Workshop on Work, Gender, and Identity in Modern Japan

Workshop on Work, Gender, and Identity in Modern Japan

Organized by Christopher Gerteis - Postdoctoral Associate, Council on East Asian Studies, Yale University and Stephen Vlastos - Professor of History, University of Iowa

Saturday, February 25, 2006 - 10:00am to 11:30am
Room 203, Henry R. Luce Hall See map
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 6511


This workshop invites a small group of junior and senior Japan scholars to consider how gender identities have been conflated with/perceived through work in modern Japanese society. Participants have been asked to develop essays that examine, in broad context, how gender ideologies, kinship patterns, class relations, cultural forms, political movements, and global economic transformations shaped the meaning of work and gender for different groups of men and women in twentieth century Japan. By examining topics such as the impact of normative gender mores upon the status of wage-earning women; the cultural nexus of production, sex, and service work; and the relationship between work, family, and nation, workshop participants will engage the way gender identities influenced, interacted, and reconfigured each other in modern Japan, and propose conclusions about the intersection of gender and labor in the broad context of modern history.

Session A: 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Moderator: William Kelly, Yale University and Susan Harbage Page, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chair: Stephen Vlastos, University of Iowa

Emotional Labor and Sex Work without Sex
Haeng-ja Sachiko Chung, Harvard University

Sign Language Interpretation as Gendered Labor in Japan
Karen Nakamura, Yale University

Boy meets Girl: the Gendered Division of Labor in the Shôjo Manga Industry
Jennifer Prough, Valparaiso University

Session B: 2:00PM – 4:00PM
Moderator: Andrew Gordon, Harvard University
Chair: Stephen Vlastos, University of Iowa

Laboring Bodies: Menstruation Leave in Prewar Japan
Izumi Nakayama, Harvard University

‘This Political Struggle’:
Women and the (re)Gendering of Militant Unionism in Postwar Japan
Christopher Gerteis, Yale University

It’s Tough to be a (Japanese) Man (or Madonna) during High Speed Economic Growth: Circuits of Desire and Networks of Labor
Miriam Silverberg, University of California, Los Angeles

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Japan