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Engaging the World

Institute For Transpacific Cultural Research

Institute For Transpacific Cultural Research / Events / Past Events / A Third Gender

A THIRD GENDER: BEAUTIFUL YOUTHS IN JAPANESE PRINTS

A talk by Asato Ikeda

5-7 pm, Wednesday, March 28, 2018
Room 7000 (7/F, Lohn Policy Room)
SFU Vancouver, Harbour Centre, 515 West Hastings Street

EVENT DESCRTIPION

How do we—and can we at all— talk about sex, gender, and sexuality of early modern Japan without imposing contemporary North American values and preconceptions? This question was central to the process of organizing the exhibition A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Prints at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto in 2016. The exhibition focuses on visual representations of male youths, called wakashu in Japanese, who were the object of sexual desire for both women and adult men in Edo-era Japan.

Presented in the form of an exhibition, the project necessitated engaging the past with the present and the general public with scholarship. In this presentation, Dr. Ikeda explains the process of this engagement and discuss the dialogues the team at the ROM and she had with Toronto’s LGBTQ+ community.

The talk is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served. Registration recommended.

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About The Speaker

Asato Ikeda is Assistant Professor of Art History at Fordham University and Research Associate at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. She is the co-editor of Art and War in Japan and its Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2012), the curator of A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Prints (Royal Ontario Museum, 2016; Japan Society, 2017), and the author of The Politics of Painting: Fascism and Japanese Art during the Second World War (forthcoming in May 2018 from the University of Hawaii Press).

Find out more about Dr. Ikeda's work here.

Images From The Exhibit

Event Photos