{"id":57502,"date":"2019-02-06T01:17:11","date_gmt":"2019-02-06T01:17:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=57502"},"modified":"2019-02-06T01:29:29","modified_gmt":"2019-02-06T01:29:29","slug":"what-miyazakis-heroines-taught-me-about-my-mixed-race-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=57502","title":{"rendered":"What Miyazaki\u2019s Heroines Taught Me About My Mixed-Race Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"

What Miyazaki\u2019s Heroines Taught Me About My Mixed-Race Identity<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Catapult<\/a>
\n2017-10-16<\/p>\n

Nina Coomes<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\"Cover<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cMiyazaki<\/a> tells us something about bodies in flux: There is no easy answer; only the conflict, the question.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

One summer day when I was nine, I climbed into a hair stylist\u2019s chair and asked them to cut my hair to my ears. Until that point, I\u2019d always had a head of long hair tumbling over my shoulder, useful for coquettish tossing when I imagined myself as Snow White<\/a> or Cinderella<\/a>. I had never worn short hair, had never wanted it; I\u2019d always thrived on girliness that fed into my obsession with imitating what I perceived to be the ultra-feminine Disney<\/a> princess archetype. But that summer, sitting in a chair too tall for me, I asked the friendly lady with the scissors to take it all. After a moment of thought, I told her, \u201cShort\u2014like a princess raised by wolves.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was referencing San, from Hayao Miyazaki\u2019s<\/a> Mononoke-hime<\/em> or Princess Mononoke<\/em><\/a>. In the film, San is a human girl left as a sacrifice to the gods of the mountain by her human parents, raised by the very god to whom she was sacrificed\u2014Moro, a wolf-like Inu gami<\/em>\u2014and convinced, as a result, that she too is a wolf. When the viewer meets San for the first time, her small face is pressed to an open wound in her wolf-mother\u2019s flesh. She turns her head toward the viewer, momentarily breaking the fourth wall, her face smeared in bright red. She spits a jet of blackening blood and rubs her fist along the edge of her chin, as if to wipe the stain of blood from her face. The utter humanness of this gesture, paired with her clear physical intimacy with the wolf-god, immediately casts her identity into conflict\u2014a theme to be played over and over throughout the movie. Is San a wolf? Is she a girl? Is she neither, or both, or something in between?…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cMiyazaki tells us something about bodies in flux: There is no easy answer; only the conflict, the question.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,395,1196,8,20],"tags":[29404,29405,29406,29403,29402],"class_list":["post-57502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-autobiography","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-catapult","tag-catapult-magazine","tag-hayao-miyazaki","tag-nina-coomes","tag-nina-li-coomes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57502"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57504,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57502\/revisions\/57504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}