"I Hear You Just Fine": Disability and queer identity in Yuki Fumino's I Hear the Sunspot

Percy, Corinna Barrett

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/108991 Copy

Description

Title

"I Hear You Just Fine": Disability and queer identity in Yuki Fumino's I Hear the Sunspot

Author(s)

Percy, Corinna Barrett

Issue Date

2020

Keyword(s)

• queer
• disability
• queer identity
• cultural attitudes
• social interaction
• anime
• lgbt
• Compulsory Able-Bodiedness

Abstract

Yuki Fumino’s currently ongoing series, I Hear the Sunspot, is a manga that provides a voice for those on the “outside” of society as it examines Japanese cultural attitudes toward both disability and homosexuality. Employing a range of characters, the manga confronts the problem of compulsory able-bodiedness and the need for disabled persons to fill prescribed roles, the process of moving away from self-isolation to self-acceptance, and the debate between living insularly within a disabled community or community building between disabled and nondisabled communities. Fumino uses the figure of Kohei to represent the struggles of self-acceptance as it relates to intersectional queer and disabled identities, and the figure of Taichi to represent the ‘bridge’ of community building as a catalyst to this self-acceptance in a society where both disabled and queer communities are seen as outsiders.

Series/Report Name or Number

Journal of Anime and Manga Studies, vol. 1

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/108991

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21900/j.jams.v1.233

Copyright and License Information

• Copyright 2020 Corinna Barrett Percy
• This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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