University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Graduate Student, East Asian Languages and Cultures

PhD Candidate

Thesis Title: Transfiguring the Female: Women and Girls Engaging the Transnational in Late Twentieth Century Japan

About

I am a PhD candidate in East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My dissertation examines female genders and sexualities in 1970s and 80s Japan, and the role of transnational flows of ideas and images in their construction.

Much of my research and publications to date have been on gender and sexuality shōjo manga (girls' comics) and on the lesbian community in Japan (and their overlap). By expanding my focus to incorporate the ūman ribu [women's lib] movement, I am able to get a broader understanding of ways the most engaged women were working to change gender and sexual norms for women in the 1970s and 1980s, when Japan's rapid economic growth was creating increasing opportunities for women and made possible various forms of political and cultural activism. (An abstract of my dissertation is below.)

Upon completion of this project, I intend to return to my work on shōjo manga. My next monograph will incorporate new research on queer female comic and animation consumption in Japan in the amateur comics sphere from the 1970s to the present, as well as the domestic and global transformation of both commercial and amateur consumption and production by the internet. It will also include revised versions of my articles on commercial texts and fandoms in 1970s–1980s Japan, which examine such issues as the role of translation in liberating gender and sexual expression, and the relationship between images of homoeroticized beautiful boys and lesbian identification.

I welcome contact from those with overlapping research interests.

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Dissertation Abstract
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Transfiguring the Female: Women and Girls Engaging the Transnational in Late Twentieth Century Japan

A growing body of scholarship examines how transnational flows have led to profound changes in the experience of being a woman or a man. While showing how communities, such as feminists or sexual minorities, can be the agents of these changes in a process of “globalization from below” (Moghadam 2005), this work has tended to focus on a single community, obscuring links among them and their cumulative social effects. My dissertation, by contrast, examines three communities of women and adolescent girls in Japan who overtly challenged gender and sexual norms in the last two decades of the Shōwa era (1926–1989): the women’s liberation movement, the lesbian community, and consumers and producers of gender-bending shōjo manga [girls’ comics]. These women and girls found the normative understanding of “women” untenable and worked to destabilize it in part by appropriating alternatives from the West. While my primary focus is on the 1970s and 1980s, when these communities emerged and variously flourished, faltered, and fragmented, my gaze extends back to the early twentieth century, enabling me to trace deeper transnational roots. My dissertation counters a tendency in Japan studies to use the majority to represent all women, as well as the more broadly held assumption that “women” are “an already constituted and coherent group” (Mohanty 1988). Moreover, my work highlights ways in which communities ostensibly marginal to society can have profound effects on the center.

In contrast with existing scholarship on these three communities, which primarily draws on textual sources, my dissertation is based on both archival research and interviews with 60 women and men linked to the communities. Specifically, I examine dictionaries of new words; literature; sexological texts and sexological discourse of a somewhat less scientific bent; pornography; newspapers; popular magazines aimed at various populations; shōjo manga [girls’ comics] and related magazines; and non-commercial magazines, newsletters, and other ephemera from the ribu, rezubian, and gender-bending shōjo manga spheres found in formal and informal archives and personal collections. Recollections and reflections shared in interviews inform my empirical grasp of individual as well as community histories and my understanding of changes in the category “women.” Chapter one, “Transfiguration,” introduces and situates my project within existing scholarship and introduces “transfiguration,” the central concept I use to frame my project. Chapter two, “Trajectories,” provides histories of the three communities at the heart of this work. Chapter three, “Terminology,” draws on archives stretching back to the beginning of the twentieth century to trace the transnational etymologies of three terms used within and about the communities: “ūman ribu” [women’s lib], “rezubian” [lesbian], and “shōnen ai” [boys’ love]. Chapter four, “Translation,” examines direct translations and other transfigurations of texts such as Our Bodies, Ourselves (1971) and The Hite Report (1976), as well as literary and historical texts from the early 1970s to the late 1980s with an eye toward acts and impacts of translation. Chapter five, “Travel” considers the effects of real and vicarious voyages on individuals and communities. The epilogue, “Transformations,” surveys recent social changes and considers the lasting effects of these communities on Japanese society at large as well as individuals involved.

My dissertation shows that, while some women turned to what they perceived as an advanced West for solutions to or an escape from local issues, most were firmly focused on the local—even as they selectively adapted, even celebrated, Western practices. For the majority of even the most radical women, the Western turn was not a turn away from Japan. Rather, it was integral to being a modern woman within Japan. More significantly, among women and girls in the women’s liberation movement, the lesbian community, and the gender-bending shōjo manga sphere—and, ultimately, beyond it—the act of transfiguring Western cultural practices into something locally meaningful, as well as the products thereof, resulted not just in change at the individual and community level, but the transfiguration of the category “women” in Japan. This more expansive notion of the female accommodated not merely a significantly increased number of public roles not bound to being a mother or a wife but a greater diversity of gender and sexual expression.

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Homepage: http://jendaakenkyuu.blogspot.com/