Beyond the ‘feminization of masculinity’: transforming patriarchy with the ‘feminine’ in contemporary Japanese youth culture

Contemporary Japanese society has seen the emergence of aesthetically conscious young men who employ ‘feminine’ aesthetics and strategies as ways of exploring and practising new masculine identities. In this paper, I explore the significance of this emerging trend of male beauty by observing and analysing the expressions, strategies and intentions of those young men who have taken to aesthetically representing themselves in these ways. This cultural trend is often described as the ‘feminization of masculinity,’ echoing the gendered articulation of rising mass culture in terms of the ‘feminization of culture,’ which acknowledges aspects of the commercialization of masculine bodies in Japan of the 1990s onward. While this view successfully links important issues, such as femininity, beauty, and the gendered representation of the self in a broader context of capitalist culture, it does not sufficiently convey a sense of agency in the young men's lively practices of exploring and expressing new masculine values and ideals. Rather than viewing ‘feminization’ simply as a sign of commodification, I argue that these young men strategically distance themselves from conventional masculinity by artificially standing in the position of the ‘feminine’, where they can more freely engage in the creation of alternative gender identities. From this point of view, the use of the phrase ‘feminization of masculinity’ often implies a fear and anxiety on the part of patriarchy over the boundary‐crossing practice that seriously challenges the stability of gendered cultural hegemony. Moreover, such anxiety driven reactions easily merge with nationalist inclination, as those threatened tend to seek the consolidation of patriarchal/hegemonic order by eliminating ambiguities and indeterminacy in cultural/national discourse. I conclude that the cultural hegemony of contemporary Japan could better sustain itself by incorporating non‐hegemonic gender identities, which would allow it maintain an open space for critical imagination and effectively diffuse an obsessive and ultimately self‐destructive desire for transparency/identity.     

The representation of ‘Asia’, ‘occupational forces’ and ‘women’ against the backdrop of post‐war Japanese culture: from the system of censorship to the present

This paper is one of the attempts to show how each East‐Asian regional country’s memory of the war has been related to the post‐war literatures and movies restricted by the structure of the Cold War. In particular, this paper takes up the issue of how the structure of Japanese culture after World War II was heavily influenced by the Cold War. When Japan was under the Occupational Forces, Japanese writers and film directors settling on the subject matter of the war were not free from the strain of the systematic censorship by GHQ. Translating into mechanisms of their works using the body or woman (comfort woman) by squarely facing the facts of the East‐Asian history, this paper reconsiders the body of post‐colonial Japan.     

‘It’s in the Blood,isn’t it?’ The Contested Status of First World War Veterans in Second World War Civil Defence

This article examines how ex-servicemen’s memories of the First World War shaped their experience of working in civil defence during the Second. In response to ongoing public criticism of civil defence as a whole and a dismissive attitude towards veterans in particular, these men expressed a distinct form of ‘useful masculinity’, rooted in their combat experience and developed within the particular context of civil defence. I will argue that through the group setting in which remembering took place, veterans were able to oppose dominant cultural narratives and to develop and express these alternative narratives about their value.     

The ‘Welsh’ Pimpernel: Richard Llewellyn and the Search for Authenticity in Second World War Britain

ABSTRACT

Achieving worldwide success in 1939 with his bestselling novel, How Green Was My Valley, Richard Llewellyn became indelibly linked with a particular vision of Wales and Welshness. Yet, when it posthumously emerged that Llewellyn was not Welsh but an Englishman of Welsh parentage he faced accusations of fakery. Mapping Llewellyn’s military service in the Welsh Guards and work with the BBC, this article traces his complex negotiation of selfhood during the Second World War. By highlighting how Llewellyn was embraced as a cultural representative of transnational Welshness, it underlines the potential of dual identifications in underpinning constructions of wartime Britishness.     

The Vietnam War and the ‘Miracle of East Asia’

Abstract

The Muslim community in Sri Lanka has a pre-Islamic origin. Ethnically they are a mixed group, but changing political fortunes throughout the course of Sri Lankan history have made them realize that their identity lies in holding fast to the religion of Islam and not to any ethnic category. The current Sinhala-Tamil ethnic war has once again reinforced the need to hold on to the religious identity even more tightly. However, recent economic and political changes in the country and changes taking place in the Muslim world have injected new concerns for the community to worry about. The community is well and truly trapped in a political quagmire. This article highlights some aspects of this predicament.     

The great upsurge of South Korea’s social movements in the 1960s

Abstract

I intend to show the characteristics and limitations of South Korea’s social movements in the 1960s and examine its formative potentialities in the growth of social movements thereafter. Whereas the 1960s in the Western world is characterized by the surge of ‘new social movements’ and waves of upheaval in the Third World, it would not be the case of South Korea. The ‘subject’ of the movements looks similar, but the context and raised issues proved markedly different. Some old‐school left‐wingers who conceived the strategy of socialistic national liberation survived the emergence of new ‘liberal’ generations in South Korea’s 1960s. The structural crisis of Korea’s anticommunist ruling class caused by the democratization movements and the growth of nationalism at the turn of the 1960s instigated the military coup of 1961, which finally brought Yushin dictatorship in 1972. Although South Korea’s social movements remained isolated from the world through the ‘long 60s’, it may be viewed as a significant part of the division of the ‘liberal consensus’ in the American‐led East‐Asian bloc.     

‘The Talke of the Towne’: News,Crime and the Public Sphere in Seventeenth-Century London

This article reconsiders ideas of the public sphere in the seventeenth century, by focusing on how public opinion is shaped by the movement of information between media and between receivers. It contends that the scholarly preoccupation with a public sphere viewed exclusively in terms of politics obscures the fact that contemporaries did not distinguish between politics and subjects such as crime in their newsgathering. Examining the case study of James Turner, a burglar in the 1660s who became a cause célèbre in London and beyond, this article shows how crime news were eagerly exchanged, informing discussions and constructing public opinion.     

The ‘truth politics’ of anti‐North Koreanism: the post‐ideological cultural representation of North Korea and the cultural criticisms of Korean nationalism

Abstract

This essay questions the ‘truth politics’ of anti‐North Koreanism in which a ‘genuine’ figuration of North Korea is presumed to be achievable at the popular level. I define the truth politics of anti‐North Koreanism as the political‐cultural discursive formation obscuring the ideological powerfulness of anti‐North Koreanism that hinges on ‘the normality of nationalism’. The truth politics reinscribes and reinforces the populist and functionalist belief in national unification that justifies developmentalist agendas for North Korea. As an alternative, I discuss the post‐colonial cultural criticism that calls into question the identity politics of popular nationalism, which implicitly performs along the lines of the Sunshine Policy guidelines to naturalize the normality of nationalism under economic developmentalism. The questionable formation of nationalism prevents South Koreans from gaining self‐reflexive access to the way in which heterogeneous tropes of the nation rupturing in the discursive practice of popular nationalism are exploited. But I also critically interrogate the analytical framework presumed within the criticism, because it constrains its own scope and abilities of questioning the truth politics of anti‐North Koreanism the criticism ostensibly targets.     

‘America’ as desire and violence: Americanization in postwar Japan and Asia during the Cold War

Abstract

Reflecting on a personal experience of ‘pre‐professional’ university education and reluctant engagement with Cultural Studies as an academic project, this article examines the now ambiguous role of undergraduate education under neo‐liberal management regimes. Arguing that a ‘new class politics in knowledge’ is emerging with the transnational policy‐sharing and international student exchange schemes with which diverse governmental cultures are responding to globalization, Morris suggests that the undergraduate classroom is becoming a ‘frontier’ of struggle over the future. Teaching cultural studies to undergraduates in a liberal arts environment is one way in which the discipline's emphasis on local knowledge can be put to institutionally creative uses.     

‘The Charlatanry of the Learned’: On the Moral Economy of the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century Germany

The notion of charlatanism is central to the social workings of the eighteenth-century republic of letters. Starting with Johann Burkhard Mencke's famous treatise The Charlatanry of the Learned, this paper traces how accusations of academic and scientific misconduct put in terms of ‘charlatanry’ initially helped to produce the new species of the erudite ‘charlatan’. Facing a growing complexity of scientific culture, this new frame of meaning, structured by numerous examples of scientific misconduct, offered a way of mapping the world of learning. But besides its cognitive impacts, the discourse of charlatanry allowed the creation of symbolic boundaries, which determined decisions as to the affiliation or non-affiliation to this recently forming scientific community by separating honourable from dishonourable scientific personae. Speaking of charlatanry therefore always implied a social distinction as much as a scientific one. The discourses on charlatanry also mirror differentiations within the scientific field. At first dominated by a critique built on courteous or bourgeois values, the scientific field later developed its own criteria of appraisal, such as authorship, originality, transparency, etc. Attracting the attention of a growing public sphere, the explicit verbalization of claims which were not related to the value system of a republic of letters primarily concerned with the production and distribution of knowledge finally led to a more implicit moral economy of science.     

Translation of ‘America’ during the early Cold War period: a comparative study on the history of popular music in South Korea and Taiwan

Abstract

The evaluation of the cold war influences played by the US on the rest of the world should not only be accounted economically and politically, but also culturally. In this paper we see the US influences on South Korea and Taiwan from the value‐laden concept of Americanization and through which we examine comparatively specific practices of domestic popular music development in these two countries. Setting this paper as a historical comparative study, we see the working of Americanization in relation to popular music as a value regime in which American is constructed as an ideal model imaginatively and discursively, which was made possible by economic, social and cultural forces in South Korea and Taiwan. Focusing on the Cold War period, circa 1950s to 1960s, levels and aspects of Americanization were therefore ways of translation, to use Said’s concept of traveling theory analogically; Anglo‐American music genres traveled to these countries to be incorporated contextually as new or trendy conventions of music‐making, which in turn helped form local music genres. The socio‐historical contexts of South Korea and Taiwan, with respect to the presence of American army forces, and similar postwar anti‐communist political forces, in nation‐building (north–south Korea, red China–free China antagonism respectively) are central to our understanding of the visibility of Americanization in different music cultures in these two countries. This paper will go into each country’s historical trajectory of music practices that took Japanese colonial influences up to the postwar time and then blending with Anglo‐American genres in indigenizing that eventually marked their different paths, as we comparatively reveal their institutional, political and national cultural conditions, which were necessary in shaping each country’s music‐making conventions, entertainment business, and consumption cultures of popular music – and that might implicitly inform tentatively the present rivalry between ‘offensive’ Korean Wave and ‘defensive’ Taiwanese ‘rockers’ in the globalization era.     

‘The Most Interesting Work a Woman can Perform in Wartime’: The Exceptional Status of British Women Pilots during the Second World War

This article deals with the women pilots of the Air Transport Auxiliary during the Second World War. It argues that the same cultural factors that successfully won these women equal pay during the war also undercut their ability to have a long-term impact. The article encompasses prewar flying communities as well as efforts after the war to create a permanent reserve of women pilots for the RAF.     

‘Bloomers’ and the British World: Dress Reform in Transatlantic and Antipodean Print Culture, 1851–1950

The ‘bloomers’ are rarely considered beyond their 1851 origins in the United States and subsequent appearance in Britain. This article expands dress reform scholarship by analysing print culture elsewhere in the British world, specifically Australia and New Zealand. The colonial press manufactured controversy over this fashion – a perceived transgression of gender norms – even though antipodean women rarely sported the outfit. This article focuses on the dress reform lectures and writings of Amelia Bloomer, Caroline Dexter and Dr Mary Walker. While certain continuities resurfaced alongside the bloomer-like rational dress popularised in the bicycling culture of the 1890s, dress reform was largely deemed far less controversial by the turn of the twentieth century.     

The ‘Isle of Vice’? Youth,class and the post-war holiday on the Isle of Man

This article broadens our knowledge of post-war holidaymaking (c. 1950–80) by adopting the Isle of Man as a case study. A popular holiday resort from the late nineteenth century, the Isle of Man experienced considerable political turbulence during the 1950s and 1960s about how best to stay competitive as a seaside resort, where authorities employed uniquely stringent methods to contain rowdiness and protect the island’s ‘respectable’ atmosphere. The first two sections examine the leisure habits of the young and working class in a holiday context, integrating this analysis with perceptions of their behaviour gleaned from oral interviews with local residents. The concluding section explores how the presence of holidaymakers on the Isle of Man – uniquely among seaside resorts in the British Isles – informed (and in some cases emboldened) a sense of national identity. Oral history, complemented by the Hansard reports of the Isle of Man parliament and local press coverage, sheds light on the activities of the post-war working class at play, and how the presence of holidaymakers fortified Manx national consciousness.