James Welker will give a talk on "Feminists, Lesbians and Queer Girls’ Manga/a>" at Carnegie Mellon University on September 12.
Join us for an enlightening guest lecture by James Welker, the author of Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls’ Comics Artists and Fans (University of Hawaii Press, 2024). This groundbreaking book delves into the dynamic and overlapping communities of women and adolescent girls in 1970s and 1980s Japan who challenged traditional gender and sexual norms. The lecture will explore the ūman ribu (women’s liberation) movement, the rezubian (lesbian) community, and the world of queer shōjo manga (girls’ comics), highlighting how these groups redefined the concept of “women” by selectively appropriating Western ideas while remaining deeply rooted in Japanese culture.The talk starts at 5:00 pm in Carnegie Mellon University, Posner Hall 343 (map).
Welker will provide a broad historical overview of these movements and offer insights into how acts of transfiguration reshaped what it meant to be a woman in Japan. Drawing from a vast archive of dictionaries, sexology texts, literature, magazines, comics and interviews, his book talk promises to be a rich exploration of how these communities forged new understandings of gender and sexual expression.
James Welker is a professor in the Department of Cross-Cultural Studies, Kanagawa University, Yokohama, Japan. His research focuses primarily on gender and sexuality in postwar and contemporary Japan, especially fan cultures, feminisms, and the LGBT(Q) community. He is the author of Transfigurations: Redefining Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan (forthcoming).