Event Information: Seminar. “Adultery and Gendered-biased Sexual Modernity in Japan.” (Sep.9)(ended)
Title: Adultery and Gendered-biased Sexual Modernity in Japan
Speaker: Prof. Harald Fuess (the Professor for Cultural Economic History at Heidelberg University)
Date: Sep. 9, 16:30-18:30
Venue: 5th Floor, Fuculty of Letters Main Bldg.
Abst.
State and societies have traditionally punished, sanctioned, or tolerated adultery in various ways. For Japan one can argue that legal discrimination against wives lessened after the opening of the country in the nineteenthcentury before adultery was completely abolished as a crime about one hundred years later. It is natural to assume a positive impact of Western ideas in shaping Japanese laws toward gender equality but a closer look at adultery legislation and court cases, however, reveals a more differentiated picture of European because the “West” was less homogenous and progressive than is often assumed. This presentation argues that Western legal influence instead of being liberating and moving towards gender equality reinforced legal distinctions in the criminalization of the extramarital behavior of husbands and their wives in the name of modernity.
