Research Projects
The human faces of Asia. First published in the first edition (1876–1899) of Nordisk familjebok. Credit: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Understanding Race and Racism from a Global-Historical Perspective: A Case Study of Japan
This project seeks to reexamine “race" from a global-historical perspective, not anchored in a view of race and racism that sees them as “universally the same” across the world. Most accounts of race in the social sciences are based on approaches that were developed in the US or the West more broadly, which does not necessarily explain racial phenomena in non-Western contexts such as Japan. This is a lacuna of the field of Race and Ethnic Studies. My principal research questions are: what are the non-Western, non-US-based models of ‘race’, racisms, and racialization and how they are similar and different? How has the Western notion of "race" traveled to Japan and what were the consequences when it met and interacted with Japanese way of differentiating people at specific historical moments?
Relevant Publications
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Suzuki, Kazuko. 2021. “Empire and Racialization: Reinterpreting Japan’s Pan-Asianism from a Du Boisian Perspective.” A. I. R. White and K. Quisumbing King, ed. Global Historical Sociology of Race and Racism (Political Power and Social Theory Vol. 38), Emerald Publishing Limited: 23-54, https://doi.org/10.1108/S0198-871920210000038002
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Suzuki, Kazuko. 2017. [Featured Review] “A Critical Assessment of Comparative Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity Vol. 3 (3): 287-300, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2332649217708580
Paying with Gender: Yaoi and Post-Binary Feminism in Contemporary Japan
Yaoi / Boys Love (BL) is a literary genre of male-male erotic romance by and for heterosexual women, originally invented by Japanese women at the end of the 1970s, which has now become global. Because Yaoi novels are often marginalized as mere "pornography" and they are created by and for women, this stigma shrouds the deeper gender dynamics of oppression and also liberation that make this genre so popular. In answering the question of why some heterosexual women prefer to read male-male romance novels than heterosexual counterparts, my research unmasks these dynamics and examine what I call “post-binary feminism” in Japan. Post-binary feminism departs from the assumption of the association of binary sex (male/female) and binary gender (masculinity/femininity) as cultural norms. The central goal of this project is to illustrate the renewed feminist agenda among Japanese women caught up in the contradictions between liberal democracy and the deeply embedded Confucian-based institutions and norms in Japanese society.
Yaoi/BL novels are objects of my research analysis. [Top: Japanese BL novel, Deadlock by Saki Aida (illustration by Yuh Takashina); Bottom: Chinese danmei novel, Ma Dao Zu Shi by Mo Xiang Tong Xi. Photo by Kazuko Suzuki
Relevant Publications
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Suzuki, Kazuko. 2015. “What Can We Learn from Japanese Professional BL Writers?: A Sociological Analysis of Yaoi/BL Terminology and Classifications,” in Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture and Community in Japan, edited by M. McLelland, K. Nagaike, K. Suganuma, and J. Welker. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi: 93-118.
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Suzuki, Kazuko. 1988. “Pornography or Therapy? Japanese Girls Creating the Yaoi Phenomenon.” In Millennium Girls: Today’s Girls Around the World, edited by Sherrie A. Inness. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield: 243-267.
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Suzuki, Kazuko. 2021. “’Madō Soshi’/’Chinjōrei’ to Chūgoku bunka nashonarizumu no kakusan,” 「魔道祖師・陳情令と中国文化ナショナリズムの拡散」 (‘Mo Dao Zu Shi’ / ‘The Untamed’ and the spread of Chinese cultural nationalism). Rōdō Chōsa (July) No. 276: 1-2 (in Japanese).
Collaborative Project with Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, China with Yulei Guo (PI)
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Social construction of cuteness
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Lively capital in wildlife tourism
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Giant Pandas and "pink sustainability"
Photo by Kazuko Suzuki
New Collaborative Project
with Diego von Vacano
Bolivian indigeneity (potential mobilization of local labor force, in particular, disadvantaged female indigenous populations in a newly emerging global energy regime
Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia. Photo by Diego von Vacano