"I Hear You Just Fine": Disability and Queer Identity in Yuki Fumino's I Hear the Sunspot
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21900/j.jams.v1.233Keywords:
queer, disability, queer identity, cultural attitudes, social interaction, anime, lgbt, Compulsory Able-BodiednessAbstract
Yuki Fumino’s currently ongoing series, I Hear the Sunspot, is a manga that provides a voice for those on the “outside” of society as it examines Japanese cultural attitudes toward both disability and homosexuality. Employing a range of characters, the manga confronts the problem of compulsory able-bodiedness and the need for disabled persons to fill prescribed roles, the process of moving away from self-isolation to self-acceptance, and the debate between living insularly within a disabled community or community building between disabled and nondisabled communities. Fumino uses the figure of Kohei to represent the struggles of self-acceptance as it relates to intersectional queer and disabled identities, and the figure of Taichi to represent the ‘bridge’ of community building as a catalyst to this self-acceptance in a society where both disabled and queer communities are seen as outsiders.
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