Artist Saimdang was selected to feature of the 50,000-won banknote to raise awareness of gender equality within Korea. However, this choice caused great controversy amongst many feminist commentators, who saw the selection as a way for the government to promote historic Confucian notions of gender identity and patriarchal expectations of women.
In 1968, Muhammad Reza Shah, the Pahlavi monarch of Iran made his first official visit to Malaysia. For the Iranian Shah, his visit to the region was part of his outreach to Third World nations to position himself as a leader of the Global South.
by Zayra Badillo Castro For women, war is never over. Rasul Gamzatov, (1923-2003) Poet, Dagestan, Russian Federation Makhachkala is not a city often covered in the news. The capital city of the Republic of Dagestan, an administrative entity under the Russian Federation located in the North Caucasus, has become a headline since the start of…
Murayama’s photographic series Kitanai Odori displays Murayama’s body in the throes of an ecstatic nude performance, demonstrating a visual embodiment of an emancipated self. Mavo artists challenged the Japanese government’s social matrix and programme of homogeneity, and for it the group suffered dearly.
“There was a silence at the heart of the flying bodies; there was a soundless sound; there was a motion meaningless as the awful collision of particles beyond sight; there was an energy purposeful of intention but beyond understanding. A man must lose his life to find it.”
by Amelia Storey On a recent visit to my local arts centre, I found myself looking down onto their café’s courtyard from the first floor exhibition room. To my astonishment, I realised that the café tables were positioned immediately next to tombstones – close enough to lean your chair back against. I recognised then that…
The implementation of a Euroamerican binary in nineteenth century Japan fuelled an erasure of indigenous gender identities; the subsequent impact of centring biological sex had significant effect on contemporary Japanese society.
The construction of modern sexuality emphasises the sameness of biological gender between sexual object and sexual subject, which did not operate in Japan as it could not accommodate these existing gender constructions. The intense connection of the Nikkō Tōshōgu to the Tokugawa meant that it was intrinsically connected to a time that was becoming increasingly demonised as deviant.
More about this episode Samples of music in this podcast have been for research and academic discussion only. Podcast transcript This is a SOAS History Blog Podcast. In this installment, we bring you Walter Rodney Prize winner Saffa Khalil discussing her award-winning dissertation with SOAS staff member Henny Ziai. For further information about the music…
