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Permitted and prohibited desires : mothers, comics, and censorship in Japan

Author

Allison, Anne, 1950-

Title

Permitted and prohibited desires : mothers, comics, and censorship in Japan / Anne Allison.

Format

Book

Published

Boulder, Colo. : WestviewPress, 1996.

Description

xxvi, 225 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

Notes

Includes bibliographical references (p. 197-213) and index.

Contents

• Different differences : place and sex in anthropology, feminism, and cultural studies
• A male gaze in Japanese children's cartoons, or, Are naked female bodies always sexual?
• Cartooning erotics : Japanese ero manga
• Japanese mothers and obentōs : the lunch box as ideological state apparatus
• Producing mothers
• Transgressions of the everyday : stories of mother-son incest in Japanese popular culture
• Public veilings and public surveillance : obscenity laws and obscene fantasies in Japan.

Summary

This study of gender and sexuality in contemporary Japan investigates elements of Japanese popular culture including erotic comic books, stories of mother-son incest, lunch boxes that mothers ritualistically prepare for schoolchildren, and children's cartoons. Anne Allison brings recent feminist psychoanalytic and Marxist theory to bear on representations of sexuality, motherhood, and gender in these and other aspects of Japanese culture. Based on five years of fieldwork in a middle-class Tokyo neighborhood, this theoretically informed, accessible ethnographic study provides an analysis of how sexuality, dominance, and desire are reproduced and enacted in late-capitalistic Japan.

Kinsey subjects

Sex and society--Japan--20th century. Status of women--Japan--20th century. Censorship--Japan--20th century. Cartoons. Comics. Incest--Japan. Child parent relationships.

ISBN

0813316987 (hardcover : alk. paper) 9780813316987 (hardcover : alk. paper) 0813331277 (pbk. : alk. paper) 9780813331270 (pbk. : alk. paper)