Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan

From Book News, Inc.
Allison (anthropology, Duke U.) explores the varied culture of sex and sexuality, power relations, and gender dynamics in contemporary Japan. She looks at sexual images in cartoons and comic books, mother-son incest stories in popular books and magazines, pornography, obscenity laws, and the rituals and ideology surrounding school lunches. Includes b&w illustrations. Paper edition (unseen), $22.00. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

John Comaroff, University of Chicago
"Allison brings an unusual mix of passion and imagination, thoughtfulness and energy to her writing. This book will be controversial, which is all to the good: it challenges us to see Japanese popular culture, sexuality, and society in a new, angular light--and to rethink many comfortable truisms as we do. A remarkable piece of work."

Karen Kelsky, Journal of the History of Sexuality
"An important work. . . . Permitted and Prohibited Desires is a valuable contribution to anthropology and cultural studies, providing at once an accessible introduction to some of the most influential recent Western theoretical trends, and an experimental foray into the applicability of this theory in a non-Western cultural setting."

Book Description
This provocative study of gender and sexuality in contemporary Japan investigates elements of Japanese popular culture including erotic comic books, stories of mother-son incest, lunchboxesor obentosthat mothers ritualistically prepare for schoolchildren, and children's cartoons. Anne Allison brings recent feminist psychoanalytic and Marxist theory to bear on representations of sexuality, motherhood, and gender in these and other aspects of Japanese culture. Based on five years of fieldwork in a middle-class Tokyo neighborhood, this theoretically informed, accessible ethnographic study provides a provocative analysis of how sexuality, dominance, and desire are reproduced and enacted in late-capitalistic Japan.

About the Author
Anne Allison is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Duke University, and author of Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (1994).


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An important work￯﾿ﾽPermitted and Prohibited Desires is a valuable contribution to anthropology and cultural studies, providing at once an accessible introduction to some of the most influential recent Western theoretical trends and an experimental foray into the applicability of these theories in a non-Western cultural setting.


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