Presentation Title
Washing Outside the Bath: The Impure Girl's Body in Uchida Shungiku's Early Manga and Fiction
Location
RCC 202
Start Date
12-10-2013 11:00 AM
End Date
12-10-2013 12:30 PM
Abstract
My project explores how Uchida Shungiku manipulates discourses of purity and impurity to address the broader political and historical implications of “victim consciousness” in postwar Japan. In particular, this study looks at the bath as the site in which such discourses are negotiated in Uchida’s early manga and shishōsetsu writing. How, I ask, does Uchida use the impure body to represent the body politic itself? Subsequently, how does Uchida reclaim the process of purification to create a site of seemingly liberated female sexuality?
Washing Outside the Bath: The Impure Girl's Body in Uchida Shungiku's Early Manga and Fiction
RCC 202
My project explores how Uchida Shungiku manipulates discourses of purity and impurity to address the broader political and historical implications of “victim consciousness” in postwar Japan. In particular, this study looks at the bath as the site in which such discourses are negotiated in Uchida’s early manga and shishōsetsu writing. How, I ask, does Uchida use the impure body to represent the body politic itself? Subsequently, how does Uchida reclaim the process of purification to create a site of seemingly liberated female sexuality?
Comments
Presentation is included in Panel 16: The Role of the Body in Contemporary Japanese Literature