
The Other Women's Lib
Gender and Body in Japanese Women's Fiction, 1960-1973
Julia C. Bullock(Author)
University of Hawai'i Press
Published on 30. May 2010
Book
Hardback
224 pages
978-0-8248-3387-9 (ISBN)
Description
The Other Women's Lib 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 (Kono Taeko, Takahashi Takako, and Kurahashi Yumiko) for their avant-grade 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 - Julia Bullock 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 Other Women's Lib"" 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. Raised during the war to be 'good wives and wise mothers' yet young enough to take advantage of the opportunities presented to them by Occupation-era reforms, the authors who fueled the 1960s boom in women's literary publication staunchly resisted normative constructions of gender, crafting narratives that exposed or subverted hegemonic discourses of femininity that relegated women to the negative pole of a binary opposition to men. Their fictional heroines are unapologetically bad wives and even worse mothers; they are often wanton, excessive, or selfish and brazenly cynical with regard to traditional love, marriage, and motherhood.
More details
Product info
Hardback
Language
English
Place of publication
Honolulu, HI
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 231 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
454 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8248-3387-9 (9780824833879)
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Julia C. Bullock is assistant professor of Japanese at Emory University.