Women's Performative Writing and Identity Construction in the Japanese Empire

by Satoko Kakihara

Overview

In Women’s Performative Writing and Identity Construction in the Japanese Empire, the author examines how writers captured various experiences of living under imperialism in their fiction and nonfiction works. Through an examination of texts by writers producing in different parts of the empire (including the Japanese metropole and the colonies and territories of Taiwan, Korea, and Manchukuo), the book explores how women negotiated the social and personal changes brought about by modernization of the social institutions of education, marriage, family, and labor. Looking at works by writers including young students in Manchukuo, Japanese writer Hani Motoko, Korean writer Chang Tŏk-cho, and Taiwanese writer Yang Ch’ien-Ho, the book sheds light upon how the act and product of writing became a site for women to articulate their hopes and desires while also processing sociopolitical expectations. The author argues that women used their practice of writing to construct their sense of self. The book ultimately shows us how the words we write make us who we are.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781793611611
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	11/28/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	162
File size:	333 KB

About the Author

Satoko Kakihara is associate professor of Japanese at California State University, Fullerton.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Writing and the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere

Chapter One: Education—Students and the Language of Establishing Imperial Identities

Chapter Two: Marriage—Hani Motoko and the Everyday Contradictions of Love and Happiness

Chapter Three: Family—Chang Tŏk-cho and the Resistance of Communities of Women

Chapter Four: Labor—Yang Ch’ien-Ho and the Living of Modern Selfhood

Conclusion. Womanhood Between Theory and Practice

Bibliography

About the Author

Editorial Reviews

Kakihara’s Women’s Performative Writing and Identity Construction in the Japanese Empire is a fascinating study of how women’s writings in Korea, Japan, Manchuria, and Taiwan negotiated subjectivities under imperialism and modernity. Focusing primarily on education, marriage, family, and labor – social institutions that constructed modern womanhood through much of East Asia – this rigorously researched and accessibly written monograph expertly analyzes how narratives in a range of languages and genres both resisted and reproduced the categories as well as the social norms and expectations to which women were subjected. Women’s Performative Writing will be of great interest and importance to scholars and students of gender studies, comparative literature, world literature, and East Asian studies.

Karen Thornber