Animation is a genre of popular culture that is particularly suited to enact tropes of transgress... more Animation is a genre of popular culture that is particularly suited to enact tropes of transgressing, queering and overcoming boundaries. This paper discusses the 2012 animated film Wolf Children (Dir. Hosoda Mamoru) that portrays the socialisation process of two hybrid wolf-human children. Our analysis employs queer theory (Butler) and the concept of stigma (Goffman) to elucidate how the wolf children’s deviation from normativity and their attempts to ‘pass’ as normal can be read as references for passing modes of non-normative identities, i.e., of social, ethnic, and sexual minority groups in Japan. In this and Hosoda’s other major films, however, the potential for disturbing fixed notions of identity is contained through the gendered frame of the Japanese ‘good wife and wise mother’. As his family stories reify the heteronormative (gender) order, his work presents a ‘Japanese’ version of a Disney-like ‘cinema of reassurance’ (Napier): it contains diversity and difference by incorporating it in a reification of the national heteronormative imaginary.
Animation is a genre of popular culture that is particularly suited to enact tropes of transgress... more Animation is a genre of popular culture that is particularly suited to enact tropes of transgressing, queering and overcoming boundaries. This paper discusses the 2012 animated film Wolf Children (Dir. Hosoda Mamoru) that portrays the socialisation process of two hybrid wolf-human children. Our analysis employs queer theory (Butler) and the concept of stigma (Goffman) to elucidate how the wolf children’s deviation from normativity and their attempts to ‘pass’ as normal can be read as references for passing modes of non-normative identities, i.e., of social, ethnic, and sexual minority groups in Japan. In this and Hosoda’s other major films, however, the potential for disturbing fixed notions of identity is contained through the gendered frame of the Japanese ‘good wife and wise mother’. As his family stories reify the heteronormative (gender) order, his work presents a ‘Japanese’ version of a Disney-like ‘cinema of reassurance’ (Napier): it contains diversity and difference by incorporating it in a reification of the national heteronormative imaginary.
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Papers by Tianqi Zhang