Office: HMNSS 2504
Phone: (951) 827-7507
Fax: (951) 827-2160

leslie.winston@ucr.edu

LESLIE WINSTON
Visiting Assistant Professor, Japanese/Comparative Literature

Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles, 2002

Leslie Winston specializes in modern Japanese literature, focusing on the sexed subject of the 1890s and early twentieth century, particularly that of writers Shimizu Shikin (1868-1933), Higuchi Ichiyô (1872-1896), Shimazaki Tôson (1872-1943), and Tokuda Shûsei (1872-1943). Professor Winston’s fields of specialization include gender studies, film studies, gothic literature, the construction of Japanese identity through icons such as the geisha, and the emergence of modern Japanese prose fiction and questions of canonization. With a background in eighteenth and nineteenth-century British and American literature, Prof. Winston also pursues comparative studies with Japanese literature. Professor Winston’s publications include “The Voice of Sex and the Sex of Voice in Higuchi Ichiyô and Shimizu Shikin,” in The Linguistic Turn in Contemporary Japanese Literary Studies: Politics, Language, Textuality, ed. and intro. Michael Bourdaghs (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies) Forthcoming in Spring 2008; “Beyond Modern: Shimizu Shikin and ‘Two Modern Girls’” and translation of “Two Modern Girls” (Tôsei futari musume, 1897) by Shimizu Shikin Critical Asian Studies.  September 2007 (39.3); and “Where the Low and the Abject Collide: Shimazaki Tôson’s Female Subject in The Family” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal. December, 2004 (27).

Her current interest lies in intersexuality as an expression of the ambivalence or rejection of categories of sex. Interrogating the female subject from the late 19th century through the first two decades of the 20th, Professor Winston explores Shikin’s uses of the intersexual strategically to displace the body as site of difference. Shikin severs the causal link between sex and gender, thereby refuting the popular notion that behavior is rooted in the body. In this project, Professor Winston focuses on the trope of intersexuality in reading the female subject in Shikin's and Shûsei’s work as a counter-discourse to the dominant narratives on sexuality. The body of the hermaphrodite confirmed that the roles the state insisted women should assume, in fact had no basis in "nature." As sexologists and scientists were making efforts to eliminate hermaphroditism, Shikin and Shûsei were invigorating it as an alternate discourse.

On this project, she has presented the following papers: “Performing the Hermaphrodite: Tokuda Shûsei’s Counter-Discourse to Gender Dimorphism in Arakure (Rough Living, 1915)” at PostGender Conference: Gender Identity, Performativity and Sexuality in Japanese Culture at Tikotin Japanese Museum of Art, Haifa, Israel, December 8-9, 2005; “Counter-narratives of Sexuality in Meiji/Taishô Japan” at Stanford University, Japan Luncheon Series sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and Stanford Society of Fellows in Japanese Studies, November 28, 2005; “In Search of the Perfect Body: Intersexuality as Trope for Reading the Female Subject,” at the German Institute for Japanese Studies, Tokyo, Japan, January 5, 2005.