EVENT DETAILS

The Arc of Genderism Assessing Two Decades of Gender Advertising in Japan

by Professor Todd Holden Thursday, April 25, 2013
Department of Multi-Cultural Studies
Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan
Graduate School of International Cultural Studies

Japan is home to the second largest advertising market in the world and its commercial
communications are among the most sophisticated. Its ad content routinely addresses issues
of family, youth culture, nationalism, work, education, technology, the human condition,
consumption, capitalism, freedom, leisure and social welfare, many containing gender
discourse. In this talk, Professor Holden will marshal dozens of examples from television
advertising in Japan over the past two decades to plot the arc of discourse about gender.
Building on Erving Goffman’s classic concept of genderism, Professor Holden suggests a
number of additional aspects to consider, such as context, medium or epoch. Accounting
for type and direction of change will help plot the arc of gender representations; more
importantly, measured through the prism of critical and classical scholarship, it should tell
us about gender dynamics and, more widely, socio-cultural shifts in Japanese society today.
This is the third of the Speaker Series on gender funded by the Department of East Asian
Languages and Literatures and the Humanities Collective. For additional information,
please contact the Department of East Asian Languages & Literatures at (949) 824-2227.