Abstract
In this chapter, Dumas provides a reading of Natsuo Kirino’s novel The Goddess Chronicle, a feminist retelling of the eighth-century mytho-historical text Kojiki. Drawing on feminist thinkers Elizabeth Grosz and Bracha Ettinger, Dumas concentrates on its engagements with female embodiment to explore how historical notions of female defilement are reimagined as a vehicle of rebellion against patriarchal religious and sociocultural institutions. Dumas also argues that The Goddess Chronicle works to expose and resist a model of male narrative desire that is highly visible across the Japanese male literary canon. Finally, Dumas situates Kirino amid a genealogy of other modern Japanese women writers who similarly imagine female monstrosity as a vehicle of resistance to constraining gender paradigms, and from there to patriarchal constructions of nationhood.
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Dumas, R. (2018). Disobedient Bodies, Monstrous Affinities: Reframing Female Defilement in Natsuo Kirino’s The Goddess Chronicle. In: The Monstrous-Feminine in Contemporary Japanese Popular Culture. East Asian Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92465-6_6
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