Encina Hall, S329
616 Serra Street
Stanford CA 94305-6055

mmason2@stanford.edu
(650) 724-4716 (voice)
(650) 725-2592 (fax)

Research Interests
Modern Japanese literature and history, colonial/post-colonial studies, gender and masculinity, modernity, issues of the nuclear age and peace movements.

Michele Mason is a FSI Japan Studies postdoctoral fellow. Her training in modern Japanese literature has been informed by a cultural studies approach, with an abiding concern for historical understanding. Dr. Mason's research and teaching interests include modern Japanese literature and history, colonial/postcolonial studies, gender and feminist studies, and masculinity studies. She also continues her engaged study of nuclear studies and peace and nuclear abolition movements.

Dr. Mason is currently working on two book projects. The first is a manuscript, provisionally titled Peripheral Visions: Imagining Hokkaido and Instituting Imperial Japan, which is based, in part, on her dissertation. This work examines how "visions" of Japan's first modern colony, Hokkaido, played a crucial role in the construction of imperial ideology, the modern military, Japanese subjects and national identity. Through her readings of Meiji literary representations, government policies and pronouncements, and media and popular accounts, she argues that powerful rhetorical modes were deployed to construct Hokkaido, variously, as a natural part of the Japanese archipelago and a remote foreign land; a fount of untouched natural resources and an empty wasteland of snow and ice; a utopian escape and a desolate dead-end; a proving ground for national masculinity and a metaphor for modern angst. This project reconsiders Hokkaido's ambivalent colonial status, and highlights the significance of gender, and specifically masculinity, in shaping modern Japan.

Dr. Mason is also editing an anthology on colonial literature entitled Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context, and Critique. This work offers an innovative format that couples invaluable first-time translated primary texts of the Japanese colonial era with critical interpretive essays by experts in the field. The primary sources and analytical works address Japan's wide range of formal and semi-colonial territories, including Hokkaido, Okinawa, Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, China and the South Seas. The primary documents span a variety of genres, for example, government legal documents, a travelogue, several short stories and an excerpt from a novel, as well as a cookbook and serialized cartoon. This anthology marshals an impressive body of current critical theories for reading colonial texts and, thus, will be useful to scholars who seek a practical guide for teaching and analyzing Japanese colonial texts as well as any scholar concerned about the broader questions of colonialism in the past and present.

This spring Dr. Mason will offer a course, Feminist Theory and Masculinity Studies, which uses feminist theory to understand the origins, methodologies and trajectory of masculinity studies. Students will read landmark feminist writings that ultimately severed "masculinity" from "men," revealing the constructed nature of male power and social, political and sexual inequality. Tracing the contentious history of masculinity studies, students will study hegemonic and marginalized masculinities, the notion of gender performativity, mythopoetic and pro-feminist men's movements, and constructions of masculinity intersecting with race, sexuality, nationalism, colonialism, and more.

Dr. Mason received a B.A. in Linguistics and Japanese from the University of Oregon, Eugene (1989), an M.A. in modern Japanese literature from the University of California, Los Angeles (1995) and a Ph.D. in modern Japanese literature with an emphasis on cultural studies from the University of California, Irvine (2005).

Other affiliations
Stanford Society of Fellows in Japanese Studies