Il female gaze di Torikai Akane. Soggettività e violenza di genere in La professoressa mente

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the complexity of the gaze in Sensei’s Pious Lie, maybe the most significant in the career of Akane Torikai, one of the contemporary leading female manga artist in Japan. The manga is centered on misoginy and gender based violence and the author uses a subjective perspective through the point of view of the panels to achieve the maximum degree of self identification: the proximity reader-character is constantly negotiated from different points of view. Since Sensei’s Pious Lie was serialized in a seinen, this paper also highlights how engaging a female gaze and a subjective perspective in a mainly men targeted work can challenge normative gender roles and bias about gender based violence.