James Welker
ジェームズ・ウェルカー
Professor
Cultural History, Globalization, Popular Culture, Gender/Sexuality, Fandom, LGBTQ+, Manga/Anime
English, Japanese
Yokohama , Japan
James Welker is a professor in the Department of Cross-Cultural Studies at Kanagawa University in Yokohama, Japan. His research focuses primarily on gender and sexuality in postwar and contemporary Japan, especially fan cultures, feminisms, and the LGBTQ+ community.
He is the author of Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls’ Comics Artists and Fans (Hawai‘i 2024), and editor of BL ga hiraku tobira: Ajia o hen’yō suru sekushuariti to jendā (Seidosha, 2019), “Queer(ing),” special issue of Mecadamia: Second Arc 13, no. 1 (2020), and Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia (Hawai‘i, 2022).
He is also the co-editor of Rethinking Japanese Feminisms (Hawai‘i, 2018), with Julia Bullock and Ayako Kano; Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan (Mississippi, 2015), with Mark McLelland, Kazumi Nagaike, and Katsuhiko Suganuma; Queer Voices from Japan: First-Person Narratives of Japan’s Sexual Minorities (Lexington, 2007), with Mark McLelland and Katsuhiko Suganuma; and “Of Queer Import(s): Sexualities, Genders and Rights in Asia,” a special issue of the journal Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific (no. 14, 2006), with Lucetta Kam. He has published a number of journal articles and book chapters on Boys Love (BL) media and its globalization, yuri media, the lesbian community, and the women's liberation movement in Japan.
PhD, East Asian Languages and Culture, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States, 2010
MA, Advanced Japanese Studies, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom, 2003
- Professor, Kanagawa University, 2019–
- Associate Professor, Kanagawa University, 2013–2019
- Postdoctoral Fellow, University of British Columbia, 2010–2012
James Welker, Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls’ Comics Artists and Fans (Hawai‘i, 2024)
James Welker, ed. Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia (Hawai‘i, 2022)
James Welker, ed. “Queer(ing),” special issue of Mechademia: Second Arc 13, no. 1 (2020)
ジェームズ・ウェルカー 編著 『BL開く扉 変容するアジアセクシュアリティジェンダー』 青土社 2019
Julia C. Bullock, Ayako Kano, and James Welker, eds., Rethinking Japanese Feminisms (Hawai‘i, 2018)
Mark McLelland, Kazumi Nagaike, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker, eds., Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan (Mississippi, 2015)
Mark McLelland, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker, eds., Queer Voices from Japan: First-Person Narratives from Japan’s Sexual Minorities (Lexington, 2007)
3/20/2024