Jonathan D Mackintosh, PhD, MA

Lecturer in Japanese Studies

Contact details

Department of Media and Cultural Studies
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street, Bloomsbury
London WC1E 7HX
email: jd.mackintosh@bbk.ac.uk
tel: 020 7631 6132

Jonathan lectures in Japanese Studies, with a focus on modern Japanese social and cultural history.

Research

Jonathan’s interests include two main strands. The first focuses on gender and sexuality and how these are shaped by race/ethnicity and the nation. Concerned with how male-male relationships are represented and expressed through the body, he has developed a special interest in the discursive history of masculinity and everyday history of manliness.

The second strand reflects Jonathan’s concern with how community and identity are shaped in cross-cultural contact and how this contact enables us to understand identity within a wider trans-national context. In his most recent research, Jonathan focuses on the social, material, and cultural history of the Japanese in North America in the mid twentieth century.

Teaching

Jonathan is Programme Co-ordinator of the Certificate of Higher Education: Language and Culture (Japan), as well as Class Co-ordinator of Birkbeck’s Japanese Language Classes. He co-ordinates and convenes ‘Rethinking Japan: Introduction to Modern Japanese Culture and Society’, which is offered to the BA Japanese and Media/Film, BA Linguistics and Languages, and BA Modern Languages.

He also teaches on the MA Japanese Cultural Studies/Japanese Creative Industries Studies where he convenes the following courses: ‘Men and Masculinities in East Asia’; ‘Occidental Desire: Race and the Representations of the West in Japan’; and ‘Of Japanese Descent: Japanese Communities and Identities outside of Japan’.

Postgraduate Supervision

Jonathan can supervise on a range of areas, and welcomes supervision enquiries on twentieth-century cultural history, gender and sexuality studies including historical and contemporary masculinities, diaspora and transnationalism especially in the context of the Americas.

Jonathan’s current research student is researching alternative therapies in Japan.

Publications

Books

Jonathan’s first book is called Homosexuality and Manliness in Postwar Japan (Routledge, 2009). It looks at the constructions and representations of male-male sexuality and manliness as they were explored in the first years of Japan’s first specialist magazines catering to male-male sexuality: Barazoku (The Rose Tribes), The Adonis Boy, Adon, and Sabu.

Taking their cue from this genre of lifestyle and erotic articulation, it explores various episodes in this history of men across the early-to-mid postwar period and earlier including: the first stirrings of a homo movement in the early 1970s, which in turn sparked expressions of virulent anti-homo sentiment; the impact of American ideologies and idealisations on the conception of Japanese manly beauty from the 1950s to the 1970s; manly ethics and a geneology of masculine expression; and finally the very modern love of elder and youth.

At the level of masculinities studies, it suggests how the articulations of the men who love men may speak to wider histories of men, and at the level of historiography, it explores ways we might bring together narrative and history.

Monograph

• Homosexuality and Manliness in Postwar Japan – (Routledge, September 2009)

Collected edited volume

• Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in North-East Asia: What A Difference A Region Makes (Co-edited with C. Berry, N. Liscutin) – (University of Hong Kong Press, 2009)

Selected articles and chapters

• ‘Embodied Masculinities of Male-Male Desire in Japan in the Early 1970s’ in P. Jackson, F. Martin, M.McLelland, A. Yue (eds), Rethinking Gender and Sexuality in the Asia-Pacific (Ohio University Press, 2009)
• 'A Japanese Homo 'Moving' - Itō Bungaku and the Solidarity of the Rose Tribes', Intersections, 13, 2006

Selected book reviews

• Toake Endoh, Exporting Japan: Politics of Emigration to Latin America (University of Illinois Press 2009), Reviews in History, Institute of Historical Research (In press: publication in Fall 2009)
• Roland Kelts, Japanamerica: How Japanese Popular Culture Has Invaded the US (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 3, no. 1 (March 2008))

Non-academic

• ‘Those Weird Japanese – Some Thoughts on Salarymen, Orientalism, and British East Asians’, Birkbeck Magazine, July 2006.
• ‘East Asia – Emergent Regional Culture or Resurgent Nationalisms? Report on the Birkbeck/Goldsmiths Symposium – “What A Difference a Region Makes: Cultural Studies/Cultural Industries in East Asia”’, Birkbeck Magazine, July 2006.