Karen Kelsky

(Ph.D. Hawaii)
Head of Department
Associate Professor EALC and Anthropology:

Japan, lesbian, gay and transgender studies, queer globalizations, transnational cultural studies

217-244-9077
kelsky@uiuc.edu

I am a cultural anthropologist of Japan. My work focuses on gender, sexuality, race, popular culture, and transnational cultural studies. My book Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams was published from Duke in 2001. It explored the gendered politics of Japan's internationalization, and the causes and effects of a turn toward the West through study abroad or marriage to a Western man for some young, ambitious Japanese women.

My current work is on the lesbian community and the politics of transgenderism in Japan. I am at work on a book project entitled "The Personal is Personal: Reading the Lesbian in Contemporary Japan," which is a cultural studies-based exploration of the major lesbian popular texts of the last twenty years, including autobiographies, zines, and pornography. I focus on the major sites of contestation around lesbian identity and subjectivity in this work, particularly around issues of butch-femme and sexual autonomy, coming out, privacy and visibility, and the question of sexual diversity. I have just finished a manuscript entitled "[Not] a Lesbian Feminist: Kakefuda Hiroko and the [Im]Possibility of the Lesbian Subject in 1990s Japan."