The Aspiration of Somnambulant Labor in Contemporary Japanese Cinema

• In Event: Visualizing Labor in East Asia

Abstract

A slew of recent Japanese films feature female protagonists sleeping their way through life, some unable or unwilling to get up, and others actively remaining supine. Within these films—which include the Korean-Japanese coproduction Dream (2008), Air Doll (2009), A Woman and War (2013) and Asleep (2015)—despite their apparent immobilization, women visibly and explicitly perform a significant reproductive labor through their somnambulance, a labor that is not only gendered but explicitly nationalized. This paper asks what the insistence on women’s somnambulant labor of care works for or towards? On whose behalf does it work? Most critically, why now are young women left to sleepwalk their way through the world? I propose aspiration (as both breath and desire) as the material-immaterial model responding to the great figural burden these screen women are hailed into reproducing. Ultimately I ask: if the trope of women’s supporting labor is as tired as these women literally and visibly are, why can’t they get any relief?

Author

• Kimberly Icreverzi, Boston University