Although there have been seven Graduate Courses in the Gakushuin University Graduate School, it has grown increasingly clear that there was an academic area that was not being handled adequately by individual courses since the latter half of the 20th century. We referred to this area as "Culture of Corporeal Representation" and established it as an interdisciplinary research course.

The heart of the nineteenth-century scholarship was based on text (literature and words). Yet, contemporary culture cannot be discussed without representation (images). Arts developed in the 20th century, such as film, animation, and manga, have a huge place in contemporary culture; however, there has been no place to connect and research them as a new development of their precursor to representational art such as theater. Our "Graduate Course in Cultural Studies on Corporeal and Visual Representation" fills that academic void.

Plays, in which actors represent life in the world; films, in which celebrities are glamorously reflected; and manga and animation, whose characters span space and time, all of these took the body and image as their starting point and have made a significant impact on contemporary media environment and industry. What exactly is happening there? The "Graduate Course in Cultural Studies on Corporeal and Visual Representation" aims to investigate a field that is understood as feeling but is still unexplored academically.

Another aim of the course is to provide a foundation for research on the cultural possibilities for imagery and corporeality that could never be seen by absolutizing words and reason. To achieve this, we study the history and theories of corporeal representation culture in depth. In particular, corporeal representation is closely linked to the gender norms in society that produce it. ‘Corporeality’ represented in performing arts, films, and manga/animation disturbs and changes gender norms in each time. It is gender cultural theory that is the key to analyzing the social effects of such corporeal representations.

For the unique and far-reaching purpose of studying corporeal representation culture, our course has assembled a team of leading researchers working in a variety of fields, and we would like students to make good use of this cooperation and capture the essence of cutting-edge contemporary culture with their bodies and intellects.

Cultural Studies on Corporeal and Visual Representation is a new field that questions the cultural meaning created by the body as an image medium, focusing on performing arts, film art, manga/animation, and gender. In this course, you organically combine the fields of performing arts, film art, manga/animation, and gender as cultural studies that engages the body beyond language, region, and specialty and you learn more broadly and in greater depth.

This course is therefore most suited to those interested in theater, film, manga/animation, and gender, and to those who want to research these areas in cultural background that engages with the body.

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