Ethics of care and female sacrifice in Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011) is an anime television series that imagines an alternate world in which teenage girls have served as magical girls, who fight against witches and stop them from cursing and killing people, for centuries. However, these girls’ sacrifices for their local communities will eventually drive them to despair and turn them into the witches. It is only through the titular character, Madoka, that the exploitative system can be disrupted. This paper engages with the ethics of care to interrogate the ways in which the anime show offers (re-)imaginations of female sacrifice, a notion that threads through the show. Care ethicists such as Nel Noddings (2013) and Inge van Nistelrooij (2014, 2017) have suggested that it is not necessarily a patriarchal idea for female subjects to sacrifice themselves; instead, it may be proper for one to sacrifice herself when it attests her identity and preserves her value. This paper argues that Puella Magi Madoka Magica simultaneously critiques the form of sacrifice that leads to the carer’s self-erasure and recasts sacrifice as a manifestation of the carer’s relational identity, self-care, and resistance to any systems that exploit (girls’) care.