Gendering Fascism: Visual Propaganda in Wartime Japan
Final Report Abstract
International fascism studies has produced a number of investigations discussing the role of women and ideas of femininity, masculinity or even sexuality in fascist countries, but a systematic study of the role of gender in different fascist systems, movements and ideologies is still missing. This particular project, ‘Gendering Fascism’, is not intended as to substitute such a large-scale study, but it addressed the need for one and provided an empirical analysis and theoretical arguments for a broader approach to ‘gendering fascism’. The team, comprised of the principal investigator and her doctoral student, examined visual material pertaining to gender in Japanese propaganda during the Fifteen-Year War (1931- 1945). Specifically, the team examined illustrated propaganda magazines that were published between 1932 and 1945 (NIPPON, FRONT, Manchuria Graph, Hokushi). In a close reading of explicit and implicit gender representations the team also examined the complexities and contradictions of visual language. Detailed analysis showed that gendered representations do not (simply) mirror a given gender order but function as productive and constitutive ‘scripting’ elements in versions of fascist modernity. In the material under consideration, gender served as a technology in Teresa de Lauretis’ sense, and as a tool within propaganda that was employed in repetitive and varying, dynamic, and (de)stabilising ways. Applying the concept of ‘visual grammar’, in which gendered visuals and visual sequences are understood - akin to grammatical elements - as relational and functional within an, albeit arbitrarily, fixed semiotic order, gender could be recognised as an important naturalising factor for stabilising hegemonic demands and relations. It also revealed that, in contrast to communist totalitarian propaganda, fascist versions of totalitarian propaganda stressed ideas of gender difference and binary gender, while it propagated decidedly utilitarian and indeed modern images of masculinity and femininity. Building on these empirical and theoretical insights, the team, together with international scholars of gender and fascism studies, also compiled transnational and transregional case studies from the Asian, US-American and European regions. Through the lens of gender, these studies revealed locally specific and also circulated and shared forms of fascisms. Highlighting the transnational and transregional elements in these case studies served to decentre Eurocentric definitions of fascism and helped to sharpen the contours of the gendered similarities in various fascist manifestations of ideology, propaganda and organisation.
