Contemporary Japanese tanka as a gender identity formation practice: presentation of the corpus

Tanka is primarily known as a classical Japanese form of metrical short-verse poetry, consisting of five lines with syllable counts of 5-7-5-7-7. The use of tanka by younger generations as a tool to express their gender identity in an increasingly colloquial language has contributed to the so-called tanka boom phenomenon on social media, making this poetry genre relevant as a gender identity formation practice in the digital setting. In her essay About Tanka (2016), poet Ishikawa Mina asserts: “stated or unstated, reliable or unreliable, the ‘I’ unquestionably remains the center of tanka practice.” This talk will introduce the PhD project’s corpus. The close reading of the proposed corpus aims to collect textual evidence of the role performed by the ‘I’ from the early 2000s to the present day. To this end, I rely on Culler’s Theory of the Lyric (2015) to define my understanding of tanka as a genre, and on World Poetry Theory (Benozzo, 2021) in order to discuss its relation to media ecosystems shaped by the convergence of literary, visual, and material cultures (Ensslin, Round, Thomas, 2023). This research aims to clarify the ways in which tanka operates as an agent in gender identity formation practices while reflecting upon the effects of interconnectivity of online communities.

To attendants from outside the Department: Please pre-register with the seminar organizer, Jaqueline Berndt (jberndt@su.se), to allow access to the venue.