Julia C. Bullock - Rethinking Japanese Feminisms

1. Introduction
   Julia C. Bullock, Ayako Kano, and James Welker
   
2. Womens Rights as Proletarian Rights: Yamakawa Kikue, Suffrage, and the Dawn of Liberation
   Elyssa Faison
3. From Motherhood in the Interest of the State to Motherhood in the Interest of Mothers: Rethinking the First Mothers Congress
   Hillary Maxson
4. From Womens Liberation to Lesbian Feminism in Japan: Rezubian Feminizumu within and beyond the man Ribu Movement in the 1970s and 1980s
   James Welker
5. The Mainstreaming of Feminism and the Politics of Backlash in Twenty-First-Century Japan
   Tomomi Yamaguchi
   
6. Coeducation in the Age of Good Wife, Wise Mother: Koizumi Ikukos Quest for Equality of Opportunity
   Julia C. Bullock
7. Flower Empowerment: Rethinking Japans Traditional Arts as Womens Labor
   Nancy Stalker vi
8. Liberating Work in the Tourist Industry
   Chris McMorran
   
9. Seeing Double: The Feminism of Ambiguity in the Art of Takabatake Kash
   Leslie Winston
10. Feminist Acts of Reading: Ariyoshi Sawako, Sono Ayako, and the Lived Experience of Women in Japan
    Barbara Hartley
11. Dangerous Women and Dangerous Stories: Gendered Narration in Kirino Natsuos Grotesque and Real World
    Kathryn Hemmann
    
12. Yamakawa Kikue and Edward Carpenter: Translation, Affiliation, and Queer Internationalism
    Sarah Frederick
13. Rethinking Japanese Feminism and the Lessons of man Ribu: Toward a Praxis of Critical Transnational Feminism
    Setsu Shigematsu
14. Toward Postcolonial Feminist Subjectivity: Korean Womens Redress Movement for Comfort Women
    Akwi Seo
15. Takemura Kazuko: On Friendship and the Queering of American and Japanese Studies
    J. Keith Vincent
16. conclusion On Rethinking Japanese Feminisms
    Ayako Kano
    

JULIA C. BULLOCK, AYAKO KANO, AND JAMES WELKER

T he great diversity of feminist issues and practices represented in this volume should make it clear why we have opted to write about feminisms in the plural. When the editors of this volume first conceived the idea for a book on modern Japanese feminisms, already more than a decade into the twenty-first century, it seemed an opportune time to reassess the many ways that feminist thought and activism have shaped modern Japanese society, as well as take stock of what work remained for future generations of scholars and activists.

The chapters in this book work toward the rethinking of Japanese feminisms in several ways. Some authors throw light on ideas and practices that resonate with feminist thought but find expression through the work of writers, artists, activists, and laborers who have not typically been considered feminist. These scholars call on us to reconsider, and perhaps expand, the types of thought and praxis that we generally include within a feminist rubric. The authors of other chapters revisit specific moments in the history of Japanese feminisms in order to complicate or challenge the dominant scholarly and popular understandings of specific activists, practices, and beliefs.

Rethinking Japanese Feminisms draws from and builds on the work of scholars, activists, and thinkers researching and publishing about feminisms since the 1970s, when the field of womens studies emerged worldwide, becoming known in Japan as joseigaku. The intervening decades have seen the repositioning of womens studies as gender studies, followed by gender and sexuality studies, which itself has often incorporated or overlapped with a field now called LGBT/LGBTQ studies or simply queer studies. These new perspectives have reshaped how we conceive of modern female subjects, and, much as feminist scholarship was instrumental in the development of queer studies, so too has queer studies influenced feminist scholarshipin Japan and elsewhere. Written by scholars who employ methodologies and theoretical perspectives from anthropology, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, literature, media studies, queer studies, and sociology, the chapters in this volume reflect the influence of these theoretical and methodological shifts. Building on previous scholarship over the past several decades that has explored Japanese culture through the lens of gender and sexuality studies, the essays in this volume apply these insights toward an assessment of the past, present, and future of feminisms in Japan.