Olomouc Asian Studies
Olomouc Asian Studies
Volume 3
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1st edition
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© edited by Halina Zawiszová, Giorgio Strafella, Martin Lavička, 2025
© Palacký University Olomouc, 2025
https://doi.org/10.5507/ff.25.24465821
ISBN 978-80-244-6582-1 (print)
ISBN 978-80-244-6583-8 (online: iPDF)
Kazuyoshi Kawasaka
Ami Kobayashi
Verita Sriratana
Coming out as Everyday Life Activism: “displaying” Gay Father Families in Taiwan 153
Jung Chen
nursery Rhymes, Rituals, and Cultural Trauma: A Connotation of “Chair Maiden” in Taiwan 181
Yu-Yin Hsu and Kuan-Wei Wu
narrating Women’s Bodies and Violence: Testimonies of Sexual Violence Victims in Japan
Chiara Fusari
PART III
BodIES, GEndER, And IdEnTITIES
199
Like Snow Like Mountain: narrating Gender Violence in the Era of #MeToo Activism 225
Daniela Licandro
Becoming-Simulacra: Textualizing Murderous Women in heisei Japan (1989–2019) 251
Fengyuan Zhen
A Lady’s Reckoning: Torture, Eroticism, and Salvation in the noh Play Shikimi Tengu 277
Dunja Jelesijevic
The Body as Lens and Testimony: The Bodily Experience and Cultural Identity in the Song Stories of Traveling to Foreign Lands (960–1279 CE) 301
Li-wen Wang
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BodIES, GEndER, And IdEnTITIES In VISUAL
Archaeology and Onmyōdō: human-Shaped Ritual objects Associated with Purification Rites and Curses
Marianna Lázár
The Shiny Body of the Good Soldier: Identity and the Corporeal in Shen Jingdong’s Art
Giorgio Strafella
Yang Fudong: In Search of the Lost Yin/Yang Balance
Christine Vial Kayser
Stylish and Bold: A Critical Analysis of the Trope of the Modern Girl in Indian Cinema in the Late Colonial Period
Sutanuka Banerjee and Lipika Kankaria
Labor, Marginalization, Taiwanization: Mapping the Embodiment of the Being-Woman in Post-Martial Taiwan Through Wu Mali’s “Stories of Women from hsin-Chuang”
Contributors
Keiko Aiba
Meiji Gakuin University, Japan
aiba@k.meijigakuin.ac.jp
Keiko Aiba is a Professor in the Faculty of International Studies at Meiji Gakuin University, Japan. She received a PhD in sociology from Washington State University. She has explored how femininity is constructed in women’s bodies and whether sports and physical activities have the potential to challenge the ideal female body. Through an ethnographic study of Japanese women pro wrestlers, she published Transformed Bodies and Gender: Experiences of Women Pro Wrestlers in Japan (2017). She currently researches how beauty ideals affect female high school students in Japan.
Roberto Riccardo Alvau
Complutense University of Madrid, Spain robertoalvau@gmail.com
Roberto Alvau is a Sardinian PhD researcher at Complutense University of Madrid. He has collaborated with the Reina Sofia National Museum in Madrid and the Amsterdam Street Art Museum. He specializes in socially engaged, participatory art, and collaborative art, as well as decolonial practices within contemporary Taiwanese art. His current research focuses on the construction of national identity, marginalized voices overlooked by hegemonic narratives, and the role of art as a cohesive device for social inclusion.
Sutanuka Banerjee
National Institute of Technology Durgapur, India sbanerjee.hu@nitdgp.ac.in
Sutanuka Banerjee (PhD, Aalborg University, Denmark) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Durgapur. She has published papers in respected journals including Journal of International Women’s Studies; Asiatic; Sic: Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation; Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender
Contributors
Liudmila Bredikhina and Agnès Giard
Studies; Asian Journal of Women’s Studies; Rupkatha: Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities; 3L: Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies; and Agathos: An International Review of the Humanities and Social Sciences. She has presented several papers in international conferences in India and abroad as well as contributed book chapters in edited volumes by national and international publishers. Her research areas focus on Popular Culture, Gender Studies, and Transnational Feminism.
Liudmila Bredikhina
South East Technological University, Ireland liudmila.bredikhina@gmail.com
Liudmila Bredikhina is researching virtual male kawaii practices among Japanese metaverse users and babiniku VTubers from a feminist standpoint. Using virtual ethnographic methods and semiotic analysis, she interrogates Japanese men’s discursive practices surrounding cuteness and investigates how they harness the virtual space to perform “other” identities. She also raises questions surrounding the “liberation” aspect of virtual identities and how they intersect with commercial and consumer pressures. In 2022, she received the Prix Genre (Gender Prize) for her research on babiniku and Japanese traditional theatre. Her recent publications include “Tōjisha no koe o toraeru: ‘Babiniku’ jissensha e no ankēto, intabyū chōsa [Capturing the Voices of Those Involved: Survey and Interview Methods for Studying ‘Babiniku’]” (VTuber gaku, 2024), “Babiniku: what lies behind the virtual performance. Contesting gender norms through technology and Japanese theatre” (Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, 2022), and “Becoming a virtual cutie: Digital cross-dressing in Japan” (Convergence, 2022). As of 2024, she is affiliated with South East Technological University (SETU), but was affiliated with another institution when conducting the research presented in this volume.
Jung Chen
Academia Sinica, Taiwan jungchen1993@gamil.com
Jung Chen is an Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of Sociology at Academia Sinica. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge. Her PhD thesis is about Taiwanese gay fathers’ transnational reproduction, with a specific focus on the ways in which their making of relatedness via biotechnologies both destabilize and accommodate normativities. Her next project will look at the reproductive imaginations, family-building, and mobilities of tongzhi couples in Taiwan, mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macao.
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Chiara Fusari
University of Zurich, Switzerland
chiara.fusari@aoi.uzh.ch
Chiara Fusari is a PhD Candidate and a Teaching Assistant at the Department of Japanese Studies of the University of Zurich. Previously she had conducted research on Burakumin with a specific focus on gender issues and wom en’s participation in the liberation movement. Her work is published in the journal Contemporary Japan. Her doctoral research focuses on sexual violence, social mobilization, and feminism in contemporary Japan.
Agnès Giard
Laboratoire Sophiapol – Université de Paris Nanterre, France aniesu.giard@gmail.com
Agnès Giard is anthropologist, working on the industry of human romantic and sexual surrogates in the context of Japanese national depopulation. Her research tackles the consumption of emotional commodities, such as love dolls, digital boyfriends, or holographic spouses, and the stigma attached to ohitorisama, i.e., single people held responsible for the falling birthrate. Her last book, Un désir d’humain: Les love doll au Japon [Yearning for Human: Love Dolls in Japan] (2016), was named by the ICAS (International Convention of Asia Scholars) Book Prize as one of the “five best books published in France in the field of Asian Studies” in 2017. The book relates to “artificial life” systems (dolls for adults) framed within a symbolic system dealing with failure, lack, and loss. She is Associate Researcher at Sophiapol, a laboratory dedicated to the socio-anthropology of emotion and exclusion, at Paris Nanterre University.
Yu-Yin Hsu
Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
Yu-Yin.Hsu@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
Yu-Yin Hsu is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow of Taiwan Research Unit at the Ruhr University Bochum. She received her PhD from the National University of Singapore with the FASS (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) Scholarship in Buddhist Studies in 2019, specializing in modern Chinese Buddhism with a focus on its ritual practices and migrant changes across borders.
DOI: 10.5507/ff.25.24465821.02 Contributors
Contributors
Dunja Jelesijevic
Northern Arizona University, USA
Dunja.Jelesijevic@nau.edu
Dunja Jelesijevic earned her PhD in Japanese religion from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was a Japan Foundation Fellow at Nagoya University from 2012 to 2013. Her research interests include premodern Japanese religion, literature, and performance arts, with a specific focus on religious aspects of Noh theater. Her broader interests include East Asian Buddhism and East Asian folk religions, as well as Chinese religion, philosophy, and literature. She has written about and presented on the topics of religion and ritual in a number of Noh plays.
Lipika Kankaria
Independent Scholar, India lipikakankaria@gmail.com
Lipika Kankaria earned her PhD in English from the National Institute of Technology Durgapur and completed her BA and MA in English literature at the University of Calcutta. She has published papers in journals such as Journal of International Women’s Studies; Asiatic; Sic; and Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies, and contributed chapters in volumes such as Handbook of Research on Social and Cultural Dynamics in Indian Cinema and (Re)presentations: Problems, Politics and Praxis. Her research focuses on Gender Studies and Popular Culture.
Kazuyoshi Kawasaka
Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany kawasaka@hhu.de / kazkawasaka@gmail.com
Kazuyoshi Kawasaka is principal investigator of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)-funded project “Sexual Diversity and Human Rights in 21st Century Japan: LGBTQ+ Activisms and Resistance from a Transnational Perspective” at the Institute for Modern Japanese studies at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. He received his DPhil in Gender Studies (Humanities) at the University of Sussex in 2016. His research focuses on nationalism and queer politics in Japan, the globalization of LGBTQ+ politics, and transnational anti-gender/LGBTQ+ movements. He is a co-editor of Beyond Diversity: Queer Politics, Activism, and Representation in Contemporary Japan (2024) and the author of “Queers and National Anxiety: Discourses on Gender and Sexuality from Anti-Gender Backlash Movements in Japan since the 2000s” in Global Perspectives on Anti-Feminism: Far-Right and Religious Attacks on Equality and Diversity (edited by Stefanie Mayer and Judith Goetz, 2023).
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Contributors
Ami Kobayashi
Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany
ami.kobayashi@hhu.de
Ami Kobayashi studied Educational Sciences at the Sophia University in Tokyo and at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In her doctoral thesis The Gait as Political Choreography, she conducted historical and comparative research on political school ceremonies in Germany and Japan (1873–1945). Since 2018, she has worked as a Lecturer at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (Faculty of Educational Sciences) and the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldor (Institution for Modern Japanese Studies) in Germany. She published articles related to body, sexuality, and the nation-state in German, English, and Japanese. Her research interests are education transfer, comparative education, the cultural history of pedagogical practices, sexual minorities in schools, Anton. S. Makarenko, and Collective Education.
Martin Lavička
Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic
martin.lavicka@upol.cz
Martin Lavička is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Asian Studies at Palacký University Olomouc (UP), where he teaches modern Chinese history, Taiwan history, and Chinese politics. He received his BA in Chinese and Japanese Philology from UP, an MA in International Relations from National Chengchi University in Taiwan, and a PhD in Political Science from UP in 2021. His research focuses on the socio-legal aspects of China’s ethnic policies, religious freedoms, and the rule of law. He is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies at Lund University with his two-year OP JAC MSCACZ project “CLAW: Chinese Conceptualization of the Rule of Law: Challenges for the International Legal Order.”
Marianna Lázár
Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, Hungary lazar.marianna@kre.hu
Marianna Lázár is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Japanese Studies at Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary. Her work has been published in journals such as Journal of Ryukoku University, Annals of Dimitrie Cantemir Christian University , East Asian Studies , and Orpheus Noster , and in edited volumes, such as Minzokugaku no shatei [The Scope of Ethnology] (2022), Encounters with Japan: Japanese Studies in the Visegrad Four Countries (2015), and Kortárs Japanológia (2015, 2019, 2022). She specializes in ancient Japanese history with a focus on archaeology and cultural exchange. Her
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Contributors
Liudmila Bredikhina and Agnès Giard
current research is focused on the burial practices of the Kofun period and the archaeology of early Onmyōdō practices. Her doctoral thesis was a study of the development of the Four Gods belief in East Asia, focusing on its cultural-historical, artistic, and ideological development in Japan.
Daniela Licandro
University of Milan, Italy
daniela.licandro@unimi.it
Daniela Licandro obtained her PhD in modern Chinese literature from the University of Chicago. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Milan in the fields of modern Chinese literature and Chinese language pedagogy. Her research interests include women’s autobiographical practices in modern China, gender studies, realism, modernism, and theories of the body. Her work has appeared in NAN NÜ: Men, Women, and Gender in China; Chinese Literature and Thought Today; and Educazione Linguistica. Language Education (EL.LE). Her recent analysis of Li Lanni’s memoir of mental illness and her research on 1930s Shanghai modernism are forthcoming, respectively, in Altre Modernità [Other Modernities] and Modernism/modernity.
Novidayanti
The Government of Jambi Province, Indonesia novidayanti@gmail.com
Novidayanti has been a public policy analyst and regional development planner for the Development Planning Agency of The Government of Jambi Province, Sumatra, Indonesia since September 2021. After completing her MA in Gender and Development at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex in 2011, she pursued her doctoral study in Asian and International Studies at the City University of Hong Kong. Her previous work was about the construction of gender identity of waria (Indonesian transgender women) in Malay Muslim society in Jambi Province. This work extends the research of her MA thesis, which discussed how Muslim waria in Indonesia negotiate gender identity. She is currently working on Muslim LBT (lesbian, bisexual, and transgender) migrant worker-related issues in Hong Kong as part of her doctoral research.
Verita Sriratana
Chulalongkorn University, Thailand
Verita.S@chula.ac.th
Verita Sriratana (PhD, University of St Andrews) is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University. She
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is a former Visiting Research Fellow in Human Rights at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Lund University. Verita is the winner of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) Women’s Forum Prize for “I Burn (Marx’s) Paris: ‘Capital’ Cities, Alienation and Deconstruction in the Works of Bruno Jasieński,” published in Temporalities of Modernism (2022), and author of a research article entitled “‘The Straight and Strong Man’s Burden’: An Analysis of Benevolent Sexism as Misogyny in International Women’s Day Speeches from Leaders of Belarus, Russia and Thailand,” published in Stance: The Thai Feminist Review (2023). She is currently a Research Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) at Heidelberg University, where she works on a project entitled “Don’t they know it’s not the end of the (patriarchal and heteronormative) world?: Misogyny as (Post)Apocalypse.”
Giorgio Strafella
Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic giorgio.strafella@upol.cz
Giorgio Strafella (PhD, University of Nottingham) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Asian Studies and a researcher at the Sinophone Research Centre, Faculty of Arts, Palacký University Olomouc. He is the author of Intellectual Discourse in Reform Era China (2017). His work has been published in journals such as positions: asia critique; Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art; Asian Studies Review; China Information; Made in China; and Asiatische Studien / Études Asiatiques, and in edited volumes. He is also co-editor, with Daria Berg, of Transforming Book Culture in China, 1600–2016 (2016); China’s Avant-Garde, 1978–2018 (2023); and a special issue of the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs on “China’s New Cultural Entrepreneurs and Creative Industries, 2000–2022” (2024). His current research focuses on art criticism and experimental art in contemporary China.
Christine Vial Kayser
Paris-Sorbonne University and CY Cergy Paris University, France christine.vial-kayser@cyu.fr
Christine Vial Kayser is an art historian and theorist, honorary museum curator, teacher-researcher (HDR), and Associate Researcher at Creops (Paris-Sorbonne University) and Héritages (CY Cergy Paris University). She is president of the AsieSorbonne Association. Her research focuses on contemporary Asian-Western art from a phenomenological perspective.
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Contributors
Liudmila Bredikhina and Agnès Giard
Li-wen Wang
University of Bonn, Germany
Li-wen Wang is a PhD student at the University of Bonn, Germany. Her research interests include pre-modern Chinese novels, maritime history, ocean and island studies, and material culture. Her ongoing dissertation discovers the maritime landscape represented in the Song-Yuan novels within the global historical context.
Kuan-Wei Wu
Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
Kuan-Wei.Wu@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
Kuan-wei Wu is a PhD Candidate at the Faculty of East-Asian Studies, Ruhr-Universität Bochum. He is a reader of intellectual history and cultural history, and he is also fond of novels, essays, and poetry.
Halina Zawiszová
Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic halina.zawiszova@upol.cz
Halina Zawiszová is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Asian Studies at Palacký University Olomouc. She is trained in Japanese philology, English philology, and linguistics. Her main research foci revolve around topics related to social interaction, language, emotion, and the construction of social relations and identities. Her recent publications include a monograph On ‘doing friendship’ in and through talk (2018), an edited volume Interests and Power in Language Management (co-edited with Marek Nekula and Tamah Sherman, 2022), and an edited volume Voiced and Voiceless in Asia (co-edited with Martin Lavička, 2023).
Fengyuan Zhen
University of Auckland, New Zealand fzhe587@aucklanduni.ac.nz
Fengyuan Zhen recently completed her PhD in Asian Studies at the University of Auckland. Her doctoral thesis, titled Heisei (1989–2019) Evil Woman: Textualising Murderous Women in Contemporary Japan, investigates the gendered narratives surrounding murders committed by women. Her research focuses on how various textualizations challenge and reshape prevailing discourses on gender and societal issues, including shifts in gender division of labor, consumer culture, and the expanding cyberspace—topics of significant public concern during the Heisei era in Japan.
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Foreword
The Olomouc Asian Studies (OLAS) book series is published by the Department of Asian Studies at Palacký University Olomouc to further expand its outreach initiative in the area of Asian Studies beyond its already well-established international conference, the Annual Conference on Asian Studies (ACAS). Rigorously peer-reviewed and available as open access e-books and print-on-demand books, the edited volumes published in the OLAS series address wide-ranging topics and issues in the field of Asian Studies, while bringing together contributors from around the world.
This is the third volume in the series. It shares key topics with the 16th ACAS, entitled “Bodies, Gender, Identities,” which was held in hybrid form in Olomouc, Czech Republic on November 25–26, 2022. The open call for chapters that we issued after the conference aroused considerable interest. The seventeen chapters that comprise this book were selected based on their subject matter and doubleblind peer review. Six of them constitute expanded and revised versions of papers presented at the conference.
We would like to thank the authors for their generous collaboration and patience along the way. We would also like to express our gratitude to the many anonymous reviewers. Without their unselfish help and dedication to the integrity and excellence of research such a publication could not be produced. Finally, our appreciation is due to the Department of Asian Studies and the Sinophone Research Centre of Palacký University Olomouc whose financial support made the publication of this book possible.
The editors
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