Below, please see the information for a Northwestern University event that was shared with us. More details can be found on the event page.
When: Thursday, February 27, 2025
12:30 PM - 1:45 PM CT
Where: Harris Hall, 101, 1881 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208
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.
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