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

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

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 Tok-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

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, Harvard University