During 20th century Japan, the aftermath of World War II led to sociopolitical instability and growing anxieties about national identity and subjectivity. Raechel Dumas’ article “Monstrous Motherhood and Evolutionary Horror in Contemporary Japanese Science Fiction” explores the idea that motherhood symbolizes a loss of identity between the mother and the child. The framework of motherhood in Japanese science fiction sets up mothers as vessels for forces that exceed or erase the identity of the self. When read alongside Jacques Derrida’s theorization of spectrality and the instability of presence, Dumas’s analysis reveals that the monstrous maternal is not merely a gendered threat but a philosophical challenge to ontological certainty itself.
Dumas uses the Parasite Eve to illustrate how the material body transforms and unravels identity. The mother figure Kiyomi experiences dream sequences that describe a “womb-like warmth” consumes Kiyomi and makes her identity indistinguishable from her parasitic child Eve.¹ This dissolution of the maternal body is a dramatic retelling of Derrida’s concept of hauntology which is the condition in which the present is never whole or self-sufficient but is unsettled and in conflict with what comes before and after it.² Kiyomi’s dreams illustrate losing boundaries and becoming inhabited by the parasite Eve. This metamorphosis mirrors Derrida’s claim that identity is always impacted by ghosts or external forces that aren’t fully one’s own. Kiyomi’s maternal body becomes the site where the past overtakes the present, demonstrating Derrida’s assertion that the living present is always “disjoined” by those who are “no longer or not yet there”.³ The maternal process creates a disillusion of identity that portrays motherhood as a figure of excess, inseparable from external forces that affect the women themselves.
Derrida’s ideas of logic are clearer in Dumas’s reading of Queen of K’n-yan, where the mother is not merely a biological threat but a spectral manifestation of historical trauma. The alien queen in this story is portrayed as a combination of human and alien forms caused by Japanese grotesque wartime crimes. Japan’s imperialist crimes that were “forgotten or culturally repressed” illustrate Derrida’s ideas concerning homogeneity.⁴ Through the use of the media, societal structures, and academia, Derrida claims that one’s identity is tied to the political and societal structures influential in one’s life.⁵ Dumas notes that Derrida’s haunting “belongs to the structure of every hegemony” and the past returns as a monstrous mother whose reproductive excess literalizes the return of the repressed.⁶ The mother in K’n-yan becomes a hauntological figure who embodies a presence that is never fully present but rather is an unstable identity that refuses containment. K’n-yan’s mother illustrates both biological horror and ontological crisis.⁷ Overall, motherhood is shown to dissolve identities of bodies, histories, and identities which echoes Derrida’s claim that the self is always already inhabited by others and not the self.
Ultimately, through examining Dumas’ reading of Japanese science fiction parallels between motherhood and Derrida’s hauntology becomes obvious. Both Parasite Eve and the Queen of K’n-yan illustrate how monstrous motherhood illuminates anxiety about identity’s dissolution whether that be personal, familial, or national. By reading Dumas’ article this loss of identity through the lens of Derrida, the maternal becomes a site for Japan to be haunted by its own repressed histories and unstable futures.
- Raechel Dumas. “Monstrous Motherhood and Evolutionary Horror in Contemporary Japanese Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 45, no. 1 (2018): 26-27.
- Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, 1994.
- Dumas (n 1) 42.
- Ibid.
- Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler. “Spectographies.” The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, edited by María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 37–52.
- Dumas (n 1) 41.
- Ibid. 43.