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Full-Text Articles in Critical and Cultural Studies

Radiant Dreams And Nuclear Nightmares: Japanese Resistance Narratives And American Intervention In Postwar Speculative Popular Culture, Aidan J. Warlow Feb 2022

Radiant Dreams And Nuclear Nightmares: Japanese Resistance Narratives And American Intervention In Postwar Speculative Popular Culture, Aidan J. Warlow

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project explores three distinct sets of Japanese and American postwar popular culture texts to demonstrate that there is a continuum of Japanese cultural interest in pacifism through resistance narratives in speculative fiction. Through close readings of Godzilla, Mobile Suit Gundam and Akira, and Metal Gear Solid, which I compare with similar American texts, my project positions its objects of study as points of cultural resistance to hegemonic pro-American cultural products. Each text produces commentary on Japanese-American relations with specific respect to nuclear policy and military expansionism. Significant Japanese cultural producers have grown increasingly critical of Japanese-American …


Re-Masculating The Vampire: Conceptions Of Sexuality And The Undead From Rossetti's Proserpine To Meyer's Cullen, Emily Schuck Mar 2013

Re-Masculating The Vampire: Conceptions Of Sexuality And The Undead From Rossetti's Proserpine To Meyer's Cullen, Emily Schuck

LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University

This paper explores the relationship between sexuality and the undead from Victorian England to present day vampire narratives. Specifically, I examine the shift in the vampire narrative from the frightening Dracula to the extremely sexualized nature of vampires in the early twenty-first century. My results are concerned with the nature and exchange of fluids between vampire bodies and their victims (or lovers) and the power associated with that exchange. My conclusion implies that re-masculating the vampire is a return to a patriarchal dominant discourse promulgates the heteronormative status quo, unlike their early predecessors, which tend to undermine heteronormative sexuality.