GLOBAL GENRES—Kaiju Connections: Disabled Ecologies, Visibility, the Posthuman, and Transnationality in Pacific Rim
/This post is part of a series of essays that emerged from Henry Jenkins’ doctoral seminar on global genres at the University of Southern California. In this contribution, Joy Hannah Panaligan explores the relationship between the kaiju genre and disability in Pacific Rim (2013) by Guillermo del Toro, which veers away from traditional kaiju narratives of national trauma. This kaiju invasion instead demands collective, global action and cooperation, allegorizing universal problems like climate change. This post draws on Sunaura Taylor’s (2024) concept of disabled ecologies to map out how kaiju films can examine the invisible and visible “disabilities” embedded in human and non-human actors within the ecological system.
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