NEKAMA Men Living Different Lives on the Internet

Abstract

At present, a huge number of people join in online games or SNS. With increasing the number of its users, online communication with invisibility and anonymity has generated a new type of communicators in Japan; those are referred to as ?Nekama? and have communication based on the Japanese gendered linguistic system, in online communities. ?Nekama? means a male participant who represents himself as a female in the cyber space. Whereas, he naturally spends his daily life as a male and most of them are heterosexual in the real space. Doing ?Nekama? enables a male participant to free from traditional gender role. However, the existence of ?Nekama? can bring up gender issues in the cyber space. Because they fill the lack of information about who they are with gender images and the Japanese women‘s language. Therefore, ?Nekama? release himself from fixed gender order in the real space, and at the same time he reproduces and strengthens gender order in the cyber space.