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The Other Women's Lib: Gender and Body in Japanese Women's Fiction

Online ISBN:
9780824870836
Print ISBN:
9780824833879
Publisher:
University of Hawai'i Press
Book

The Other Women's Lib: Gender and Body in Japanese Women's Fiction

Julia C. Bullock
Julia C. Bullock
Emory University
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Published online:
17 November 2016
Published in print:
30 April 2010
Online ISBN:
9780824870836
Print ISBN:
9780824833879
Publisher:
University of Hawai'i Press

Abstract

This book provides the first systematic analysis of Japanese literary feminist discourse of the 1960s—a full decade before the “women's lib” movement emerged in Japan. It highlights the work of three well-known female fiction writers of this generation (Kōno Taeko, Takahashi Takako, and Kurahashi Yumiko) for their avant-garde literary challenges to dominant models of femininity. Focusing on four tropes persistently employed by these writers to protest oppressive gender stereotypes—the disciplinary masculine gaze, feminist misogyny, “odd bodies,” and female homoeroticism—the book brings to the fore their previously unrecognized theoretical contributions to second-wave radical feminist discourse. In all of these narrative strategies, the female body is viewed as both the object and instrument of engendering. Severing the discursive connection between bodily sex and gender is thus a primary objective of the narratives and a necessary first step toward a less restrictive vision of female subjectivity in modern Japan. The book further demonstrates that this “gender trouble” was historically embedded in the socioeconomic circumstances of the high-growth economy of the 1960s, when prosperity was underwritten by an increasingly conservative gendered division of labor that sought to confine women within feminine roles. The book affords a cogent and incisive analysis of these texts as feminist philosophy in fictional form, arguing persuasively for the inclusion of such literary feminist discourse in the broader history of Japanese feminist theoretical development.

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