Radu Leca: Island of Girls - Female-Only Utopias in Japanese Culture

Veranstaltungsort: Hörsaal 4, Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien (Altbau, 1. Stock)

Vortragsreihe im Studienjahr 2014/15:
Empires of Women. Konzepte und Konstruktionen matriarchaler Modelle/ Concepts and Constructions of Matriarchies

Representations of female-dominated communities within Japanese culture, represented by the mythical Nyogogashima (Island of Women), have been regularly actualized in twentieth century literary and popular visual culture. The proliferation of exclusively female spaces, from girls? schools to the Takarazuka Revue to female-only train carriages, has been paralleled by fictional scenarios of female empowerment and the emerging feminist movement. In the interwar period, feminist magazines were calling for the ?rebirth of the female? while modern girls photographed in bathing suits re-envisioned as the Island of Women. This utopian trend was reiterated in literary works of the ?60s-?70s and photographs of the feminist movement. And its legacy is discernible in the new generation of women artists in Japan.

This lecture therefore traces the genealogy of a female-only utopia running diachronically across Japanese cultural imagination and seeding alternatives to a male-dominated discourse. While its actualizations have been largely fictional, they nevertheless provided sites of empowerment for the female subject and enabled explorations of alternative gender roles.

Radu Leca is an art historian based in London. His doctoral research analyses the significance of the spatial imaginary in the visual production of seventeenth century Japan. Radu has just published an article entitled ?The Allure of Absence: the aesthetics of the female body in contemporary art and seventeenth century Japan? in Kapsula Magazine 2-3 Longing 2/3.