Desiring futures: Hope, technoscience, and utopian dystopia in Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Chu, Leo

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/108993 Copy

Description

Title

Desiring futures: Hope, technoscience, and utopian dystopia in Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Author(s)

Chu, Leo

Issue Date

2020

Keyword(s)

• magical girls
• feminism
• utopia
• technoscience
• hope
• neo-noir
• shojo

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze the animated television series Puella Magi Madoka Magica based on a variety of literary critical methods: neo-noir criticism, feminist epistemology and studies of technoscience, and discussion of utopia/dystopia imagination. My focus is on the depiction of desire and hope, as two interconnected but potentially conflicting concepts, in Madoka Magica which presents different philosophical edifices related to them as one central narrative tension. On the other hand, the feminist methods I utilize will demonstrate how the “genre subversion” the series introduce can be read alongside with not only magical girls’ struggle against their fates in the fiction but the real power structures and asymmetries in (post-)modern society. By highlighting the difficulties to resist a future and ethics imposed from the standpoint of dominant social groups as well as the attempt to solve such impasse by the series, the paper argues that Madoka Magica, while not committing itself to the creation of a radical alternative to the existent political or economic systems, has nonetheless affirmed the possibility and importance to have hope for futures that are yet to be imagined.

Series/Report Name or Number

Journal of Anime and Manga Studies, vol. 1

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/108993

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21900/j.jams.v1.231

Copyright and License Information

• Copyright 2020 Leo Chu
• This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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