FROM GINZA TO SHANGHAI: THE MODERN GIRL IN EAST ASIA

Event details
Speaker : Professor Vera Mackie
               School of Historical Studies, University of Melbourne
Date      : Tuesday, 7 August 2007
Time      : 11:00am - 1:00pm
Venue    : Seminar Room B (AS7/01-17), Shaw Foundation Building

Abstract

In this paper, I will consider the representation of the modern girl in the visual culture of 1920s and 1930s Japan. The modern girl is represented in the metropolis, in colonial spaces within the metropolis, and in motion between the metropolis and the peripheries. At this time, the Japanese woman was constantly being compared and contrasted with the ‘new women' and ‘modern girls' of the Euro-American centres. At other times the contrast was with the women of Japan's colonies. It is a feature of Japan's colonial modernity that Japanese identities were defined in opposition to both the Euro-American centres and Japan's expanding colonial possessions. At the same time, in the visual culture of modern Japan, pictorial representations drew on international circuits of imagery, signs, symbols and representational practices. The ‘modern girl' has been seen as one of the symbols of artistic modernism, and as one of the archetypal gendered figures of early twentieth century modernity in Japan. She is closely connected with the consumption of the products of modernity: cocktails, chocolate, cigarettes, ‘western' food and with the mobility of the automobile, the bus, the streetcar, the railroad, the subway, the ocean liner and the aeroplane. She is associated with practices such as social dancing, sports and swimming. She is also associated with sexuality, and there is a particular focus on her body. The modern girl is also a transnational phenomenon. The localised manifestation of the ‘modern girl' in Japan is a figure who came to be known as the ‘modan gâru', abbreviated, familiarized and domesticated in the truncated form, ‘moga'. Visual representations of the modern girl in the urban spaces of the Japanese metropolis and its peripheries constituted the viewing position of the metropolitan subject. For the urban female viewer in the metropolis, these representations demonstrated the ways in which women were being categorised and taxonomised. For the urban male viewer in the metropolis, these representations positioned him as voyeur, connoisseur, consumer, and taxonomist, with a gaze which extended from the streets and cafes of Tokyo to the dance halls and brothels of Shanghai. Gendered, classed, ethnicised and racialised positionings were constituted through a series of gazes between actors in the modern scene, embedded in complex relations of power amid the circulation of signs, symbols, bodies, commodities, finance and capital.

About the speaker

Vera Mackie is Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne, where she is working on A Cultural History of the Body in Modern Japan. Major publications include Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality, Cambridge 2003; Gurôbaruka to Jendâ Hyôshô [Globalisation and Representations of Gender]; Ochanomizu Shobô, 2003; Creating Socialist Women in Japan: Gender, Labour and Activism, 1900–1937, Cambridge, 1997 (paperback edition 2002); Human Rights and Gender Politics: Asia–Pacific Perspectives , co-edited with Anne Marie Hilsdon, Martha Macintyre and Maila Stivens, Routledge, 2000 (paperback edition 2006) and Relationships: Australia and Japan, 1870s–1950s, History Monographs Series and RMIT Publishing, 2001, co-edited with Paul Jones.