A Certain Slant of Light

I saw that kind of tension in the work of Hagio Moto, a Japanese manga-artist/writer who came to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s. There were all these things she liked that she associated with men (like the ability to take heroic action), and even though she was writing fantastical stories and science fiction, so there was no reason why she couldn't posit heroic women or gentle men, no. She was stuck. She'd do these elaborate things where men turned into women or women turned into men--as if that was the only way to deal with the sensibilities that differed from what the norms for the genders were.