San, the First More Than Human Princess

Abstract

San is the main character of the 1997 epic fantasy film Princess Mononoke written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and animated by Studio Ghibli. The intellectualized interpretation of a paradigmatic and polyhedral fictional character like San, and her qualification as post-humanist, allows us to introduce a series of tropes (activism, ecology, performativity and network) that are the result of situations translated into a gender sense. San is in this way understood as an embodied reality: she is a post-humanist figuration of an ambitious theoretical assemblage that incorporates the approaches and practices of many authors who feed each of the aspects that define this activist, ecofeminist and more than human princess, in a narrative that is definitely far from the canons of humanism and its dual imaginary. From a gender perspective, this article uses the practice of storytelling as a strategy to share situated knowledge of reality. It raises the need to create fictional stories that feed on careful thinking to give access to science to an important community of receivers. Assuming that the suppression of what is habitual can be a powerful way to knowledge, it shows a piece of animation as a study case, where the animated graphic development gives agency to all kinds of elements that inhabit conflictive territories as an architectural field of human and non-human experiences. By means of a reading of Princess Mononoke from post-humanist discourses that perceive life within care networks and outside the limits of human otherness, this article shows how from narrative practices it is possible to talk about activism against capitalism, extractivism, colonialism and necropolitics through a body in the midst of a process of industrialization, in the generalization of wage labor and in the expansion of hetero-patriarchal violence.