Julia C. Bullock's Books

The Other Women's Lib

Gender and Body in Japanese Women's Fiction

By: Julia C. Bullock

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The Other Women's Lib

Gender and Body in Japanese Women's Fiction

By: Julia C. Bullock

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-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—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. The Other Women’s Lib 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. It will be accessible to undergraduate audiences and deeply stimulating to scholars and others interested in gender and culture in postwar Japan, Japanese women writers, or Japanese feminism.

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Page Count

217

Publisher

University of Hawaii Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0824882512

ISBN 13

9780824882518

The Other Women's Lib

Gender and Body in Japanese Women's Fiction

By: Julia C. Bullock

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Other Women's Lib

Gender and Body in Japanese Women's Fiction

By: Julia C. Bullock

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

217

Publisher

University of Hawaii Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0824882512

ISBN 13

9780824882518

Coeds Ruining the Nation

Women, Education, and Social Change in Postwar Japanese Media

By: Julia Bullock

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Coeds Ruining the Nation

Women, Education, and Social Change in Postwar Japanese Media

By: Julia Bullock

In the late 1800s, Japan introduced a new, sex-segregated educational system. Boys would be prepared to enter a rapidly modernizing public sphere, while girls trained to become “good wives and wise mothers” who would contribute to the nation by supporting their husbands and nurturing the next generation of imperial subjects. When this system was replaced by a coeducational model during the American Occupation following World War II, adults raised with gender-specific standards were afraid coeducation would cause “moral problems”—even societal collapse. By contrast, young people generally greeted coeducation with greater composure. This is the first book in English to explore the arguments for and against coeducation as presented in newspaper and magazine articles, cartoons, student-authored school newsletters, and roundtable discussions published in the Japanese press as these reforms were being implemented. It complicates the notion of the postwar years as a moment of rupture, highlighting prewar experiments with coeducation that belied objections that the practice was a foreign imposition and therefore “unnatural” for Japanese culture. It also illustrates a remarkable degree of continuity between prewar and postwar models of femininity, arguing that Occupation-era guarantees of equal educational opportunity were ultimately repurposed toward a gendered division of labor that underwrote the postwar project of economic recovery. Finally, it excavates discourses of gender and sexuality underlying the moral panic surrounding coeducation to demonstrate that claims of rampant sexual deviance and other concerns were employed as disciplinary mechanisms to reinforce an ideology of harmonious gender complementarity and to dissuade women from pursuing conventionally masculine prerogatives.

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Page Count

245

Publisher

University of Michigan Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0472054171

ISBN 13

9780472054176

Coeds Ruining the Nation

Women, Education, and Social Change in Postwar Japanese Media

By: Julia Bullock

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Coeds Ruining the Nation

Women, Education, and Social Change in Postwar Japanese Media

By: Julia Bullock

Average ratings

N/A

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

245

Publisher

University of Michigan Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0472125591

ISBN 13

9780472125593

Book's by Julia C. Bullock

The Other Women's Lib

The Other Women's Lib

The Other Women's Lib

The Other Women's Lib

Coeds Ruining the Nation

Coeds Ruining the Nation

Coeds Ruining the Nation

Coeds Ruining the Nation

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