Biography
In general terms, I am interested in the ways in which technology has been imagined to intersect with notions of selfhood in late-capitalist Japanese society. My research concerns technology in its role as an affective and bodily force, intimately interwoven with human subjectivity in ways that fundamentally shape our notions of being in the world. I plan to pursue these issues through a study of 20th and 21st century Japanese SF (science- or speculative-fiction) literature and film. This includes texts that can be recognizably placed within the genre of science-fiction as well as texts belonging to SF’s predecessor genres, such as the Gothic horror and mystery stories popular since the Taishō and Shōwa periods. Having built its bubble-era economy on cutting-edge consumer technologies, Japan is often viewed as a “techno-topia,” and I expect this perception to make itself felt in popular media. If we further consider technology to be one of the foundational concerns of SF, then Japanese SF media provide a uniquely apt lens through which to examine the present and future of technological society and our place within it. This in turn will help us re-calibrate our understandings of (post-)modernity, which often takes technology, the network, and so on as self-evident and monolithic analytical entities.