In Water Boys, Shinobu Yaguchi’s film about high school boys who put on a synchronized swimming demonstration for their high school festival, ideas of masculine identity are a site of play through which Yaguchi explores with the audience the meanings of being young, male, and on the edge of adulthood. The movie is a comedy, and that format allows the director to create a liminal space, both for the characters and the audience which allows for play as the audience and the characters redefine themselves within a space at the edge of their existence up to this point. Through being drawn into the identity negotiations experienced by the characters in the film, Yaguchi also helps his audience take part in the discourse of gender formation. We are able to see that as with the construction of fragile selves that teens go through in this period of their lives, their construction of their own and others’ gender identities is performative, constantly undergoing change and emerging anew, and contingent upon the social milieu and general context in which they perform it.

Arnold van Gennep has defined liminal space as a situation of transition, in which a person undergoing transition exists in between the reality of the past and the reality to come. In this transitional space, van Gennep says that anything is possible, and the subject redefines themselves in ways not predictable before the transition began. The film Water Boys sets up this kind of liminal space in two ways: first, the boys who are the main characters of the film are seniors in high school, with only a short time to go before becoming legal adults, they find themselves in the midst of an academic, emotional, and social transition to adulthood, but not having finished school, they are not yet adults. They are thus free to redefine themselves in the course of the film. But the film itself provides a liminal space for the audience to watch the transition of the boys in the film, and to vicariously redefine ideas of youth, and of gender, while observing. This liminal space is therefore a discursive site for the negotiation of gender identity, among other things, both for the characters and for the audience.

Joan Scott has suggested that gender is discursively constructed knowledge about sexual difference, and that it is one part of identity, which itself is a constructed notion. Gender and identity are constructed, according to Scott, and Judith Butler, through a process of constituting the self through repetition of acts that embody certain ideas, as Scott says, knowledge, about sexual difference.[1] Gender is, then, as Butler says, performative. It is constantly reified through a reflexive process in which the gaze of others who recognize certain kata, or regularized cultural patterns, within the performance of an individual identify those patterns as appropriate acts for either males or females. However, as Scott notes, gender disguises itself as a set of binary opposites – male and female are frequently thought of as being opposite from each other, and so clearly delineated from each other in expected, and acceptable, behavior and norms. But such an opposition is not, in fact, possible. To be recognized as masculine, for example, requires the negation of feminine behavior. But this assumes that heterosexual behavior is the norm by which gender is defined – as Butler puts it, “the sexist claims that a woman only exhibits her womanness in the act of heterosexual coitus in which her subordination becomes her pleasure.”[2] So gender is not necessarily directly related to sexual practice. Instead, gender consists, at least in part, of a series of performances of roles based on male or female binary stereotypes, but existing not as binary opposites, but in a range in between and on either side of those binary normative descriptors. Those performances serve both to reify normative gender ideas, while denying them in the process of constructing individual and social group identities. This means that gender, and so masculinity, which belongs to one of the poles of the false binary of gender, is always emergent in the case of individuals, or of social groups, that it is always contingent upon circumstances, and circumstances change, and that it reifies itself through frequent reiteration of performance.

Gender, if it is not directly related to sexual practice, is then a social construct. If it is a social construct, and not a matter of natural physiology, it must also be performed in order to be realized. In Water Boys, the performance of gender along a wide range of possibilities that provide space for thinking about masculinity is a major theme. We can see the performance of masculinity perhaps most clearly in the character of Sato, the former basketball player who joins the swim team, he says, because he likes the looks of the new coach. Sato begins the film with hair in an afro, and an attitude that he really belongs to the elite basketball club, but has come out in order to watch Mrs. Sakuma. He performs the role of a heterosexual male jock, until we learn that he did not quit the basketball team, but was kicked off because he never made it to practice. Once it is clear that he is a case of failed masculinity – rejected by the male teammates friendship with whom he had claimed as the hallmark of his power in the school, Sato becomes the quitter that he thinks he is, drifting away from the synchronized swimming team into a punk band, then leaving that as well. Ironically, when he is confronted late in the movie with the knowledge that he is the object of Saotome’s affections, he does not have the extreme masculine reaction one might imagine. He is stunned, but takes the news calmly, and even accepts a public hug from Saotome during the final phase of the ‘sychro’ performance. By the end of the movie, Sato’s, and the audience’s, feelings about this have been changed by the performance of Saotome, and by the performance of masculine bonding among all the members of the team.

If we see Sato as becoming less and less the afro-end basketball jock, and more and more an average boy with problems, we see the main character Suzuki in his own series of problems as well. Suzuki is captivated by synchronized swimming as soon as he first sees it, and the film makes it clear that he is interested not in the high school girls all watching by juxtaposing the possibilities of girl-watching (short skirts, girls in swimsuits) with Suzuki’s obviously exclusive interest in what is going on in the pool. He is clearly less strong, and less athletic, than Shizuko, who becomes his girlfriend. He regularly leaves Shizuko behind in small acts of loyalty to the male members of his ‘synchro’ team. Suzuki’s performance of gender is very neutral, and his masculinity is as much in limbo as he is in liminal space throughout most of the movie, until at the end, he dances exclusively for Shizuko, and unabashedly wears a tiny swimsuit that she has sewn for him with “Love” printed in pink across the front. His final performance for her leaves him, for the moment, in the masculine camp for the simple reason that he has made a normative heterosexual choice of partner.

Saotome, on the other hand, is clearly performing homosexuality from the moment we meet him. There is no question that during the first swim practice he is watching one of the other boys rather than the coach, though which boy it is remains a matter for speculation. The boys go to sell tickets to the show in order to raise money for refilling the pool, and Saotome cries in happiness when the transvestite hosts and their female clients buy them out. He cries again on numerous occasions. When Suzuki begins reconstituting the team after visiting Sea World, Saotome is found in a greenhouse tending a small flower garden. He is given stereotyped actions that function as kata to make his homosexuality obvious from the beginning.

Less obvious is the gender of Ohta, whose behavioral kata are sometimes quite male, as when he goes with Sato to peep at Saotome and Suzuki on the beach late in the movie. At other times they are quite ambiguous or at best gender neutral; for example his dancing in a G-string to the all-male (all G-stringed) aerobics video, and his clear mastery of rhythm on the Dance-Dance Revolution game. Boys don’t dance – or do they? Ohta performs an ambiguous gender identity that leaves us guessing all the way to and beyond the end of the film, even though we come to be fairly clear about what his likely sexual preference is.

So gender is constituted through performance, and reiterated through constant continued performances. Since performance requires and audience, at least in part, one’s gender is determined by the way in which the audience reads the performance and reacts to it. But as it is performed, the audience does not remain static. Changes in audience and situation lead to changes in context and performance. Therefore, gender is also fluid, in the process of being constructed – emergent.

Masculine identity, because of its constructed nature, is always emergent. It is re-formed after each new situation in which one participates, and exists in the making as an improvised performance of the moment in which one reacts to the immediate situation informed by the trace of one’s conceptions of self and gender present only in the immediate past. Each new act is then an act of re-creation of gender identity in which the trace is subsumed into the performance of the present. In Water Boys, the premise of the movie provides a good example of this kind of emergent identity. At Tadano Boys’ High School, sports dominate the boys’ extracurricular lives, and for Suzuki, the demise of the swim team, on which he was a less-than-stellar performer, is a kind of loss of identity. In the early part of the movie, he learns about the new swim coach as he is trying to retrieve his goggles and swimsuit from a derelict locker on the deck of a run-down pool – an image which is meant to convey the way he is feeling mentally at the prospect of the demise of the swim team, and of his chances to redeem himself as an athlete in his senior year. This is the end, and he now has to look for a new beginning. His inability even to get rid of the tiny stray dog who defends the pool as his territory is a testament to the liminality of the situation – Suzuki is confused and unable to decide what to do or how to do it. Still, he has no choice but to reinvent himself. This reinvention begins almost the moment he meets the new coach, the very feminine Mrs. Sakuma. But Suzuki is confused. His reinvention of self involves a rebuilding of his own performance of gender identity in the way in which he views and behaves toward the coach. Still, his masculinity in this scene is also ambiguous, brought into question because of the fact that Suzuki is the only legitimate member of the revitalized swim team. His legitimacy comes from that reality that he is the only swimmer who was previously involved in the sport. The new recruits to the team have come to ogle the new coach. Their performance of expected masculine heterosexual interest reflects on Suzuki in two ways. First, their single-minded interest in the coach, not the sport, highlights the fact that Suzuki is not there only to gaze at a female body. He wants to swim, but this duality of purpose to some degree emasculates him in comparison with his more single-minded teammates. When the entire team discovers that the coach, Mrs. Sakuma, wants to turn the team into a boys’ synchronized swimming team, Suzuki’s prior commitment to the coach to stay on the team further emasculates him. Further, he actually likes the idea sub-consciously, having been attracted to synchronized swimming by accident in the first scene of the film, and this repressed desire to do “synchro” reduces his masculinity even more. Each event, and Suzuki’s reaction to it, has a deep effect on the way both the audience and Suzuki perceive his masculinity.

But masculinity as a part of identity is contingent, as well. Each new context brings self-mage into new focus in contrast to people and events around oneself. We learn immediately after the new coach arrives, for example, that heterosexual interest in the female coach is not the only reason many of the boys have joined the swim team. Kanazawa, a brainy, but nerdy, math wiz joins because he needs exercise. His interest in the coach as a woman is clear, but he is not by any stretch the athletic type. At one point as the team begins to practice for their synchronized swimming event, Kanazawa can be seen holding on to the pool wall and practicing his kick. His masculinity is in question here, since he is an un-athletic member of a school devoted to athletics. Sato, it turns out, is a former member of the basketball team, but is unwilling to work hard in practice, and so quits the team. The fact that he is perhaps the most stereotypically masculine member of the core group of boys hides the fact that he does not have the work ethic, or the drive to win, that might define him as the man’s man role that he performs might require. Saotome is clearly homosexual, and so is not there for the coach, but is there for ogling – one of the other primary male characters. This comic portrayal of a nerd, a failed jock, and a gay guy show that performance of masculinity is contingent upon the situation and the immediate audience for one’s gender performance. When Sato suggests that Saotome is in love with Suzuki at that first practice at the pool, Suzuki’s response is rejection of the very idea. Later, when Suzuki has to explain that in fact, Saotome has confessed his feelings for Sato instead, the boys deal with this new fact with some sensitivity – in spite of the fact that they had come expecting to find some romantic developments in the relationship between Suzuki and Saotome. Having gotten to know each other, the boys don’t stop thinking, or joking, about gender, but they do come to realize that each is dependent upon the others for some of the identity he is constructing, including understanding of gender. Masculinity, therefore, is contingent upon the situation, and the audience that one is performing for.

Gender, then, is a discursive construction, part of the construction of self which is also produced through discourse within a social context. As one pole of the normative (heterosexual) gender duality, masculinity is also constituted through performance, and often the possibilities for performance of masculinity, and its reification as ‘the norm’ in human gender choice through performance of its perceived opposites, can be explored well through entertainment products such as films. Water Boys director Shinobu Yaguchi does a wonderful job of exploring these possibilities in this humorous film, which pulls few punches in its portrayal of masculinity, and masculine confusion, among high school boys in Japan. If anything, the best we can get from this film is to see the falsity of the gender duality mentioned above. Masculinity, as a subset of gender, clearly has its own subsets of behavior all of which appear most clearly in contrast to each other. Through his adept framing of the movie, Yaguchi has been able to create a liminal space through which we can view a range of masculine possibilities in Japanese culture, and the very changing, contingent, and performative nature of those possibilities. They seem to be as fleeting, experimental, and dramatic as the high school senior year experienced by the Water Boys themselves.