Demonic Women in Japanese Fiction

Catalog description

Demonic women have stabbed and slithered their way through the pages of Japanese fiction ever since people began to write stories in the Japanese language more than a thousand years ago. This ghostly heritage still manifests itself in the twenty-first century, with all manner of disturbing apparitions haunting the airwaves and the internet. Where are these strange and creepy women coming from, and what do they want? In this course we will investigate both the paranormal and the psychological in an attempt to understand the cultural and universal themes and issues underlying the literary trope of the demonic woman in Japan. We will begin our journey into the realm of the mysterious with the romances and folklore of premodern Japan before projecting forward to the postwar era, a time of changing social roles and hidden resentments. As we progress from the 1950s to the 2010s, we will examine the political ideologies that cast women as miscreants, deviants, and villains. We will also delve into theories concerning abjection and the uncanny, which render women as strangers in their own bodies. Along the way we will explore constructions of gender and sexuality as we study demonic men, queerness that resists binary categorization, and posthuman technophobia. By the end of this course, students will have developed a better understanding of how history and society inform the scary stories we tell ourselves about what frightens and fascinates us.