CJS Noon Lecture Series | Put to the Test: HIV/AIDS, Japan and Sexual Citizenship

Beginning with the recounting of his personal experience of undergoing an involuntary HIV test in Japan in 2016, Treat explores recent work on abjection by LGBT scholars and its intersection with recent critiques of the concept of sexual, or "intimate," citizenship and social activism based on it. Literary works to be discussed include HIV+ poet Hasegawa Takeshi’s Confessions of Bearine de Pink (2005) and Japan’s first cell phone novel, Yoshi Yū's Ayu no monogatari (2002).

John Whittier Treat is Emeritus Professor in the Department of East Asia Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He is the author of Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb; Great Mirrors Shattered: Orientalism, Japan and Homosexuality; and The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature.

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Image credit: Masami Teraoka, Geisha and Fox (1988)