Profs & Pints Baltimore: Japan's Most Feared Women
Sun, Aug 18
|Baltimore
Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Japan’s Most Feared Women,” a look at the provocative, notorious, and genderfluid female figures who have pushed boundaries and aroused panic in Japan, with Michele M. Mason, associate professor of Japanese cultural studies at the University of Maryland, College
Time & Location
Aug 18, 2024, 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Baltimore, 1611 Guilford Ave, Baltimore, MD 21202, USA
About the event
Say this much for moral panics: They often shed light on a society’s fault lines and insecurities.
Such is the case in Japan, where various episodes of handwringing and fearmongering over the behavior of women have revealed a lot about how men sought to control women’s lives.
Join Professor Michele M. Mason, a scholar of Japanese culture who previously has given excellent Profs and Pints talks on Japanese ghost stories, for a fascinating discussion of the “nasty women” of Japan, who gained notoriety by defying expectations.
Dr. Mason will start by discussing a late 19th century panic over women who were passing as men. Many who did so had a strong economic incentive: they were poor and needed to travel in search of better circumstances in a society where women’s travel was restricted. But men of their time were predisposed to see something far more sinister at work.
Then, she’ll…