Tomiko Yoda : "The Formation of Girl-centered Consumer Culture in Japan."

Tomiko Yoda is an associate professor in the Department of Asian and African Languages and Literature, Program in Literature, and Women’s Studies at Duke University. Her book Gender and National Literature: Heian Texts in the Construction of Japanese Modernity (Duke University Press, 2003) studies modern scholarships on classical Japanese literature through the discipline’s interrelated impetus to modernize, nationalize and gender literary discourses from the distant past. She is also a co-editor of a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on socio-cultural as well as political economic transformations of Japan in the 1990s, “Millennial Japan: Rethinking the Nation in the Age of Recession.” Her current project tentatively titled, Desiring Women: Gender and the Economy of Consumption in Contemporary Japan studies the feminization of consumer culture in contemporary Japan through its relation to the intensification and modification of gender division of labor that occurred in the process of the nation’s post-modernization.