Archiv für das 'manga'-tag

Der Tiptree, Jr. Award ist frei übersetzt der jährlich vergebene Preis für Science Fiction oder Fantasy-Literatur, die unser Verständnis von “Gender” erforscht oder erweitert.

Dieses Jahr gibt es zwei Gewinner:

Greer Gilman, Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales, (Small Beer Press 2009)

Fumi Yoshinaga, Ooku: The Inner Chambers, volumes 1 & 2 (VIZ Media 2009)

Ooku ist hier für mich doppelt interessant, da ich mich für ein anderes Projekt mit eben diesem Thema beschäftige. Also weise ich doch bei dieser Gelegenheit mal ganz unauffällig auf meinen Amazon Wunschzettel hin

We chose Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ooku, Volumes 1 and 2 as our Tiptree winner with some trepidation. No one on the jury has read much manga; no one is an expert in Japanese history. What we fell in love with was the detailed exploration of the world of these books — an alternate feudal Japan in which a plague has killed 3/4s of Japan’s young men. In Ooku, the shogun and daimyo are women and much of the story takes place among the men in the Shogun’s harem.

The first volume (set in a later time period than the second) shows us a world in which men are assumed to be weak and sickly, yet women still use symbolic masculinity to maintain power. The second volume focuses on the period of transition. Through-out the two books, Yoshinaga explores the way the deep gendering of this society is both maintained and challenged by the alteration in ratios.

The result is a fascinating, subtle, and nuanced speculation with gender at its center.

|via SF Signal|