Program aims
In recent decades, we have witnessed a massive cultural shift in our society, where “the glass ceiling” that confines girls, women, and transwomen seems to have become as feeble as ever. Nevertheless, in the domain of popular media, ranging from films, TV dramas, to novels and advertisements, non-male figures have yet to catch up to our time. Such characters are still disproportionally underrepresented, often reduced to stereotypes, and their roles tend to be defined only in relation to more central, male characters (i.e. wives, girlfriends, daughters, and mothers). Every day, we breathe in and normalize this limited scope of girl/womanhood in narratives and images, which inadvertently affects how we, humanities scholars and teachers, interpret the idea of femaleness.
The primary objective of this workshop is to take a concrete first step towards becoming more cognizant about how we perceive femaleness in our day-to-day life, teaching, and research. This is an occasion for the presenters, discussants, and audience to take a moment, pause, reflect, and rethink “girls/women/transwomen” in their own terms. With the presentations of research projects as a springboard, the panelists, discussants, and the mixed audience (Dartmouth faculty and students) will inquire what it means to live as, read about, discuss, and study the largest majority-minority group of humankind. To begin this long process, this workshop will examine fictional <women X women> in literary and visual arts of premodern, modern, and contemporary Japan: mother-daughter conflicts, female homoeroticism, sisterhood, rivalry, and camaraderie among female laborers. We hope this workshop will spark frank and engaging conversations.
Some of the questions this workshop will tackle are:
- How have Japanese literary, visual, and theatrical arts depicted girl- and womanhood in the past and how have such images been interpreted by audiences and scholars?
- What can the scholar-teachers of Japanese literature and culture do to progress the general narratives surrounding “Japanese women” in Western academic discourses?
- What can humanities scholar-teachers do to progress towards realizing a society where being non-male is not a setback?
Another important objective of this workshop is to provide a platform for junior scholars and scholars located in Japan to introduce their research to a wider, mixed-rank, interdisciplinary audience.
We are extremely grateful to the Leslie Center for the Humanities and the Interdisciplinary Program of Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages for their generous funding to make this workshop possible.