Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

“Real Men Die Wrapped in Horsehide: ” and Other Tales of Modern Masculinity. A talk by Sabine Frühstück, University of California at Santa Barbara

This talk considers the history of modern masculinities, spanning the early processes of nation-state formation and empire building, through defeat and democratization. About 150 years ago, scientists, reformers, and government officials made sexuality a principal target in their efforts to know, manage, and control national populations. They perceived healthy (male) bodies to be the very basis of the nation’s military potency. Hence, conscripts and soldiers were of principal concern to the accountants of sexuality within the Japanese defense elite, the public health bureaucracy, and academe alike. Military physical exams revealed which male bodies were fit—and unfit—for that new kind of service to the nation-state: modern war.

Sabine Frühstück is a professor of modern Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is mostly interested in the study of modern and contemporary Japanese culture and its relationships to the rest of the world. Frühstück has published widely on the aging of society, gender and sexuality, the military, war and violence, and childhood and play in modern and contemporary Japan. Her research has engaged several intellectual fields. Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan (2017) is a cultural history of the naturalized connections between childhood and militarism. It analyzes the rules and regularities of war play, from the hills and along the rivers of 19th century rural Japan to the killing fields of 21st-century cyberspace. The ethnography, Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army (2007) employs gender, memory and popular culture as technologies of engagement with a number of debates that centrally involve the ambivalent status and condition of Japan’s contemporary military. Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (2003) is a sociohistorical study of the creation, formation, and application of a “science of sex” from the late 19th through the mid – 20th century. Frühstück is currently writing a modern history of gender and sexuality in Japan for Cambridge University Press. She is the chief editor of the book series New Interventions in Japanese Studies (University of California Press), and a member of the editorial boards of several book series and journals. She has served on ACLS, AAS North East Asia Council, the American Advisory Committee for Japanese Studies of the Japan Foundation, among others. At the University of California, she is currently directing the East Asia Center.

This event is sponsored by:

• The Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission
• The Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies
• The UF Center for the Humanities in the Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment)
• The UF Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Research
• The UF Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Questions? Contact Christopher Smith.