Beyond the Modern Girl: Gender, Sexuality, and Empire in Japan and Korea, 1900-1955

In the 1920s and 1930s, the fashionable and iconoclastic "modern girl" appeared in media in Tokyo, Seoul, and beyond. Yet what, if anything, did she have to do with empire? And what other gendered experiences, identities, and movements emerged alongside her? From "new women" to "comfort women," from the "sons of the empire" to "sensitive young men," along with discourses on same-sex love, this course examines gender in Japan and Korea from the colonial period through the postwar occupations.