Overview
- The first sustained English-language study dedicated to the monstrous-feminine in contemporary Japanese popular culture
- Engages both thinkers who provide important insights into negative delineations of the feminine and critics that can help us to think more affirmatively about female monstrosity in relation to postmodernity
- Contributes to a growing field of critical engagements with Japanese popular culture as a meaningful site for reproducing, rethinking, and subverting established notions of identity and systems of knowledge
Part of the book series: East Asian Popular Culture (EAPC)
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About this book
This book explores the monstrous-feminine in Japanese popular culture, produced from the late years of the 1980s through to the new millennium. Raechel Dumas examines the role of female monsters in selected works of fiction, manga, film, and video games, offering a trans-genre, trans-media analysis of this enduring trope. The book focuses on several iterations of the monstrous-feminine in contemporary Japan: the self-replicating shōjo in horror, monstrous mothers in science fiction, female ghosts and suburban hauntings in cinema, female monsters and public violence in survival horror games, and the rebellious female body in mytho-fiction. Situating the titles examined here amid discourses of crisis that have materialized in contemporary Japan, Dumas illuminates the ambivalent pleasure of the monstrous-feminine as a trope that both articulates anxieties centered on shifting configurations of subjectivity and nationhood, and elaborates novel possibilities for identity negotiation and social formation in a period marked by dramatic change.
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Keywords
Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“Covering material from novels to manga to video games, this book is wide-ranging, thorough and profound in its analytical technique, and substantial in its interpretations of the social critiques of its primary texts. Raechel Dumas provides a solid contextualisation of the material she covers, situating the monstrous-feminine in the political and economic conditions of contemporary Japan. This contextualisation allows Dumas to demonstrate how these texts critique Japan by highlighting the changing value systems at play, which threaten notions of social stability and traditional ideology.” (Timothy Iles, Associate Professor of Japanese Studies, Department of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Victoria, Canada)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Raechel Dumas is Assistant Professor of Humanities at San Diego State University, USA.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Monstrous-Feminine in Contemporary Japanese Popular Culture
Authors: Raechel Dumas
Series Title: East Asian Popular Culture
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92465-6
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-92464-9Published: 15 June 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-06436-5Published: 03 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-92465-6Published: 01 June 2018
Series ISSN: 2634-5935
Series E-ISSN: 2634-5943
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 217
Number of Illustrations: 6 illustrations in colour
Topics: Asian Culture, Culture and Gender, Popular Culture , Global/International Culture, Asian Cinema and TV