HON 404 - Early Modern Sexualities: The Body, Gender, and Sex before Western Modernization

Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program or consent of instructor. Imagine sex. Imagine sex without psychology. Imagine sex before the Confession Box. This course explores notions of gender, sexuality, courtship, and the body in Japanese societies before the arrival of Western values associated with the historical modernization project of the Nation-State. In Classical Japanese there is a verb, onnafu, which roughly translates as, “to become female/woman.” An equivalent term has never been found in a modern Japanese dictionary. The disappearance of language, as limited in usage as it might appear to us, is certainly regrettable. However, in the case of Japan, the moment of the “early modern” (kinsei)-a time characterized by an ever-growing awareness of “The West” and the ideas of civilization-driven empire, scientific-rational conceptions of life, and Judeo-Christian concepts of religion, Truth, and propriety-is the moment in which historians now see the accumulation of these small acts of cultural elision and induced amnesia, particularly in terms of how the body, gender, and sexuality had other normative ways of being/becoming. With the establishment of regulations meant to severely limit contact with Westerners and access to foreign texts, weapons, maps, and other contraband, the study of the West became the prerogative of elite Rangaku (or “Dutch scholars”), Confucian, and medical specialists. As Japan encounters a radically new worldview through a regulated fascination with the West, it does so in a relatively controlled context and in piecemeal. It is not until the mid-19th c. and what came to be referred to as American Gunboat Diplomacy, that Japan fully capitulated to 19th c. American/ Victorian infused values, legal codes, and social concerns regarding the body, sexuality, and gender. The two hundred plus years that Japan was able to hold off colonization by the West allowed for a relatively long period of incubation and processing of Japanese identity vis-à-vis Western nationalism. It also means that certain non-Western understandings and practices of sexuality, gender, and reproduction thrived and came to be documented in innumerable ways before they were ultimately (and sometimes reluctantly) deemed, if not inferior, abnormal and perhaps illegal. The course will study both primary sources related to traditional medicine, Buddhism, folk practices and cultural production in the form of print erotica, literature, theater, and travel guides, as well as secondary scholarship in social, cultural, intellectual, and political history, queer theory, and gender studies. Examining the topic in an interdisciplinary manner that borrows from history, cultural anthropology, feminism, gender studies, literary theory, and art history, it is expected students will be able to apply the critical reading, thinking, and writing skills they develop in class in order to better understand and communicate how they understand the body, sexuality, and gender in today’s contexts. Letter grade. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits