Sharon Kinsella, currently Visiting Professor at MIT’s Dept of Foreign Languages and Literature, delivered the 4th Chino Kaori lecture on the above-mentioned title at my alma mater, SOAS, on 2006-10-20. Among Kinsella’s published work, her most famous to date is Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society (1999). The lecture will be published by the Sainsbury Institute at a later date and draws on material from her forthcoming book, Girls and Male Imagination: Fantasies of rejuvenation in contemporary Japan.
Kinsella traces images of female revolt, manifested through acts of violence and sexual liberation, in various media - films, novels, manga and anime and the accompanying dicussion among journalistic and intellectual circles. She points out the irony that this cultural material and the academic discourse is produced almost exclusively by older men. While many of these left-leaning intellectuals claim to be giving a sympathetic voice to the theme of feminist liberation, Kinsella questions if their subjectivity can be truly representative and that their efforts may, perversely, result in another male appropriation of the female voice for its own purposes.
Continue reading ‘Female revolt in male cultural imagination in contemporary Japan’