Event

This talk will introduce Kano’s recently published volume, Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor (University of Hawai’i Press, 2016). This book argues for the importance of understanding Japan’s feminist public sphere, a discursive space in which academic, journalistic, and political voices have long met and sparred over issues that remain controversial to the present day: prostitution, pornography, reproductive rights, the balance between motherhood and paid work, relationships between individual, family, and state. Highlighting essential questions that remain unresolved, Ayako Kano traces the emergence and development of these controversies in relation to social, cultural, intellectual, and political history.

Ayako Kano is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature, Performance, Gender Studies at the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on the intersection of gender, performance, and politics, as well as on Japanese cultural history from the late 19th century to the present. She is co-editing a volume on rethinking modern Japanese feminism. Future projects include a cross-cultural analysis of the medieval Japanese noh theater, as well as a book on cinematic adaptations.

Penn Forum on Japan Third Thursday