In Japan and other places, modernity has given rise to what might be called a “penis industry”: a complex of urological knowledge, business interests, and advertising media that, by instilling a fear in impressionable young males that their genitalia embody a shameful departure from the physical norm, extracts money from their wallets to carry out one or another kind of treatment. This talk considers the emergence of the penis industry in early twentieth-century Japan, focusing on the advertising strategies that its entrepreneurs developed in print to promote a distinctly modern form of psychological anxiety.

Gregory Pflugfelder is an associate professor of Japanese history in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Department of History at Columbia University. Professor Pflugfelder's current work engages the construction of masculinities, the history of the body, and representations of monstrosity. His books include JAPANimals: History and Culture in Japan's Animal Life, coedited with Brett L. Walker (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, 2005); Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950 (University of California Press, 1999) and Politics and the Kitchen: A History of the Women's Suffrage Movement in Akita Prefecture (in Japanese; Domesu, 1986). His latest writing projects are "Growing Up with Godzilla: A Global History" and "Mobo: Playing the 'Modern Boy' in Interwar Japan and Its Empire." Professor Pflugfelder received his BA from Harvard (1981), his MA from Waseda (1984), and his PhD from Stanford (1996). He has been teaching at Columbia since 1996.

Free and open to the public.

This event is part of the Thursday Series of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg with support from the Lesbian-Gay-Queer Research Initiative.