Women's Identity Formation and Transformation in Contemporary Japan

Women's Identity Formation and Transformation in Contemporary Japan PDF Author: Paola Cavaliere
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This dissertation explores the extent to which women's everyday interaction and agency in faith-based volunteering helps in cultivating social stewardship and articulating new trajectories of self in Japanese society at large. The project is guided by the idea that social work sponsored by religious organizations provides women with a non-institutional channel through which they can become active civic actors in the social contract by locating themselves between the market and the state. The research draws upon a survey conducted in Japan between October 2009 and February 2010 on five faith-based volunteer groups: two Shinnyoen-sponsored groups; two Rissho Koseikai-sponsored groups; and one Catholic group. By making an eclectic use of social constructivist theories of identity, practice and performativity, this study examines the micro-social constitutive normative and generative aspects through which women move toward different trajectories of self. The analyses highlight that women engaged in faith-based volunteering tend to use their religious identity strategically and loosen it in a process of self and social reflexivity that fosters further social engagement. This makes their belonging to a religious group a resource for broader meaningful images of the self beyond religious ideological normative or structural regulative logics. By reporting the life-stories of women engaged in faith-based volunteering, this dissertation aims to provide examples of the kind of trajectories and empowering or disempowering practices generated in the cultural context of the Japanese faith-based volunteer group. The research demonstrates conclusively that it is not the presence (or absence) of religiosity that makes a critical difference, but how women exploit their institutional and non-institutional - the faith-based group - channels to generate or inhibit everyday practices that can serve to ameliorate their lives. The approach is especially important in view of women's larger engagement in society, thus in terms of empowerment and democratization.

Women's Identity Formation and Transformation in Contemporary Japan

Women's Identity Formation and Transformation in Contemporary Japan PDF Author: Paola Cavaliere
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This dissertation explores the extent to which women's everyday interaction and agency in faith-based volunteering helps in cultivating social stewardship and articulating new trajectories of self in Japanese society at large. The project is guided by the idea that social work sponsored by religious organizations provides women with a non-institutional channel through which they can become active civic actors in the social contract by locating themselves between the market and the state. The research draws upon a survey conducted in Japan between October 2009 and February 2010 on five faith-based volunteer groups: two Shinnyoen-sponsored groups; two Rissho Koseikai-sponsored groups; and one Catholic group. By making an eclectic use of social constructivist theories of identity, practice and performativity, this study examines the micro-social constitutive normative and generative aspects through which women move toward different trajectories of self. The analyses highlight that women engaged in faith-based volunteering tend to use their religious identity strategically and loosen it in a process of self and social reflexivity that fosters further social engagement. This makes their belonging to a religious group a resource for broader meaningful images of the self beyond religious ideological normative or structural regulative logics. By reporting the life-stories of women engaged in faith-based volunteering, this dissertation aims to provide examples of the kind of trajectories and empowering or disempowering practices generated in the cultural context of the Japanese faith-based volunteer group. The research demonstrates conclusively that it is not the presence (or absence) of religiosity that makes a critical difference, but how women exploit their institutional and non-institutional - the faith-based group - channels to generate or inhibit everyday practices that can serve to ameliorate their lives. The approach is especially important in view of women's larger engagement in society, thus in terms of empowerment and democratization.

Becoming Modern Women

Becoming Modern Women PDF Author: Michiko Suzuki
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804761973
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Becoming Modern Women: Love and Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature and Culture is a literary and cultural history of love and female identity in Japan during the 1910s-30s.

Career Women in Contemporary Japan

Career Women in Contemporary Japan PDF Author: Anne Stefanie Aronsson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317686977
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
Since Japan’s economic recession began in the 1990s, the female workforce has experienced revolutionary changes as greater numbers of women have sought to establish careers. Employment trends indicate that increasingly white-collar professional women are succeeding in breaking through the "glass ceiling", as digital technologies blur and redefine work in spatial, gendered, and ideological terms. This book examines what motivates Japanese women to pursue professional careers in the contemporary neoliberal economy, and how they reconfigure notions of selfhood while doing so. It analyses how professional women contest conventional notions of femininity in contemporary Japan and in turn, negotiate new gender roles and cultural assumptions about women, whilst reorganizing the Japanese workplace and wider socio-economic relationships. Further, the book explores how professional women create new social identities through the mutual conditioning of structure and self, and asks how women come to understand their experiences; how their actions change the gendering of the workforce; and how their lives shape the economic, political, social, and cultural landscapes of this post-industrial nation. Based on extensive fieldwork, Career Women in Contemporary Japan will have broad appeal across a range of disciplines including Japanese culture and society, gender and family studies, women’s studies, anthropology, ethnology and sociology.

The Politics of Trauma and Integrity

The Politics of Trauma and Integrity PDF Author: Sachiyo Tsukamoto
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000622657
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
The Politics of Trauma and Integrity uses the lenses of gender and trauma to tell the stories of narratives testified by two contrasting Japanese "comfort women" survivors. Through an innovative interdisciplinary study of the politics of gendered memory and trauma in historical context, with numerous primary sources for analysis including diaries, interviews, letters and oral testimonies, this book uncovers the life-or-death struggles of Japanese survivors in pursuit of public recognition as the victims of state violence against women. It is set within a gender history of modern Japan, supplemented by feminist activist methodology premised upon political agency that seeks social justice. The author’s analysis draws upon three key concepts: trauma, coherence of the self, and integrity. Focusing upon the role of gender and trauma as the nexus between memory construction and identity formation in modern Japan, the author reveals these women’s relentless quest for their recovery and creation of new identities. This book provides a better understanding of the victims of sexual violence and encourages readers to listen to the voice of trauma, as well as making a significant contribution to the existing research on the ongoing history of sexual violence against women in Japan, the rest of Asia and beyond. It will be of interest to scholars, researchers, activists and all who are interested in the issue of women’s human rights. It provides supplementary reading and research material for history and politics courses relating to Japan and East Asia, memory, identity, trauma, gender, war and feminist activism. This book will also be beneficial to victims of sexual violence as well as the counsellors/psychologists engaging with them.

Masking Selves, Making Subjects

Masking Selves, Making Subjects PDF Author: Traise Yamamoto
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520210344
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This sophisticated and comprehensive study is the first to situate Japanese American women's writing within theoretical contexts that provide a means of articulating the complex relationships between language and the body, gender and agency, nationalism and identity. Through an examination of post-World War II autobiographical writings, fiction, and poetry, Traise Yamamoto argues that these writers have employed the trope of masking—textually and psychologically—as a strategy to create an alternative discursive practice and to protect the self as subject. Yamamoto's range is broad, and her interdisciplinary approach yields richly textured, in-depth readings of a number of genres, including film and travel narrative. Looking at how the West has sexualized, infantilized, and feminized Japanese culture for over a century, she examines contemporary Japanese American women's struggle with this orientalist fantasy. Analyzing the various constraints and possibilities that these writers negotiate in order to articulate their differences, she shows how masking serves as a self-affirming discourse that dynamically interacts with mainstream culture's racial and sexual projections.

Transforming Japan

Transforming Japan PDF Author: Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 1558617000
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 594

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Book Description
A volume of essays by Japan’s leading female scholars and activists exploring their country’s recent progressive cultural shift. When the feminist movement finally arrived in Japan in the 1990s, no one could have foreseen the wide-ranging changes it would bring to the country. Nearly every aspect of contemporary life has been impacted, from marital status to workplace equality, education, politics, and sexuality. Now more than ever, the Japanese myth of a homogenous population living within traditional gender roles is being challenged. The LGBTQ population is coming out of the closet, ever-present minorities are mobilizing for change, single mothers are a growing population, and women are becoming political leaders. In Transforming Japan, Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow has gathered the most comprehensive collection of essays written by Japanese educators and researchers on the ways in which present-day Japan confronts issues of gender, sexuality, race, discrimination, power, and human rights.

Recrafting ‘Self/s’

Recrafting ‘Self/s’ PDF Author: 櫟本崇恵
Publisher: ふくろう出版
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
性と民族性,異国でのアイデンティティ再構築とは

The Monstrous-Feminine in Contemporary Japanese Popular Culture

The Monstrous-Feminine in Contemporary Japanese Popular Culture PDF Author: Raechel Dumas
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319924656
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This book explores the monstrous-feminine in Japanese popular culture, produced from the late years of the 1980s through to the new millennium. Raechel Dumas examines the role of female monsters in selected works of fiction, manga, film, and video games, offering a trans-genre, trans-media analysis of this enduring trope. The book focuses on several iterations of the monstrous-feminine in contemporary Japan: the self-replicating shōjo in horror, monstrous mothers in science fiction, female ghosts and suburban hauntings in cinema, female monsters and public violence in survival horror games, and the rebellious female body in mytho-fiction. Situating the titles examined here amid discourses of crisis that have materialized in contemporary Japan, Dumas illuminates the ambivalent pleasure of the monstrous-feminine as a trope that both articulates anxieties centered on shifting configurations of subjectivity and nationhood, and elaborates novel possibilities for identity negotiation and social formation in a period marked by dramatic change.

Identity, Gender, and Status in Japan

Identity, Gender, and Status in Japan PDF Author: Takie Lebra
Publisher: Global Oriental
ISBN: 9004213414
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
The writings of Takie Lebra have had significant impact on Western understanding and appreciation of the structures and workings of Japanese society. In particular, her research into the notions of self and self-other relationships, issues of gender and women and motherhood has provided a new paradigm in the way these issues are now addressed.

Feminism in Modern Japan

Feminism in Modern Japan PDF Author: Vera Mackie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521527194
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Feminism in Modern Japan is an original and path-breaking book which traces the history of feminist thought and women's activism in Japan from the late nineteenth century to the present. The author offers a fascinating account of those who struck out against convention in the dissemination of ideas which challenged accepted notions of thinking about women, men and society generally. Feminist activism took diverse forms as women questioned their roles as subjects of the Emperor, or explored the limits of citizenship under the more liberal post-war constitution. The story is brought to life through translated extracts of the writings of Japanese feminists. This cogent, carefully documented analysis will be welcomed by students from a range of disciplines including those working on gender studies and feminist history, where nothing comparable is currently available.