Sabine Frühstück
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Sabine Frühstück is Distinguished Professor and the Koichi Takashima Chair in Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She mostly uses historical and ethnographic methodologies and takes visual and material culture seriously. Her scholarship centers modern and contemporary Japanese culture and its relations to other parts of the world. Frühstück enjoys building synergies, rethinking the conventions of scholarly work, and probing national, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries.
Sabine Frühstück joins the Paris IAS in June 2027 for a one-month writing residency.
Research topics
Mass violence/war; gender; sexuality and the body; childhood.
Artificial Bodies, Naked Truths
Situated within the history of the Japanese empire and post-empire, this project aims to
make a historically grounded and theoretically sound case that the modern military has
imagined the human body not as an organic coherent whole but always already in
(replaceable) parts—measured in centimeters and kilograms at conscription exams,
categorized in classes of health and fitness for military service, and returned home
mutilated or as human remains.
More than any other institution, the modern military has, thus, been invested in crafting and recrafting the right kind of bodies (and minds) to populate and animate it. At the same time, the military’s charge has been ultimately harmful—both physically and psychologically, if not entirely destructive to many of those same bodies and minds. A series of technological innovations has been designed to build, repair, and enhance human bodies prepared for and damaged by mass violence.
Accordingly, this project advances the claim that, in the Japanese empire and post-empire, the crafting and recrafting of the modern military body forged unlikely bonds among dramatically different platforms and actors: the battlefield and the theater stage, craftspeople, the imperial household, and activist artists.
Key publications
Sabine Frühstück, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan, Cambridge University Press, 2023.
DOI: 10.1017/9781108354967
Sabine Frühstück, Playing War: Children and the Modern Paradoxes of Militarism in Japan, University of California Press, 2017.
DOI: 10.1525/9780520968233
Sabine Frühstück, Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army, University of California Press, 2007.
DOI: 10.1525/9780520939646
Sabine Frühstück, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan, University of California Press, 2003.
DOI: 10.24201/EAA.V40I3.1773
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