Defying Fate, Demanding Futurity
Nostalgia, Queerness, and Family in Ikuhara Kunihiko’s Mawaru Penguindrum
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21900/j.jams.v4.1193Keywords:
ikuhara kunihiko, psychoanalysis, Aum Shinrikyo, Collective Memory, nostalgia, familyAbstract
In discussions of anime director Ikuhara Kunihiko, much emphasis has been placed on the prominence of queerness in his works. Mawaru Penguindrum (2011), with its focus on familial belonging and relatively low incidence of explicitly LGBTQ+ characters, is consequently often framed as the most heteronormative of Ikuhara's works. Drawing on the ways in which queerness has deployed in queer theory as a force that pushes against normativity, I argue that Penguindrum can nonetheless be read as a queer text insofar as it queers the concepts of family and nostalgia. If the family is at the heart of Penguindrum, it is not the heteronormative nuclear family that Lee Edelman critiques as a force of reproductive futurity, but families of choice formed in response to exclusion from normative society. Additionally, working with Freud's distinction between mourning and melancholia as well as work in memory studies, I read nostalgia in Penguindrum as an affect that is queer insofar as it does not seek to replicate or hold onto the past, but rather uses past attachment as a generative force for forming new connection. Ultimately, I argue that queer nostalgia acts a crucial link between Penguindrum's two main themes: the idealization of the nuclear family and forms of societal belonging in the wake of the 1995 Tokyo sarin gas attacks.
References
Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? New York: Verso Books, 2009.
———. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 2002.
———. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
Eng, David L. The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
Eng, David L., Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz. “Introduction: What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?” Social Text 84-85, Vol. 23, Nos. 3-4 (2005):1–17.
Friedman, Erica. “Yuri Anime/Manga: Sailor Moon.” Okazu (blog), January 29, 2004, https://okazu.yuricon.com/2004/01/29/yuri-animemanga-sailor-moon/.
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology, and Other Works 14, trans. James Stratchey, vol. 14:243–58. London: The Hogarth Press, 1957.
Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
Ikuhara, Kunihiko, director. Mawaru Penguindrum. Aired 2011. DVD.
Leong, Taylor, “Mawaru Penguindrum: Survival Strategy in the Wake of 2020.” The Spirit of the Tomato Box (blog), January 3, 2023, https://thetomatobox.wordpress.com/2021/01/03/mawaru-penguindrum-survival-strategy-in-the-wake-of-2020/.
Lezubski, Kirstian. “The Power to Revolutionize the World, or Absolute Gender Apocalypse?” Channeling Wonder: Fairy Tales on Television, edited by Pauline Greenhill and Jill Terry Rudy. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014, pp. 163–185.
Metraux, Daniel A. Aum Shinrikyo and Japanese Youth. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999.
Murakami, Haruki. “Taking on the Forces of ‘Black Magic.’” Yomiuri Shinbun, May 17, 1998.
---. Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. Translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel, New York: Vintage, 2001.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009.
Pak, Claire. “A Retrospective on Kunihiko Ikuhara: Revolution, One Kiss at a Time.” Scene + Heard, November 4, 2019, https://www.sceneandheardnu.com/content/2019/11/4/a-retrospective-on-kunihiro-ikuhara-revolution-one-kiss-at-a-time.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Cynthia Zhang
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.