Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (1977) proposed a three-stage model of the growth of feminist theory, beginning with an androgynist poetics, then a feminist critique and female aesthetic, and finally gender criticism. If feminist theory could but explain gender relations, the promise of eliminating inequality between the sexes seemed within reach. Perhaps contrary to Showalter’s expectations, the trajectory of gender studies in the intervening three decades has moved it away from feminist theory and in other directions.

Several forces motivated this shift, including the theoretical focus on gender identity and sexual difference in the 1980s, and the growing perception in the 1990s that gender was also a men’s issue. Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex” (1984) rejected the feminist assumption that sexuality is simply derived from gender and argued that gender relations alone could not account for the complexity of sexual behaviors. Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble (1990), further identified subversive strategies of gendered performance, such as parody and drag, as central to understanding how the codes of gender work in creating normative and non-normative identities. The recent postgenderism movement, galvanized by Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1991), advocates the voluntary rejection of biologically or socially normative sexual and gender identities altogether in favor of an understanding of human fulfillment outside the bounds of the male/female, man/woman binary.

In the context of Japanese literary and visual culture, scholarship on gender reflects a close engagement with these trends and is producing numerous new critical approaches and concepts. Studies have addressed topics such as: literary “intersexuality,” defined as representations of ambivalence towards or rejection of categories of sex; the “postgender” phenomenon of ambiguously gendered or ambiguously sexed bodies in popular media; and narrative constructions of gender as a complex and porous “labyrinth” rather than a simple binary; to name but a few.

The 2009 AJLS Eighteenth Annual Conference begins with a set of questions: How do texts and images work to create gender identities or postgender alternatives to them, and for what purposes? How are those gender or postgender identities related to or distinct from sexual, national, ethnic, and other identities? What is the history of these questions we inherit, and how does that history complicate our attempts to address Japanese literary and visual culture? Conversely, what questions has Japanese literary and visual culture raised about gender, and how can they challenge our inherited set of questions?

The conference languages are English and Japanese.

Keynote Address: Friday, November 6, 8:00 pm

Susan Napier , Professor of Japanese, Tufts University

"Lady Eboshi's Secret Garden: Gender, Space, and Fantasy in the Works of Miyazaki Hayao"

Special Address: Saturday, November 7, 5:00 pm

Mizuta Noriko , Chancellor, Jōsai University Educational Corporation

“The life and literary legacy of Ōba Minako (1930-2007)”

特別講演：水田宗子、城西国際大学

Brief History of AJLS

Logo art created by Mark Simkhayev, 2009. Used by permission.