This article traces how the discourse surrounding the ‘expulsion’ of a Czech Republic political activist, Jan Šinágl, which led to his prosecution in July 2012, brings to light the violence embedded in the new order formed with the collapse of the socialist regime in 1989. The term ‘expulsion’ refers to the violent deportations of large numbers of Germans by Czechs at the end of the Second World War and during the post-war period. This article uses the method of Claude Lévi-Strauss's mythology to compare Šinágl's discourse on ‘expulsion’ with the discourse of Slovak historian Danubius and Václav Havel's Prague Castle speech, both of which refer to ‘expulsion.’ Using Walter Benjamin's Critique of Violence as a guide, this article argues how Šinágl's discourse on ‘expulsion’ as ‘divine violence’ exposes the ‘mythic violence’ latent in the self-image of the purified ‘us.’
　While this article shares research interests and methods with previous studies on post-socialism concerning the contemporary effects of memories, including the socialist period, it sheds light on new aspects of post-socialism. Specifically, previous studies have focused on cultural representations of the socialist period to elucidate the conditions under which the time and space of post-socialism have been organized. On the contrary, this article explores how the discourse of a political activist, which exposes the violence of order, reorganizes the time and space of post-socialism. Thus, this article provides insight into the paradigm shift from post-socialism to post-post-socialism in the political and cultural spheres of the Czech Republic.

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　This paper analyzed how Japanese married immigrant women in South Korea handle the political and historical issues between Japan and South Korea when these issues intervene in their lives. In this paper, I analyzed two types of data. The first is a narrative in which they discuss political and historical issues with their Korean husbands, and the other is a narrative in which they do not discuss those issues with their husbands. The analysis focused on the small stories that appeared in their interviews and analyzed them based on Bamberg's positioning analysis method for the purpose of investigating how they were involved in political and historical issues between Japan and South Korea while they are talking with their husbands.
　As a result, in the case of the couples who did not discuss, it was found that political and historical issues between Japan and South Korea are recognized as a factor which made the couple's relationships worse. And it became clear that they were trying to separate those topics from their conversations to protect their peace. In the case of the couples who discussed these issues, I found they also noticed that these issues made the couple relationship worse. Even realizing this point, they didn't stop talking about these issues. However, when talking about that topic, the couple were careful not to be confused by the national strategies of Japan and South Korea, and they tried to talk based on information from countries other than Japan and South Korea.

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　As an artist, photographer, and critic, Martha Rosler (1943-) has developed critical practices from a materialist feminist standpoint. In the early 1970s, she cultivated her thought and artistic practices by critically engaging with conceptual art and photography history in the postgraduate school of the University of California, San Diego, being also active both in the Marxist Literary Group led by Fredric Jameson and in a socialist feminist group. Influenced by Marxism and socialist feminism, her feminism is sharply differentiated from that of other feminist artists such as Judy Chicago, who was also active in the West Coast in the same period. Rosler's feminism is socialist one and different from Chicago's cultural feminism, according to which there is a female nature or essence rooted in biological sex, but how it is so has rarely been investigated in depth. This relative lack of explanation seems partly related to the problem of the historiography of US “second-wave feminism,” which often ignores the history of socialist feminism. Paying attention to the movement's history and the influence it exerted on the artist, this essay rereads Rosler's critical writings and reinterprets her artistic works in the light of Social Reproduction Theory. By doing so, this paper shows that many of the wide-ranging themes of her artworks—the constraint of female bodies, women's labor, war and the domestic sphere, international politics and the everyday, etc.—can be understood coherently as a critique of capital in general from the social reproductive vantage point.

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　This paper discusses early striptease in Japan, which began in 1947. It explores the working conditions of the strippers from materials of the time, takes up their discourse, and focuses on the fact that stripping is not a one-sided spectacle but an act of “looking back” at the audiences.
　The strippers of this period came from a variety of backgrounds. Because successful strippers could earn more than in other professions, many started stripping for a living. Nevertheless, although it was observed as a form of entertainment, audiences looked at them with pity. However, some of the strippers regarded stripping as an art form. This paper points out that the strippers' aspiration for “art” and the act of “looking back” at the audience for that, was to overturn the audience's pity and onesided sexual objectification.
　Moreover, in the “live” performance space of striptease, the audience and the stripper's gaze are directly connected, unlike in film or photography, and the audience's reaction influences the stripper's motivation to dance. Striptease in the afore-mentioned period also enabled the performers to express themselves in a way that deviated from the sexual norms of the time.
　Striptease at that time provided women with a way to earn a salary without directly selling their bodies; however, the working environment was problematic. This paper also points out that the “agentic” discourse of strippers in the media is biased toward the voices of strippers who were famous and profitable.

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　“Street” is a key term in recent cultural studies. However, generally, cultural studies regard “street” affirmatively as a space for social movements and attempt to set a binary opposition between repression by the government or capital power and civil resistance on the street. This study challenges contemporary views on the matter and attempts to show the street's complicated power dynamics. The research subjects are art activities on the street in the late Taishō period because that was a period of confusion when many democratic movements arose, but it also led to militarism in subsequent years.
　Particularly, this study analyzes the activities of Mavo, a group that played a central role in the new art movement in the Taishō period, and the pageant of the playwright Shoyo Tsubouchi. What linked them is that they both attempted to get out of the conventional space meant for art or theater and took them into the street where the people lived, thereby giving them completely different meanings. Mavo attempted to influence the people and become the people by combining their lives with art. Tsubouchi intended to produce an orderly street by unifying the people into a “nation,” erasing their diverse cultures, and unifying them into a new, highly artistic popular art culture, even though he had praised “democracy” and “active participation” of the people. The study shows that street activities cannot be affirmed only by using the street, and the concept of democracy must be reexamined.

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　Although many individuals use mobile dating apps as convenient tools to navigate their intimate lives, scholars in the West have begun to problematize blatant discriminatory behavior, particularly on platforms designed for men who have sex with men (MSM). The current study explored the contemporary gay dating culture by conducting in-depth interviews with 12 users of MSM-specific dating apps in Japan, investigating the relationship between the role of technological change on intimacy and discriminatory practices. One of the most common forms of discrimination in gay communities, namely sissyphobia, was chosen as a case study. The findings were consistent with the existing research that the highly eroticized, efficiency-oriented, and instantly connectable nature of dating apps contributes to a discrimination-prone environment. In addition, the construction of sexual preferences as “personal” discourses justifies offensive language on dating profiles. However, subtle exclusion practices favored among Japanese users may make online discrimination relatively undetectable. Moreover, the local construction of normative masculinity, which does not necessarily emphasize masculine-and-muscular looks, potentially obscures sissyphobia in the context of MSM-specific dating apps where performing exaggerated masculinity is usually critical.

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