Rediscovering bosei: The transformation of Western ideas in Japan.
Item
-
Title
-
Rediscovering bosei: The transformation of Western ideas in Japan.
-
Identifier
-
AAI3169988
-
identifier
-
3169988
-
Creator
-
Tamagawa, Masami.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Paul Attewell
-
Date
-
2005
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Sociology, General | Women's Studies | History, Asia, Australia and Oceania
-
Abstract
-
Japanese gender discrimination is deeply embedded in its socio-cultural structure and ideology. So issues stemming from gender discrimination may sometimes not appear to be explicitly sexist or problematic. Japanese feminists, too, can possibly be bound by them, and may fail to see that they really are the causes of Japanese gender discrimination. In modern Japanese feminist history, there have been a number of cases in which Japanese feminists tried their best to improve the conditions of Japanese women, often by co-opting Western feminist ideas. In some respects, they were successful; their seemingly "feminist" activities, however, paradoxically resulted in the perpetuation of the structure and ideology of Japanese gender discrimination. In particular, bosei a Japanese gender ideology has been taken for granted even by Japanese feminists, and very few Japanese feminists have so far approached and examined it as a social construct.;This dissertation explores a genealogy of bosei as a socially constructed idea, and examines how it was first invented and has since then been repeatedly legitimated and reinforced by Japanese feminist intellectuals, thus becoming a powerful ideological means to confine Japanese women to their supposedly "traditional" gender roles.;In particular, this dissertation examines the feminist writings by Fukuzawa Yukichi, Hiratsuka Raicho, Takamure Itsue, Aoki Yayoi and Ueno Chizuko. Co-opting John Stuart Mill's Subjection of Women, Fukuzawa helped establish the foundation of Japanese women's "modern" gender roles as "Good Wives, Wise Mothers" in Meiji Japan. In the 1910s, Hiratsuka co-opted Ellen Key's maternalism, and became the nation's first bosei advocate, thereby helping constitute the two pillars of the ideal "traditional" Japanese womanhood. During World War II, Takamure became the feminist war ideologue by incorporating bosei-ism into the nation's imperial expansionism. The early 1980s witnessed a rediscovery of bosei by Aoki in the guise of ecofeminism. Finally, this dissertation explores Ueno's Marxist feminist writing and offers an explanation for her popularity since the mid-1980s.;Further, this dissertation unmasks the close relation between the nation's nationalism and gender ideology, by demonstrating how bosei was originally constituted and reconstituted in the course of the Japanese nationalist movement, connoting Japanese women's patriotic character.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
