“Introduction to Art and Culture in the Global Age” is a series of special lectures organised by the Graduate school of Global Arts. In this course we invite specialist from around the world to give lectures and workshops. This time we welcome Prof. Tomiko Yoda and Prof. Alexander Zahlten for a lecture titled “Media Studies and Japan”.

Lecture 1.

Tomiko Yoda
Takashima Professor of Japanese Humanities in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, USA

 “Prince is Dead, We have Killed Him: Girl Revolution and Feminist World-Building”

Television anime series Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997) is a good specimen of what I refer to as the pop pharmakon. On the one hand, it constantly insists on its own artificiality and frivolity, steeped in the generic cliché of girls’ manga/anime and delivered through the commercial broadc­­­­­ast television network.  At the same time, it explores the possibility of flipping poison into care, inviting the audience to imagine how to break the toxic attachment to “princess narrative,” exposing its hidden rules and mechanisms, including the disavowed and exploited abject femininity.  Revolutionary Girl’s pharmacological gambit took on new forms in the process of its migration to the big screen.  Although the production of theater-release movie version of hit television anime is a common practice, Revolutionary Girl: Adolescence Apocalypse (1999) is neither a sequel, prequel, parallel narrative, spin-off, compilation film nor an alternative ending to the television series.  The film not so much extends the Utena world than render it intensive through non-linear seriality.  In particular, I will argue that in its transition from television to film, Utena franchise shifts its focus from the ideological critique to the question of desire as “the creation of new possible,” the desire for a new world.

・Profile

Tomiko Yoda is the Takashima Professor of Japanese Humanities in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University. Her specialization includes Japanese literature, media studies, and feminist studies. She is the author of Gender and National Literature: Heian Texts and the Constructions of Japanese Modernity (Duke UP), and co-editor with Harry Harootunian of Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present (Duke UP).