Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture Lecture Series 2019


Co-Ed Revolution:

The Female Student in the Japanese New Left


Chelsea Szendi Schieder

Aoyama Gakuin University


19:15‐20:45, July 5th, 2019

Room 301, 3F, Building 10, Sophia University


In this talk, I explore the meanings created by female participation in leftist campus-based protest in the 1960s, as young men and women attended universities together, battled police in the streets together, challenged political institutions, and paralyzed the higher education system. Young women involved in the student movement often imagined that it would offer them a rare chance to engage in activism away from gendered expectations and spaces, such as the home, and to participate as full equals with young men. And yet various dynamics - within the movement and in the interpretation of the movement within the mass media - often foreclosed such an imagination. Here I explore the tensions within this history and in the historiography that often memorializes the New Left as primarily "male" to uncover a gendered dynamic within Japanese postwar politics, and radical politics in particular.


Chelsea Szendi Schieder is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Economics at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. She writes about protest, women, violence, and Japan for academic and general audiences. She recently curated and contributed to a special feature for the Spring 2019 issue of Verge: Studies in Global Asias on "Contemporary History / Contended History." Her articles on women and activism have also appeared in Dissent, World Policy Journal, and The Asia-Pacific Journal. Her book on the gendered dynamics in the campus-based New Left in Japan, entitled Co-Ed Revolution, is under contract with Duke University Press. She is also engaged in the radical practice of raising a kid.


This talk is organized by Professor David H. Slater (FLA)

Lecture in English / No RSVP required

http://icc.fla.sophia.ac.jp/html/events/2019-2020/190705_Schieder.pdf


Institute of Comparative Culture (ICC) Sophia University

7-1 Kioicho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-8554, JAPAN

Web: http://icc.fla.sophia.ac.jp/