Asian Studies Theses and Dissertations

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Queering Nuclear Legacies: Anti-Nuclear Space-Time in Hayashi Kyōko and Kobayashi Erika
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Lam, Sarah; DiNitto, Rachel
In 1945 the first detonation of a nuclear weapon was conducted at the Trinity Site in New Mexico. The decades leading up to and following this event involved the systematic displacement, exploitation, and poisoning of Indigenous, ethnic minority, and poor communities for the purposes of nuclear progression. This thesis suggests a framework called “anti-nuclear space-time” to address, challenge, and rewrite nuclear colonial histories. This framework is both a subversion of Western nuclear colonial domination over time and space as well as an imagining of alternative nuclear narratives outside of colonial systems. Using queer analytics, this framework will be applied to two Japanese literary texts: From Trinity to Trinity (1999) by Hayashi Kyōko, and Trinity, Trinity, Trinity (2019) by Kobayashi Erika. I suggest these two authors are “queering” the spatial and temporal dynamics of nuclear colonial histories and creating a global nuclear conversation that denationalizes and decolonizes nuclear timelines and nuclear spaces.