The purpose of this speaker series is to explore overlapping concerns of LGBTQ Studies, Japan Studies, and Japanese American Studies. We sponsor events that showcase the latest developments in research and activism, with an aim to foster candid, constructive, and mutually beneficial dialogue among all participants.
Events
Thursday, April 16, 2026
This talk takes a crip/queer approach to engage with representations of women by Japanese writer Sayaka Murata (b. 1979), who achieved international fame with the English publication of Convenience Store Woman (Konbini ningen) in 2018, paving the way for new opportunities for other Japanese women writers in translation.
I begin with a brief outline of recent Japanese works in English translation by Murata, Natsuko Imamura, Emi Yagi, and others that portray noticeably “eccentric” female characters, sometimes in a humorous and/or charming way. For example, I introduce Murata’s depiction of the female protagonist of Convenience, whose dislike of mainstream society and its gender roles—her desire to exist only as a worker within the controlled space of the convenience store—clearly suggests a queer/feminist critique of heteronormative expectations.
I argue that queer and feminist readings are productively expanded by engaging with questions concerning neurodiversity, mental illness, trauma, and so on from a crip/Mad studies approach. While avoiding a medicalizing framework that seeks to “diagnose” fictional characters, I explore ethical questions that surface in Murata’s work precisely because of the impossibility of pinning down such answers. Specifically, in her later work Earthlings (Chikyūjin), Murata depicts a complex narrative of sexual violence and resistance against gender/sexual norms in a world of child-like fantasy, seemingly mixed with themes of mental illness and trauma, which ends in scenes of cannibalism. I argue for readings that recognize both madness operating as queer/feminist critique and realities of crip/mad existence.
I end by reflecting upon mental illness, psychiatric institutions, and sexual violence depicted in other East Asian novels such as Cho Nam-Joo’s Kim Ji-young, Born 1982, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, and Lin Yi-han’s Fang Si-Qi’s First Love Paradise, considering broader implications of reading such novels for East Asian and global feminist discourses.
Wednesday, February 28, 2024
In this presentation Hawkins speaks of navigating the trials and tribulations of queer research about Japan from the 1980s to the present. From ethnographic inquiry, to archiving, and recently advising a Japanese pop star on why to come out, the talk looks back at the disattendance of Japanese gei and doseiai…
Thursday, April 21, 2022
As preventative strategies and clinical treatment for HIV/AIDS have improved in recent years, the traumatic sense of fear and the widespread panic of the early days of the AIDS crisis has become history for those who did not live through them…
Thursday, February 13 2020
In some sense, every tale—and every poem—tells a story that’s never been told in the exact same way. But some tales and poems, under certain circumstances, cannot be told or are forbidden to be told for reasons that are sometimes not clear or are clearly political. Recently, it’s become more commonplace for the tales of people who belong to sexual minorities to be expressed in Japan and in Japanese….
Thursday, February 21, 2019
Daigoji nanshoku-e [Daigoji’s Illustrations of male-male love], more commonly known as Chigo no sōshi [A booklet of acolytes] (ca. 1321) is a collection of five stories characterized by caustic humor and sexually explicit images of chigo’s (adolescent boy acolytes) infidelities to their master priests…
Thursday, February 1, 2018
If Queer Theory now “has a history,” as many have begun to argue in recent years, that history is not limited to the US context. It was also big in 1990s Japan, when key works by Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, Gayle Rubin, David Halperin, and others were translated into Japanese more quickly than into any other language, sparking collaborations and joint actions between scholars and AIDS activists in both countries…
