Resemantizing Gender Stereotypes: Reproductions, Experiments and Challenges in China and Japan. Editors’ Introduction

This special issue draws on and expands a fruitful and engaging discussion that took place at the workshop on “Resemantizing Gender Stereotypes in 21st-Century Asian Societies: Reproductions, Experiments and Challenges in China and Japan”, held at the University of Bologna on 19 March 2025 and organized by the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures. The six scholarly articles included in the issue, emphasizing suggestions raised during the workshop, analyze recent reproductions of stereotypes surrounding femininity, masculinity, gender conformity and non-conformity, and sexuality, as well as cases or experiments of resistance and questioning. To maintain an interdisciplinary approach that is vital to capture the complexity of the issues scrutinized here, the articles move across a variety of fields – cultural studies, film, literature, media, and translation. Finally, although we focus on present-day societies and how gender stereotypes are resemantized in the contemporary environment, the issue is also based on a solid understanding of how they originated and evolved throughout history.