UC Santa Cruz

Our imaginations of calamity inform our attitude toward precarity. How does visual culture respond to traumatic cultural moments and shape our complicated feelings toward those moments? What are the ethics of living in an unstable world? These questions are more relevant today as we navigate a post-pandemic world marred by global conflicts.I argue that public memories of turbulent historical events give culturally recognizable texture to (post)apocalyptic imaginations, making them allegorical. In turn, the (post)apocalyptic setting becomes a productive site for working through precarious social realities. Additionally, these imaginations traffic in gender metaphors, which sustain patriarchal configurations of power and control and, as a result, limits our ability to picture a future without dominance or mastery. I believe a closer look at Japanese visual culture allows us to ruminate on the ethics of living in a precarious world. This dissertation closely examines Japanese animated films, television series (broadly as anime), and video games produced between the 1990s and 2010s. The 1990s saw the end of the Cold World and the start of the Heisei period (1989 – 2019). The bursting of the asset price shattered the myth of Japan's miraculous economy and a sense of security slowly built up since WWII. In this period, Japanese popular media engage with this new modern precarity. What stands at the center of these texts is a giant woman who overwhelms the beholder's senses with her large scale and immense power. I identify a “perpetually apocalyptic” setting within the objects examined in this dissertation. A perpetually apocalyptic setting pictures an eerily mundane world sandwiched between a catastrophic past trauma and an apocalyptic future calamity. Inhabitants of a perpetually apocalyptic world reference past events to prepare for the inevitable disaster. A perpetually apocalyptic setting recognizes existence as precarious. This dissertation demonstrates different mediums’ strategies for facilitating cultural reflections by challenging the neutral façade. I use the giant woman as a cipher for Japan in the 1990s through the sublime as an aesthetic condition, a political apparatus, and a psychoanalytic framework. My intervention challenges the universality and apolitical façade of imaginations of precarity, apocalypse, and civilization.