Join us for a thought-provoking seminar titled "Feminists, Lesbians, and Queer Manga Artists and Fans: Rethinking ‘Women’ in 1970s–1980s Japan," presented by James Welker. This event is sponsored by the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies, with co-sponsorship from the Department of East Asian Languages and Culture and the Center for the Study of Global Gender Equity.
The seminar will take place on February 21, 2025, at 1:00 PM in the Lucy Ellis Lounge, located at 1080 Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics Building, 707 S Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801. This is a hybrid event, so you can choose to attend in person or virtually via Zoom. Registration is required to receive the Zoom link or to confirm your in-person attendance.
For more information or to register, please contact Alex Chun at park387@illinois.edu. Don't miss this opportunity to explore the dynamic intersections of gender and culture in Japan during a transformative era.
About the Talk:
In the early 1970s, Japan saw the emergence of three dynamic and overlapping communities of women and adolescent girls who challenged Japanese gender and sexual norms: the women’s liberation (ūman ribu) movement, the lesbian community, and a sphere comprised of artists and fans of queer shōjo manga (girls’ comics). In this talk, James Welker introduces his new monograph, Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls' Comics Artists and Fans, which examines these communities and their cultural import. As he shows, individually and collectively, they found the normative understanding of the category “women” untenable and worked to redefine and expand its meaning by transfiguring ideas, images, and practices selectively appropriated from the “West.” They did so, however, while remaining firmly fixed on the local. Welker argues that their transfiguration of Western culture into something locally meaningful had tangible effects far beyond these communities.
About the Speaker:
James Welker is a professor in the Department of Cross-Cultural Studies at Kanagawa University, Yokohama, Japan. He earned his PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2010. His research and writing examine gender and sexuality in postwar and contemporary Japan as well as the global spread of Japanese popular culture. He is the author of Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls’ Comics Artists and Fans (Hawai‘i, 2024). He is also the editor of Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia (Hawai‘i, 2022), BL ga hiraku tobira: Hen’yō suru Ajia no sekushuariti to jendā (BL opening doors: Sexuality and gender transfigured in Asia; Seidosha, 2019), and a special issue of the journal Mechademia: Second Arc on “Queer(ing)” (2020), as well as a co-editor of Rethinking Japanese Feminisms (Hawai‘i, 2018), and Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan (Mississippi, 2015), among other publications.
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