Browsing by Author "Weisenfeld, Gennifer"
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Item Open Access Melancholy Sites: The Affective Politics of Marginality in Post-Anpo Japan (1960-1970)(2011) Adriasola, IgnacioThis dissertation examines the intersection of experimental art, literature, performance, photography, and architecture, as Japanese artists and intellectuals grappled with political disillusionment after the end of the protests against the ratification of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty of 1960. I focus on the work of the sculptors Miki Tomio and Kudo Tetsumi; photographs of late 1960s protests by Tomatsu Shomei and the self-portraits of the novelist Mishima Yukio; the collaboration between photographer Hosoe Eikoh and butoh dance founder Hijikata Tatsumi in the photo album Kamaitachi (The Sickle-Weasel, 1969); and depictions of the urban periphery in Hosoe's unfinished Private Landscape series (1970-) and the visionary urban planning of the architect Tange Kenzo. All shared an interest in portraying peripheral spaces, the detritus of the everyday, and the sexually perverse, cultivating a rhetoric of marginality that allowed them to explore their ambivalent feelings towards post-Anpo Japan.
Item Open Access Utopia/Dystopia: Japan's Image of the Manchurian Ideal(2012) ShepherdsonScott, KariThis project focuses on the visual culture that emerged from Japan's relationship with Manchuria during the Manchukuo period (1932-1945). It was during this time that Japanese official and popular interest in the region reached its peak. Fueling the Japanese attraction and investment in this region were numerous romanticized images of Manchuria's bounty and space, issued to bolster enthusiasm for Japanese occupation and development of the region. I examine the Japanese visual production of a utopian Manchuria during the 1930s and early 1940s through a variety of interrelated media and spatial constructions: graphic magazines, photography, exhibition spaces, and urban planning. Through this analysis, I address how Japanese political, military, and economic state institutions cultivated the image of Manchukuo as an ideal, multiethnic state and a "paradise" (rakudo) for settlement in order to generate domestic support and to legitimize occupation on the world stage. As there were many different colonial offices with different goals, there was no homogenous vision of the Manchurian ideal. In fact, tensions often emerged between offices as each attempted to garner support for its own respective mission on the continent. I examine these tensions and critique the strategic intersection of propaganda campaigns, artistic goals and personal fantasies of a distant, exotic frontier. In the process, this project explores how the idea of Manchuria became a panacea for a variety of economic and social problems plaguing Japan at both a national and individual level.
Item Open Access Visualizing Bodies: Public Health and the Medicalized Everyday in Modern Japan(2022) Gaglia, Nicole Ying YeeThis dissertation examines the complex network of visual culture that represented public health in early twentieth century Japan. I investigate the role of images in shaping modern Japanese public health discourse within four distinct spheres of cultural production: hygiene exhibitions, enlightenment posters, images of sporting women, and modernist painting. In doing so, I identify objects, spaces, and images as agents imbricated in the construction of a medicalized everyday—a scientific rationalization of everyday life rooted in the body. The visual material that grounds this analysis, from posters advertising vaccination clinics to photographic magazine spreads featuring female swimmers, represents the diverse contexts within which public health operated. My approach integrates an art historical framework into the study of modern public health to consider the ways that visual representations of the body created a dialogue between the image and the viewer—an exchange that affected the development of human subjectivities and understandings of embodiment. I address how the debates that conceptualized health and disease as modern constructs were situated around, on, and within the body. This dissertation proposes that state institutions, the medical community, cultural producers, and the Japanese public identified the human body as a site that could simultaneously reflect and influence the experience of modernity. I argue that modern visual discourses of the body articulated through the framework of public health transformed the experience of everyday life in modern Japan. This dissertation contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship in the fields of art history, visual studies, and the history of medicine by investigating the representational practices of modern public health in Japan. I focus on the visual culture of public health communication, located at the interstices between scientific knowledge production and popular reception, to uncover how the complexities of vision and its characteristics of mediation and resistance affected discourses on health, the body, and the individual.