In this episode, Allison Alexy talks with Prof. Grace En-Yi Ting, an Assistant Professor in the Gender Studies Programme at the University of Hong Kong. Dr. Ting specializes in queer/feminist approaches to Japanese literary and cultural studies, with an emphasis on women writers in the modern period and girls’ culture. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Minor Intimacies: Queerness, the Normative, and the Everyday in Contemporary Japan, examining femininities and queer potentialities within literary and subcultural representations of daily life in post-1980’s Japan. Our conversation centers on her article "Ekuni Kaori’s Tears in the Night: The Brilliance of Queer Readings for Japanese Literary Studies," published in the Journal of Japanese Studies. Topics of discussion include: shojo and girls culture, pleasure, queer desires, the novel Kirakira Hikaru, homonormativity, activism and public scholarship, bad attitudes, feminist killjoys, social media, overlaps and disconnections between Asian Studies and Asian American Studies, and tensions surrounding sharing work publicly. You can find Dr. Ting on Twitter @graceting

Michigan Talks Japan is produced by Robin Griffin, Justin Schell, and Allison Alexy and is supported by the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan.