Transformation and Metamorphosis in Popular Culture

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-041-11708-7
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 282 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: Routledge Advances in Popular Culture Studies

This book investigates the cultural significance of transformation and metamorphosis in popular media across diverse global and historical contexts. Bringing together interdisciplinary scholarship, the chapters examine how transformation is represented in a wide range of media—from poetry and animation to horror, games, and AI-generated music videos.

With particular attention to Japanese transformation tropes and their global influence, this book rethinks the symbolic and affective power of metamorphosis in shaping identity, politics, and popular imagination. Timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of both Kamen Rider Kuuga and Meta Morphing, this collection marks a timely intervention into ongoing discussions of embodiment and change. It is structured in six thematic sections, addressing animated transformations, more-than-human forms, societal metamorphoses, musical and sonic transformation, body horror, and changing identities. Featuring contributions that blend phenomenology, cultural history, and media analysis, the text offers conceptual innovation and methodological diversity. Chapters also engage emerging topics, such as AI-generated content and the intersections of transformation with race, gender, sexuality, and disability. The collection combines rigorous scholarship with accessibility, and features contributions from both leaders in their fields research and the emerging voices of early career researchers.

This book is intended for scholars and postgraduate students in the humanities and social sciences, particularly those working in media, cultural studies, animation, gender and queer theory, fan studies, musicology, horror, and AI studies. Its interdisciplinary framing and international scope will appeal to academics researching transnational popular culture, as well as educators seeking to integrate themes of transformation into their teaching. The collaborative structure ensures coherence across chapters, while its inclusion of historically excluded perspectives makes it a valuable contribution to global and justice-oriented scholarship.

Zielgruppe

Academic, Postgraduate, and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Staite, Sophia

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Populärkultur
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Freizeitsoziologie, Konsumsoziologie, Alltagssoziologie, Populärkultur
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Mediensoziologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Contributors

From Metamorphosis to Mutation: An Introduction

Section I: Animated Transformations

1. Tex Affects: Transformation and Embodied Perception

2. Honor and Power: Transforming She-Ra

3. Embracing Transformation in AI-Generated Music Videos

Section II: More Than Human Metamorphosis

4. Human/Animal Transformation as Environmental Communication in Animated Children’s Films

5. Feline Embodiment and Human-Animal Relations in A Whisker Away

6. Sword Spirits and Sword Transformations: Encountering Object-beings Beyond Anthropomorphism

Section III: Societal Transformations

7. Transition without Transformation: Space Warrior and the Ambiguity of Justice in Martial Law Taiwan

8. A Simulation Powered by Repression: Gendered and Political Transformations in The Matrix Resurrections

9. Wings of Courage: Magical Boys, Metamorphosis and Social Transformation in Toei Animation’s Pretty Cure Series

Section IV: Musical Metamorphosis

10. Hearing Transformation: How Music Defines Digimon’s Digivolution

11. Undertale as Transformative Media

12. Metal-Morphosis: Physical, Genre and Scene Transformation in Metal Music

Section V: Transforming Identities

13. Changing Vocal Gender Stereotypes in Latin American Mass Media: The case of a beauty pageant growler

14. Bearly Beloved: Halsin’s Queerness and Self-Identity in Baldur’s Gate 3

15. Pornography as Metamorphosis: The Problematics of the kairaku-ochi Scenes in Japanese ero-manga and Shindo Eru's Subversion in Henshin

Section VI: Horror Morphing

16. The Horror of Transformation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

17. Metamorphosis, Body Horror, and Female Empowerment in Lovecraft Country: Navigating Identity through Transformation

18. Love in the Time of Mycelium: Fungus as Liberator in Women’s Fiction

Logan - Generic Mutancy in the X-Verse

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Sophia Staite is a Lecturer in Humanities (Philosophy & Gender Studies) at the University of Tasmania, Australia, and a past fellow of the Global Sentimentality Project at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (Germany). The leading English-language scholar of influential Japanese superhero franchise Kamen Rider, their work appears in Children's Literature in Education, The International Journal of Disney Studies, Jeunesse, and The Routledge Companion to Superhero Studies (2025).