FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
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Prospero’s Tri-Filial Family Unit: Queer Childhood as a Tool and Threat to Heteropatriarchal Maintenance and Restoration in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest
Full text linkThis paper explores the quasi-familial dynamic in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, proposing that Prospero’s efforts to restore and secure patriarchal authority in Italy and on the island are contingent upon his abusive paternal control over three queer child figures: Ariel, Caliban, and Miranda. Drawing on early modern childhood studies and queer theory, this paper reads these figures as queer children: mutable, gender-unstable, arrested in development, and marked by naïveté. It is among the first studies to conceptualise these characters as a tri-filial unit whose queer identities are instrumentalised to construct a vision of heteropatriarchal stability. Prospero fosters his children’s queerness by maintaining them in queer states, manipulating these conditions to advance his heteropatriarchal agenda of securing his biological daughter’s marriage to the prince of Naples. However, as the play progresses, each child figure begins to resist or outgrow Prospero’s control, ultimately revealing the fragility and artificiality of the hetero-patriarchal structures he seeks to uphold. This paper argues that The Tempest exposes the inherent instability of patriarchal power, showing that the very queer identities Prospero manipulates become the agents of its potential undoing
Friends on Purpose: The Queer in Friendship
Full text linkFriendship, when approached as an inherently queer relational form, challenges normative assumptions that hierarchise intimacy through the naturalisation and institutionalisation of the heteronormative family. Drawing on a personal narrative of a long-standing friendship, this article examines how such bonds can question and dismantle dominant intimacy hierarchies. It contributes to ongoing critiques of family as a normative institution by positioning friendship as a chosen, intentional and radical practice of intimacy: friends on purpose. To this end, autotheory is employed in order to represent the search for an adequate language for the intimate, non-institutionalised nature of relationships as well as to highlight its modes of radical subjectivity. The analysis further engages with historical concepts of intimate closeness such as the Boston Marriage, romantic friendship, the split-attraction model, and queerplatonic relationships, alongside the works of Michel Foucault, Didier Eribon, Angela Chen, and Geoffroy de Lagasnerie. Instead of integrating friendship into the institutional logic of family, it is conceptualised as a practice that disrupts conventional notions of kinship. At the same time, it is shown that non-institutionalised forms of relationships can still remain intertwined with amatonormativity and normative life scripts. By resisting the temporalities and prescribed values of romance, marriage, and reproduction, and by questioning their naturalisation, friendship opens up a powerful mode of relating beyond institutional recognition
Exchanging Symbolic Patriarchy for Narrative Patriarchy in The Royal Tenenbaums
Full text linkThis essay critiques the ideological basis of the conventional family unit by dissecting the presentation of patriarchy in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. The film’s portrayal of patriarchy is analysed through reference to deeply embedded cultural attitudes that permeate societal structures through storytelling. The prevalence of Christianity within American society is acknowledged to justify both situating Tenenbaum’s narrative within a predominantly Judeo-Christian tradition and referencing the Old Testament as a key influence upon standards of patriarchy. The research of biblical scholars is consulted to outline the various privileges afforded to Hebrew patriarchs within the thirteenth century B.C.E., revealing that the standards of patriarchy within this era informed the archetype of idealised patriarchy within the Old Testament. The attitudes of Royal Tenenbaum are recognised as acquiescent with the expectations of the idealised biblical patriarch, close analysis of the film revealing the ways in which he exhibits such entitlement. Analysis reveals that whilst the removal of Royal’s conventional privileges occurs within the film, this reduction and realtering of his position as a father-figure allows for a subliminal patriarchal privilege to emerge. The film exposes the narrative privilege allocated to the patriarch in conventional storytelling, such that the portrayal of growth and redemption within the father-figure is heightened and glorified, and the patriarch is privileged as the focal point to the viewer’s narrative catharsis. The film exposes the functioning of this process on an ideological level
Trans Embodiment, Aging, and the Heterotopia of Domestic Space: Reimagining Kinship and Futurity in For Nonna Anna and Wild Side
Full text linkThis article engages with the domestic space in two contemporary transgender narratives, For Nonna Anna (2017) and Wild Side (2004). Building on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, it argues that these films highlight the domestic sphere as a site of both cultural tradition and queer potential. Contrasting the frequent focus in queer cinema on gay male cruising and public encounters, this essay pivots to the home environment, demonstrating how religious iconography, inherited furnishings, and daily rituals become charged with intergenerational memory and transformative possibilities. Through an analysis of mirror scenes, informed by Foucault’s claim that mirrors act as both utopias and heterotopias, this paper reveals how trans protagonists simultaneously reflect and disrupt normative temporalities. Christina’s relationship with her aging Nonna, for instance, foregrounds reciprocal vulnerability, while Stéphanie in Wild Side fuses past and present by navigating chosen kinship with her mother and lovers. Bringing the work of Sarah Ahmed, Jack Halberstam, Cynthia Port, and Alison Kafer into conversation with Foucault, this essay contends that trans bodies and elderly figures share a marginal relationship to linear futurity, suggesting alternative modes of care and intimacy. By centering aging and trans bodies, the films challenge Lee Edelman’s “no future” paradigm, proposing instead a queer futurity aligned with José Muñoz’s utopian hermeneutics. Far from being mere backdrops, homes in these films operate as heterotopic refuges that accommodate non-normative practices of embodiment, kinship, and care, reimagining the family dwelling as a horizon of queer futurity. In doing so, they offer insight into how domestic environments can reshape cinematic explorations of transness, aging, care, and kinship
Silenced Bodies, Profitable Flesh: A Feminist Response to Child Sexual Exploitation Through Oryx’s Reimagined Voice
Full text linkThis paper examines child sexual exploitation through a feminist lens, interweaving an analysis of Japan\u27s JK (joshi kosei) business with a reimagined monologue based on Margaret Atwood\u27s character Oryx. Through creative exposition, the author explores how family structures simultaneously perpetuate and protect against exploitation. The work identifies critical gaps in Japanese legislation that enable child exploitation despite surface-level reforms, revealing how patriarchal structures commodify bodies typically protected within family units. The author argues that pornography and prostitution function as forms of "sexual cannibalism" that dehumanize bodies into consumable parts. By examining Oryx\u27s fictional journey alongside real-world exploitation in Japan, the article advocates for educational initiatives, strengthened family support systems, and ethical consumer choices to restore the protective function of family and combat sexual exploitation
Lashing out Against the Backlash: Constructing a Queer-Timed Narrative in the Affective Space of the Kitchen in Kim Ji-young, Born 1982
Full text linkRecognized as a key text in contemporary South Korean feminist activism, the novel Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 has been invoked in other feminist narratives as a means of “delivering both the revelation of collective trauma and the criteria for reinterpreting what had been experienced through new temporal alternatives to what had been the ‘official’ story’” (Lee 218). However, the novel’s potential “to magnetize a mass awakening” seems to be limited to an endemic context (Lee 218). Though stimulating debate in East Asian countries (Yang 1558), neither the novel nor the film has received enough critical attention internationally. I aim to bridge the gap in current scholarship by analyzing the feminist narrative of Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 in a broader theoretical context. Drawing upon Susan Faludi’s theory on anti-feminist backlash, I explore how the new temporal alternatives opened up by the novel further emerge through the spatial dynamics of the kitchen in the cinematic medium, thereby enabling Ji-young to lash out at the backlash against the film. I first examine, in the context of anti-feminist backlash, the mobilization of negative affect in feminist theory as a means of speaking out against patriarchal oppression. Then, engaging with queer feminist theory, I analyze how a means of openly expressing these negative affects is offered through Ji-young’s mental breakdown, which constructs a queer-timed narrative that transforms the kitchen into a space of female creativity. While exploring the liberating potential of this transformation, at the same time, I reflect upon whether the queer narrative of Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 is effective by questioning the validity of applying a Euro-centric theoretical framework to a film set in an East Asian country
Japanese Postmodernism, Infantile Capitalism and the Family Unit in Yoshimitsu Morita’s The Family Game (1983)
Full text linkStudy of Yoshimitsu Morita’s 1983 film The Family Game (家族ゲーム) has long focused on the film’s criticism of the middle-class nuclear family of 1980s Japan through searing satire. Marking the end of postwar politics and new economic heights, the 1980s brought with it the need to redefine and reify central concepts such as the family, and educational excellence became one of the lines of reference. Caught up in the educational rat race, the film’s Numata family make efforts to project the illusion of family without meaningful connection to one another. Building upon previous analyses of satire and the family in the film, this article applies postmodern theorist Akira Asada’s concept of infantile capitalism to analyse the intersection of the film’s economic context with the family structures it criticises. Asada’s theory of infantile capitalism outlines the economic mode of 1980s Japan as mimicking familial social structures in its attitude towards both work and social hierarchies. Through a close reading of The Family Game, this article argues that the criticisms levied by the film at the Japanese middle class family’s obsession with education is part of a larger conversation with the postmodern paradigm and the very definition of the family. The trends criticized by the film and theorists of the 1980s did not stop with the end of the decade but instead continued, highlighting this moment in time as pivotal to understanding the continued intersection between family and education in Japan