Event overview
Public Lectures by Sharalyn Orbaugh (University of British Columbia) and Joshua Mostow (University of Vancouver)
1) Japan: Land of Obscenity or Polymorphously Queer Paradise? J
Sharalyn Orbaugh (Professor of Modern Japanese Literature and Popular Culture, University of British Columbia)
Mass media in UK and North America frequently highlight what they see as the exploitative and obscene imagery in Japanese popular culture, particularly manga (comic books for children and adults) and anime (animated narratives for film and television).
The UK and Canada have laws in place that make illegal the possession of many manga, including examples that would be considered entirely mainstream in Japan.
This presentation will examine the history of discourses around gender, sex and sexuality in manga, including arguments by Japanese and non-Japanese scholars that manga and anime present not exploitation but a playful queering of normative categories.
2) The Invention of Pornography and the Imprinting of Love in 16th-Century Italy and 17th-Century Japan
Joshua Mostow (Professor of Pre-Modern Japanese Literature and Art, University of Vancouver)
Italy in the sixteenth century and Japan in the seventeenth century both saw the emergence of print pornography in book form, often accompanied by poetry.
This presentation will compare I Modi, designed by Giulio Romano and printed by Marcantonio Raimondi with accompanying verses by Pietro Arentino, with several works by Hishikawa Moronobu and his predecessors.
The focus will be on the purpose of such works, their role in defining gender, sexuality and the licit and illicit in their relative early modern societies. How do the respective artists use their own classical past—that is, the Greek and Roman antiquity on one hand, and the courtly culture of the Heian period on the other—and how do they characterize sexual relations in their present times?
What role does class play in the depiction and reception of sexual acts in the two societies? How did the authorities, both secular and religious, respond to these works—or not? What was the rhetorical and polemical stance of these works and can seventeenth century Japan be in any way considered its own “Renaissance”? This presentation will attempt to provide signposts to answering these questions.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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1 Nov 2016 | 4:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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