The Monstrous-Feminine in Contemporary Japanese Popular Culture

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 shjo 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.

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

Autorentext

Raechel Dumas is Assistant Professor of Humanities at San Diego State University, USA.

Inhalt

1. Open Wounds: Situating the Monstrous-Feminine in Contemporary Japan.- 2. The Girls that Never End: The Infinite Seduction of Tomie and Ring.- 3. Xenogenesis: Monstrous Mothers and Evolutionary Horrors in Contemporary Japanese Science Fiction.- 4. Faces of Horror, Dances of Death: Female Revenants and Suburban Hauntings in New Millennial Japanese Horror Films.- 5. Corrupted Innocence, Sacred Violence, and Gynoid Becomings: The Monstrous-Feminine on the Gaming Scene.- 6. Disobedient Bodies, Monstrous Affinities: Reframing Female Defilement in Natsuo Kirino's The Goddess Chronicle.- 7. The End?.