use and even in the art style that the mangaka of the series draws the characters in. It is from these differences that controversy about the masculinity of the protagonists arises.  

Protagonists 1-8 of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure

The Knight versus the Gangster  

The two protagonists I will examine in this post are the knight Jonathan Joestar and the gangster Giorno Giovanna. While there has not exactly been a study into how masculine fans consider these characters to be, I have observed that many fans and detractors of the series consider Johnathan to be masculine and Giorno to be effeminate. I will be drawing upon ideas from Darrin Cox’s The Knight versus the Courtier and West and Zimmerman’s Doing Gender to examine why the masculinities of these characters are perceived so differently. 

Johnathan Joestar 

Although Johnathan is a kind and gentlemanly character, I believe that he is perceived as masculine because he acts akin to one of Cox’s knights. Johnathan is shown to be an honorable and educated man of noble origin which may initially make him seem like a courtier, but he is also shown to be more than willing to courageously march into battle with nothing but a sword and his magical martial arts skills to violently quell the evils that threaten him and his loved ones. Johnathan’s wealthy background, his bravery, and the violence that he is willing and able to enact are all things that liken him to a knight, so they may be the reasons that he is perceived as masculine.  

Johnathan Joestar

Another reason that Johnathan is perceived as masculine has more to do with how he was designed, or how his sex category and gender are perceived by the audience. West and Zimmerman wrote that people categorize your sex as the sex that they perceive you as, that your appearance and the identifying displays that you do mark you as male or female. They added that your actions and social interactions determine your gender and that your gender is not just your sex category but rather how you define yourself within that category, meaning that you could, for instance, be a female who is masculine or feminine. I believe that Johnathan, who is drawn as extremely muscular and also shown to be in knight-like clothing like gauntlets, is categorized by the audience as a man. His actions and interactions, such as his bravery and violence, further go on to define his gender as masculine. This is likely why the audience perceives him as a masculine man.  

Giorno Giovanna 

On the other hand, Giorno Giovanna is perceived as feminine. Like Johnathan, Giorno is shown to use a lot of violence, and I recall that he technically has one of the highest kill counts in the series. Unlike Johnathan, Giorno is not shown to be an honorable character but a thief and con artist, as someone who is quite independent but will work with a team for his own benefit. His violence is knightly, and Cox did state that being independent and ruffian-like were behaviors associated with knights as well. This all implies that Giorno should be seen as masculine, so why exactly does the audience see him as feminine? The answer may lie in the way that his sex category and gender are perceived by the audience. 

Giorno Giovanna

By the time he was working on the story of Giorno Giovanna, Hirohiko Araki had become much more technically skilled in his art and tended to draw his characters in a sleeker, more realistic way. He had also taken much influence from fashion magazines when he created the poses and outfits that his characters utilized. As a result, Giorno is much less muscular than Jonathan and wears a less traditional outfit as well. Some people may have a difficult time immediately categorizing his sex by his appearance and identifying displays, as he has braided hair and earrings, which can be associated with women. On the other hand, he has a large cutout in his jacket that displays almost all of his chest. Being shirtless or exposing your chest is often only seen as acceptable when you’re a man, so the audience might take this as a cue that Giorno is male.  

Moving on, Giorno’s actions and social interactions, the things that define his gender, can be seen as both masculine and feminine. He can be violent and ruthless and does not often express his emotions. These are all actions that can be considered masculine. However, he is often shown to be in feminine, model-like poses, which may be feminine. Overall, I believe that Giorno is perceived as feminine for the same reason that Cox stated King Francis III was perceived as feminine: the audience did not perceive his masculinity to be established and secure, but he acted in ways that could be considered feminine anyway.  

Conclusion 

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is a series with a cast of protagonists and supporting characters that span a range of sex categories and genders. Two of its protagonists, Johnathan Joestar and Giorno Giovanna, are respectively seen as a masculine male and as a feminine male, likely because of the differences in their gendered actions and identifying displays. I hope this post was interesting to you, and I would highly recommend that you watch or read JoJo’s, as it’s an excellent series.