AAAS 582C - Gender, Sexuality&Jap. History

Credits: 4

This seminar examines the intersection of gender and sexuality with Japan’s key historical problems from the early modern era to the present. To help students build upon and reconsider assumptions regarding gender and sexuality in Japan, the seminar focuses on such issues as status, prostitution, household, colonial encounters, continuity and discontinuity in modernization, state- and nation-building, consumer culture, wartime mobilization, interracial marriage, and internationalization. The seminar begins by identifying the impact of gender and sexuality on politics and society in early-modern Japan and then turns to examine these issues in the age of Western and late Japanese imperialism, as well as that of the social transformations that followed this period. This seminar also pays attention to the voices negotiating gender and sexual norms throughout the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By engaging with a rich body of scholarly and theoretical work, as well as contemporary men’s and women’s writings, the course aims to facilitate understanding of how gender and sexuality have shaped Japanese history in local, regional, and international contexts. All readings are in English.