genderbook_cover Great news! My undergraduate dissertation, which I wrote in 2010, is going to be published in a book. Manga Girl Seeks Herbivore Boy is a collection of four dissertations on gender, all written by Japanese Studies undergrads at Cambridge in the past couple of years.

My own chapter in this book is about how fatherhood is portrayed in the textbooks they use for moral education classes in Japanese schools. The thing I’m most proud of in my contribution to this book is the methodology; I built on an ethnographic technique called Domain Analysis to visually map out the semantic fields of words relating to the father-child relationship.

Nevertheless, I find the topics covered by the other contributions to this book far more interesting. They cover transgender law, changing masculinities among young men, and manga. The book will be published on 23rd February, but it’s available for pre-order from a number of places. Profits go to the faculty. See the announcement here