ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This paper examines the related aspects of minority and disgust in Japanese contemporary novels, focusing on LGBT and the elderly. What is commonly found in the novels of Noriaki Fushimi and Yoko Tawada, the works is “mixing”. However, the nature of the mixing is different. In Fushimi's novel, individuality unconstrained by community discipline and solidarity between disparate minorities are presented as a way to overcome the disgust inflicted on LGBT and the elderly. The problem is that there are unexpected points that are missing in the process. The novel is based on a way that negates the relationship between the subject and the other, the perpetrator and the victim from the perspective of historical revisionism that dehistorifies the war in modern Japan. If the pair of minority-recognition movements and emphasis on individuality for identity politics are dehistoricization, this is self-contradictory. This mixed method that appropriates self-loathing as the alienation of the other has a concern that the affects of disgust is fixed. On the other hand, the elderly in Yoko Tawada's novel “The Emissary” is not the object of disgust. The elderly who care for children born with sick deformed bodies due to the effects of a catastrophe are not vulnerable and dependent. They are key members of both the home and society as the subjects of labor. The posthuman new world, in which the position of the elderly and children is reversed and the human and nonhuman bodies are mingled, seems to be a dystopia, but the world in which minorities share their roles beyond differences seems more like utopia. The world of “The Emissary”, which is mixed across the boundaries with a flexible mind and body, shows the possibility of decentralized solidarity. There, disgust is not something to be managed or overcome, but to embrace each other. In this case, the loathsome beings can become the subject of the field of solidarity that constitutes, reconstructs, and disengages the minority itself, rather than the object of otherization buried in minority character.

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