'Ukiyo' was both a state of mind and a world of pleasure-seeking. It offered freedom from the limitations placed by the Tokugawa shogunate. It also gave the merchant class, and urban life in...Show more'Ukiyo' was both a state of mind and a world of pleasure-seeking. It offered freedom from the limitations placed by the Tokugawa shogunate. It also gave the merchant class, and urban life in general, a break from the controlling samurai warrior class. Edo (present-day Tokyo) society was generally regarded as a highly controlled society. Not unexpectedly, the Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka pleasure districts were likewise restricted. The most well-known of them was the Yoshiwara licensed brothel district, a separate walled town to the north of the main city that was exclusively created to entertain its male inhabitants. While ukiyo-e like paintings, prints, and illustrated books portrayed nearly every element of coeval Japanese society in Edo, pictures of female entertainers and pleasure districts in Yoshiwara were the most prevalent. A large selection of these portrayed women, although perhaps unintentionally by the artist because of the different social roles women had back then, are depicted in an objectifying manner. This is especially the case in bijinga, literally translated as ‘images of beautiful women’. The women, although it is debatable whether the depicted women are supposed to represent the actual women from the Edo period or if they are merely icons, are put down as objects of desire and vessels for reproduction among other things. In this paper, I will shed light on this issue and question whether ‘celebration’ or ‘aesthetic’ are used as a justification for these forms of objectification or not. Using ambiguous prints, I will give an analysis of the different perspectives and explanations that exist about that specific print.Show less
This is a well-argued thesis on a pertinent topic - revisiting the objectification of women in the genre of bijinga in early modern Japan. The thesis emphasises the need to revisit the...Show moreThis is a well-argued thesis on a pertinent topic - revisiting the objectification of women in the genre of bijinga in early modern Japan. The thesis emphasises the need to revisit the interpretation of women in this genre in relation to the historical functions of these images - advertising and selling the floating world. Based on analysis of selected case studies, the thesis argues convincingly that the escapist nature of representations of the floating world in ukiyo-e does not absolve researchers from their ethical responsibility to consider the historical realities behind the depiction of beautiful women. They were not just beautiful women but also sex workers, and their sophisticated and eroticized depiction in ukiyo-e purposefully glossed over these realities. Edo Period viewers of these images were aware of these realities to some extent but contemporary (Western) viewers are oftentimes not, which makes historical contextualization important for understanding the historical functions of these images. The thesis also argues that some bijinga depicted women more empathetically, and that this aspect has been marginalized due to the relatively uncritical interpretation of bijinga in past research primarily as an example of idealized art. For future research, the discussion of these marginalized bijinga can be extended.Show less
