Disability and Corporeality in Modern Ja

Spanning the late 19th century to the present, this course explores the cultural construction and representation of disability and corporeality in modern Japanese literature, film, and manga, and introduces students to a range of Japanese texts and media as well as to theoretical approaches to disability, illness, madness, shame, aging, and representations of the body. Special focus will be placed on the discursive construction—through language, media, and literary texts—of the stigma placed on people with mental or corporeal differences and how this construction intersects with other cultural categories such as country and city, gender, class, ethnicity, race, sexuality, political affiliation, religion, and age. We will consider how textual and visual representations challenge, reshape, and expand our views of these categories and constructions.