Posted in Consumer Culture, Culture, Gender, Manga, Media, tagged birth dearth, childless, Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature, Egypt, Fukui, gender stereotypes, history, LGBT Family, marriage equality, Middle East, sex aversion, sexless, violence against women on 2012/05/12| 3 Comments »
It seems like the world of gender news has exploded in the last month, so I’m feeling a bit behind here. First, congrats to President Obama for coming out of the support closet on homogamous marriage in time for the election! And now on to our regularly scheduled programming: gender stereotypes, women in Egypt, marginalization, hope for the birth dearth, Japanese PFLAG, and the best Tumblr of this administration.
From failbook.
Posted in Ôoku, Culture, Gender, Manga, Media, tagged Arikoto, よしながふみ, birth dearth, 男女逆転大奥, Edo period, female shogun, Gender, genderswap, Kasuga, Masako, Ohoku, Ooku: The Inner Chambers, Oraku, The Lady Shogun and Her Men, Tokugawa Iemitsu, Yoshinaga Fumi, Ōoku, 大奥 on 2011/03/07| 14 Comments »
Part 1: The Sexual Revolution Within the Ôoku
There’s a line in Volume 1 that really defines the larger work of Ôoku, where a character notes that the men there kept like goldfish: a luxury item to have simply for the sake of having. For the third and (part of) the fourth volumes of Ôoku, I’d like to shift the focus from the narrative itself to the larger cultural issues presented in the volume. No work of art or literature exists in a vacuum, and the third and fourth volumes of Ôoku address the present issue of “herbivore men” and their counterpart, “carnivore women.” Unlike Otomen, though, the story of Ôoku is not directly about this issue, but there’s no denying the connection between contemporary culture and the work. The content of this volume is largely meant to explain the changes in Japanese (alternate history) culture caused by the Red Pox, or how the culture in the world that Yoshinaga created evolved from the Shogunate of Iemitsu to that of Yoshimune.
I’d like to address this in multiple parts—first the sexual revolution within the ôoku; next, the changing political and social world; and finally the lasting cultural impact that the revolutions within and without the castle have on the world. The issues addressed here are fairly lengthy, so I’ve divided up Part 1 into subsections. Spoilers are a given; also, one image contains some potentially NSFW cleavage.
