The Fall 2018 Gender and History series presents

A Global History of Sexuality and Sexual Violence during World War II

With

Sabine Fruhstuck Professor East Asia Center, Director University of California Santa Barbara

4:30 PM Homer Babbidge Library Class of 1947 Room, 1st Floor

World War II also constituted an unprecedented, vast web of sexual incitement, suppression, and violence, much of which was organized and systematic and most of which victimized women rather than men. Violence and sex have been relentlessly linked in wartime in manifold and sometimes contradictory ways. In this talk, Fruhstuck traces the linkage by focusing on two major sites of World War II, Japan’s clash with the rest of Asia and Germany’s aggression toward most of Europe. This double focus on two of the primary aggressors of the war allows her to describe the historical, ideological, and cultural aspects of sex and sexuality in two regions that, for a short while, connected politically but remained culturally dramatically different.

About the speaker:

Sabine Frühstück is Professor of Modern Japanese Cultural Studies at the Univ. of California, Santa Barbara, where she is also Director of the East Asia Center. Prof. Frühstück researches modern and contemporary Japanese culture and its relationship to other parts of the world. She is the author of Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan (2017), a cultural history of the naturalized connections between childhood and militarism; Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army (2007), an ethnography that 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; and Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (2003), a sociohistorical study of the creation, formation, and application of a “science of sex” from the late 19th through the mid-20th century.