June 6, 2019/ 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM

Whitsett Room Sierra Hall 451, CSU Northridge

Japan in the Trans-Pacific

"Gender and Criticism: Japan in the Trans-Pacific”
June 6, 2019
California State University, Northridge.

The theme of this one-day workshop on the issue of gender in Japan Studies is “Gender as Critique: Precarity, Power, and Performance.” We consider “critique” as a practice that challenges social norms and stereotypes and explores what might be changed through the production of knowledge. But we also welcome other strategies than “critique” that seek alternative ways to resist authoritarianism, violence, and hegemony. By looking into the gendered discourses of the body, motherhood, labor, class, race, and social movements in modern and contemporary Japan, we aim at materializing, historizing, and theorizing the precarious, powerless, and underrepresented status of women, without neglecting the performativity of individuals who lived or are living in this socially constructed, heterogeneous identity.

The workshop will present a total of eight papers on the following topics: the politics of the body in Japanese literature and culture; feminist debates and activism on womanhood and motherhood; and the gendered labor, class, and social struggles in Japan and the transpacific.

At the end of the workshop, participants will hold an open-discussion session to address general issues of gender and Japan Studies and brainstorm on the sustainability of this collaborative project.

Presenters: Mika Endo (Independent), Junliang Huang (CSUN), Yongran Ko (Nihon University, Japan), Sujin Lee (University of Victoria, Canada), Margherita Long (UCI), Wendy Matsumura (UCSD),
Chizuko Naito (Otsuma Women's College, Japan), Setsu Shigematsu (UCR), Wakako Suzuki (Bard College), Michiko Takeuchi (CSULB), Elizabeth Tinsley (UCI), Junko Yamasaki (UCLA)

RSVP and Send Inquiries to junliang.huang@csun.edu

Junliang Huang, Ph.D.
Book Review Editor of Frontiers of Literary Studies in China
Assistant Professor of Japanese and Chinese
Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures
California State University, Northridge

www.csun.edu/humanities/events/precarity-power-performance

Download file: 2019-Gender-Workshop-CSUN-flyer-ff-suo.pdf