SOURCE: Iwamoto, Yoshio. “Ōe Kenzaburō's Warera no jidai (Our Generation).” World Literature Today 76, no. 1 (winter 2002): 43-51.

In the following essay, Iwamoto offers a critical reading of the relationship between politics, power, and sex in Warera no jidai.

“Power is sexy,” the pop psychiatrist Dr. Joyce Brothers recently declared¹ in commenting on the Gary Condit-Chandra Levy liaison, the latest in a seemingly endless succession of messy sex scandals involving high-profile Washington politicians. In fact, the varied ways in which sex, politics, and power are linked have now been discussed extensively for a very long time by pundits of all stripes, including in more recent years those scholars engaged in colonial and postcolonial discourses. Prominent in the latter deliberations are the works of such eminent intellectuals as Michel Foucault and Edward Said, whose contributions to studies in sexuality and colonialism respectively in the 1970s and 1980s have played important...