2017

January 7th

Coed Revolution: Gender in the Japanese New Left

Chelsea Szendi Schieder, Specially Appointed Assistant Professor, Meiji University

The campus-based New Left in Japan was one of the most violent but least understood student movements of the twentieth century. I tell the history of that movement through the figure of the female student activist, whose real and symbolic role in the New Left exposed basic tensions both within radical activism in postwar Japan and in its reception by mainstream society. Not only did spectacular events marking the rise and fall of radical student activism feature female student activists—from the “maiden sacrifice” of Kanba Michiko in 1960 to the terrifying femme fatales of the United Red Army’s Nagata Hiroko and the Japan Red Army’s Shigenobu Fusako—the internal dynamics of postwar student activism, based at newly coeducation higher education institutions, illustrated the new opportunities and the entrenched challenges young women faced as they articulated and enacted radical critiques of postwar Japanese politics and society.

In this talk, I introduce three specific inter-related cases to discuss these more general gendered dynamics of the New Left in Japan. I will introduce how activities within the campus-based movement that were gender-coded female, such as preparing food and jail support, were rendered invisible, creating a hierarchy of activist labor that prioritized “masculine” undertakings. Then I will discuss what constituted such masculine pursuits, and how anemphasis on affirming a gendered, masculinist vision of the revolutionary hero grew out of student activists' rejection of an “emasculated” postwar liberal state and led to an embrace of a particularly masculinist ideal of violence, aligning the student left in many ways with the logic of the far right and affirming the male subject as the proper origin of political activity. Finally, I’ll introduce the female figure of the “Gewalt Rosa” (violent Rosa Luxemburg-type), which ultimately became a mass media representation that poked fun at visible female activistsand undermined female participation in a meaningful radical politics while it also undermined radical politics in general. These three cases taken together demonstrate the potential and the limits of a “coed revolution,” and howthe meaning of female participation in student activism was quickly and persistently policed from both within the movement and from without, through the actions of male activists and of the mass media.

March 17th

The Gendered Camera: Female Makers and Users of Cameras in Postwar Japan

Kelly McCormick, PhD Candidate, Department of History, UCLA

History of Japanese photography surveys generally narrate the rise of female photographers as beginning in the 1970s and culminating in the 1990s. Through an examination of weekly newspapers, women’s magazines, and photography magazines, I have uncovered a much different picture that tells the story of the complex interactions that women had with cameras beginning immediately after the end of World War Two. This talk focuses on discourses surrounding women’s relationships with cameras in the early postwar to uncover under-examined histories of gendered photographic practice in the midst of Japan’s photography boom.

Ambivalence, and often straightforward hostility, toward the capacity for women to use cameras is reflected in the tension between laudatory corporate imagery of women working in factories such as Canon’s to assemble cameras and contemporary commentary on the futility of women ever understanding photographic technology. By reading images of women as makers and users of cameras in partnership with the naturalization of the male, photographic gaze through popular camera club activities such as the “nude shooting session,” I argue for approaching the relationship of men, women, and cameras as an analytic lens through which we can begin to understand the dynamic postwar history of photography as a mass practice.