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Corrupted Innocence, Sacred Violence, and Gynoid Becomings: The Monstrous-Feminine on the Gaming Scene

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The Monstrous-Feminine in Contemporary Japanese Popular Culture

Part of the book series: East Asian Popular Culture ((EAPC))

Abstract

This chapter examines the monstrous-feminine in the first installments of three survival horror video game franchises: Silent Hill, Fatal Frame, and Siren. Dumas situates these games amid media discourses that emerged in the wake of two eruptions of violence in mid-1990s Japan: the Aum Shinrikyō sarin gas attack and the Kobe child murders. Dumas explores sexual difference as a device for elaborating fears that emerged following these events, with emphasis on how the conservative gender ideologies visible in these games mirror discourses on “proper” Japanese nationhood. Dumas also explores these titles in terms of the tension between their content and their form to consider the pleasure of gaming as a practice that subverts traditional identity categories by facilitating the meeting of technology and the body.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Classics and Humanities, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA

    Raechel Dumas

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  1. Raechel Dumas
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Correspondence to Raechel Dumas .

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Dumas, R. (2018). Corrupted Innocence, Sacred Violence, and Gynoid Becomings: The Monstrous-Feminine on the Gaming Scene. 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_5

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