Tuesday, September 8th, 2015 Unraveling Visions: ‘Girly’ Photography in Recessionary Japan

Description

This presentation asks what happens to feminist art in contexts of economic deregulation and concomitant care deficit that tend to reconnect women to regimes of social reproduction. Drawing on the observation that women’s photography centered on portraying relationships, photography critics—dominantly men—interpreted the genre as a project that aimed to reconnect communities that have unraveled in the wake of the long recession. Women photographers, however, rejected this interpretation. Building on this tension, I claim that critics projected onto women’s photography their own nostalgia for the high-growth era and its characteristic gender division of labor. My interviews with photographers reveal that it was precisely the desire to disengage from the normative gender roles of the high-growth period that drove women to photography. Women, I argue, practiced photography to expand the zones of subjectivity from which they were able to draw new forms of labor and pleasure.

Gabriella Lukacs is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research explores themes of mass media, digital media, capitalism, labor, and gender in contemporary Japan. Her first book, Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan, was published by Duke University Press. Her current book project, Diva Entrepreneurs: Labor, Gender, and the Digital Economy in Japan, explores why women turn to the digital economy and how this economy mobilizes them to regimes of unpaid labor that it harnesses as a motor of its own development.