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Changes in the conceptualization of body and mind in Japanese popular culture, 1950 - 2015

University of British Columbia

This dissertation investigates changes in the conceptualizations of technologically-enhanced beings and bodies in contemporary Japanese science fiction anime, manga, and literature. These stories/images and real-life transitions make us consider such issues as what constitutes the body, how the body is now changing, and what the relationship between the body and the self/mind might be. In order to understand ourselves and contemporary conditions and issues, which occur in specific relation to differences inherent in each body—sex, race, disability, disease, and so on—it is essential to analyze these changes in body notions as contemporary visual media themselves critique and discuss them. Emerging from a close reading of texts from the 1950s to the 2010s, and utilizing theories from Donna Haraway, Yōrō Takeshi, and others, this project argues that, since the 1950s, Japanese popular culture has created a wide range of imagined technological bodies, the depiction of which engages with important philosophical and ethical questions. In addition, although some works from the 2000s and 2010s present sentient beings that are essentially bodiless, we see a generally steady trend toward an emphasis on the importance of the material body, as well as increasing monism as opposed to Cartesian dualism. Another trend exposed through this study is the surprising persistence of the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality, even in depictions that are otherwise radically posthuman.

Text

2016-04-19

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/57655

Asian Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/