Inverted Orientalism and the discursive construction of sexual harassment: A study of mass media and feminist representations of sexual harassment in Japan

Hiroko Hirakawa, Purdue University

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to address how the discourse on sexual harassment in Japan reproduces the taken-for-granted cultural framework. I propose looking at the recent emergence of sexual harassment talk in Japan as what I call an “Inverted Orientalist” process. To do so is to articulate how the Orientalist binary of native tradition and Western modernity is appropriated and manipulated in the process of cross-national importation of sexual harassment language, and how the hegemonic notion of Japanese national identity is reproduced in the process. I approach mass media as an important site for an Inverted Orientalist process. I examine the ways in which Asahi Shimbun utilizes the conflated binary of native tradition and Western modernity in its construction of the rhetoric surrounding sexual harassment, and how such rhetoric are related to the larger media discourses on national identity in Japan. In so doing, I provide a critical reading of how a major national newspaper, in its construction of sexual harassment discourse, (re)produces or refracts the dominant cultural identity in Japan and the social systems of inclusions and exclusions premised on that identity. In the conclusion, I locate the complex duality of Asahi's orientation statement in both institutional and ideological contexts of Japanese newspaper publishing firms.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Gottfried, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Womens studies|Sociology|Journalism|Mass media

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