With ongoing attempts since the early 1990s to elevate the low birth rate in Japan, the politics of reproduction are a highly contested realm in Japanese society. While policy makers’ attempts to influence reproductive behavior on an individual level have been scrutinized in diverse analyses, the role of the biomedical business and mass media has been mostly overlooked. Isabel Fassbender addresses this lacuna in her recent publication Active Pursuit of Pregnancy: Neoliberalism, Postfeminism and the Politics of Reproduction in Contemporary Japan (Brill, 2021) by using Critical Discourse Analysis on the „active pursuit of pregnancy“ (ninkatsu). In her talk, Isabel will not only focus on Critical Discourse Analysis as a research method in theory but also try to show a possible practical implementation by presenting concrete examples from her work. Details and registration here

Speaker:
Isabel Fassbender, Doshisha Women’s College, Kyoto