DEADLY AND DOMESTIC: YOR FORGER’S PERFORMANCE OF DUAL FEMININITIES IN SPY × FAMILY

Abstrak

This article examines the dual performance of femininity embodied by Yor Forger in the first season of the anime Spy x Family. As a wife and mother, Yor performs a socially idealized femininity characterized by care, emotional availability, and accommodation, while as the “Thorn Princess,” she embodies physical strength, autonomy, decisiveness, and violence. This study aims to examine how Yor performs these contrasting forms of femininity, how her assassin identity challenges conventional gender expectations, and what tensions emerge from the collision between her maternal and assassin identities. Employing a qualitative approach, the study uses visual and discourse analysis to examine purposively selected scenes from Season 1, focusing on Yor’s domestic interactions, her transformation into the Thorn Princess, and moments in which her maternal and assassin identities intersect. Drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity and R. W. Connell’s concepts of emphasized femininity and gender order, the analysis demonstrates that Yor’s femininity is constructed through repeated domestic practices while simultaneously disrupted by her physical power and capacity for violence. The findings further show that her two identities are not entirely separate: her capacity for violence becomes a means of maternal protection, blurring the boundary between the “good mother” and the “dangerous woman.” The study concludes that Yor’s character presents femininity as an ongoing negotiation between socially regulated expectations and individual agency, illustrating how anime can reimagine conventional gender roles through contradictory yet interconnected performances of womanhood.