Workshop: Rethinking AIDS Literature

 

• Date and Time: Monday, October 26, 2026, 3:00 PM – 5:45 PM
• Venue: Conference Room 1, Toyama Campus, Waseda University (3rd Floor, Building 33)
• Language: English and Japanese

In the late 1980s, Japanese society experienced what became known as the “AIDS Panic,” as widespread anxiety over HIV/AIDS was fueled by sensational media coverage. This moral panic intensified prejudice and discrimination against people living with HIV/AIDS, sexual minorities, foreigners, and sex workers, giving rise to public discourses that sought to exclude “dangerous bodies” and “dangerous sexualities.” Taking the AIDS Panic as a historical point of departure, this workshop examines how the discourses of fear and exclusion that emerged in the late 1980s have been reshaped under neoliberalism, fostering homophobia, discrimination against minorities, and xenophobia. By comparing Japanese and American AIDS literature, we explore how literary representations of HIV/AIDS negotiate the politics of vulnerability and the production of the “dangerous other.”

Program

• Opening Remarks: Hideto Tsuboi (Waseda University)
• Presentations: 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM

John Treat (Emeritus Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures, Yale University)　A Half-Century of American AIDS Fiction

Chris Lowy (William S. Dietrich II Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies, Carnegie Mellon University)　The Afterlives of AIDS Literature in Japan

• Roundtable Discussion: 4:40PM–5:45PM

Kayo Takeuchi (Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University)

Profiles

John Treat

John Treat is the author of Great Mirrors Shattered: Homosexuality, Orientalism and Japan（Oxford University Press,1999）and the forthcoming Remembering Our Own: The AIDS Stories. His latest novel, The Seventh City of Refuge, is now available from Phylum Press.

Chris Lowy

Chris Lowy is the William S. Dietrich II Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. Recent publications include The Architecture of Written Japanese (co-authored with Konno Shinji), “Literary Expression at the Ends of Unicode: The Strange Case of EnJoe Toh” (The Journal of Asian Studies), and “Red Hair and Orchids: The Possibility of Reading AIDS in Nakagami Kenji” (Journal of Waseda International House of Literature). His current research examines Japanese responses to the AIDS crisis.

Kayo Takeuchi

Kayo Takeuchi is a professor at Aoyama Gakuin University, in Tokyo. She specializes in modern Japanese literature, and also works in gender studies, queer theory, and disability studies. She is the author of Queering Contemporary Japanese Literature: Care, Animals, and Narrative (Seikyusha, 2023).

 

Organizer

Waseda University Research Institute for Letters, Arts and Sciences
Ryusaku Tsunoda Center of Japanese Culture
SGU Global Japanese Studies

Co-organized by: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research “Postwar Japan as Wound/Scar: Biopolitics and Literature in the Post-Cold War Era” (Principal Investigator: Hideto Tsuboi, 24K21362)