Feminism in Japan: Resistance, Complicity, and Gendered Power
- i-comcul
- 30 minutes ago
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March 25th, 2026
Sophia University, Building 10, 301
16:00-18:30
No registration required / In person only
Event Abstract
Feminism in Japan has developed over more than a century, yet persistent gender inequalities continue to shape social, cultural, and political life. This workshop brings together early-career researchers working on gender and feminism in Japan across literature, history, media, and contemporary social contexts. Through an interdisciplinary lens, ranging from postwar women’s poetry and interwar feminist movements to wartime sexual violence, contemporary literature, and digital sexual harm, we examine how gendered power, responsibility, and consent have been produced, contested, and reconfigured over time. Rather than treating feminism in Japan as a linear or unified project, the workshop highlights tensions between resistance and complicity, agency and structural constraint, memory and erasure. By placing historical inquiries alongside analyses of present-day sexual violence and digital mediation, the workshop aims to foster dialogue across temporal, methodological, and disciplinary boundaries and to rethink feminism in Japan as an ongoing negotiation shaped by national projects, cultural representation, and rapidly changing technological environments.
Workshop Schedule
16:00-16:05 Opening remarks
16:05-17:05 Panel 1: Feminism, History, and National Projects
Rewriting Tradition: Gendered Lyric Community in Nyonin Tanka (1949–1997) Damiana De Gennaro, PhD Candidate, Stockholm University
Rereading gender and nation in 1920s Japanese women’s magazines Mariam Talibi, PhD candidate, Waseda University
Sacrifice Without Honour: Military Sexual Slavery and the Gendered Logics of Empire Agnese Dionisio, JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow, Sophia University
Discussant: Maiko Kodaka
17:10-18:10 Panel 2: Sexual Violence, Representation, and Contemporary Negotiations
Rape as a topic within contemporary Japanese literature written by women Marija Tomic, PhD candidate, the University of Vienna
Clicks for Consent: Using a dating simulator to investigate the sexual consent negotiation process among Japanese youth Misha Cade, PhD candidate, the University of Tokyo
Digital sexual violence in Japan and the amplification of gendered norms Maiko Kodaka, Assistant Professor, Sophia University
Discussant Agnese Dionisio
18:10-18:30 Final Discussion
This workshop is organized by Maiko Kodaka (Assistant Professor, FLA, Sophia University) and Dr. Agnese Dionisio (JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow, ICC Sophia University)
