Translating Maternal Violence: The Discursive Construction of Maternal Filicide in 1970s Japan

ISBN-13: 9781137538819 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 273 str.

A. Castellini

Opis

This book provides the first full-length, English-language investigation of the multiple and often contradictory ways in which mothers who kill their children were portrayed in 1970s Japan. It offers a snapshot of a historical and social moment when motherhood was being renegotiated, and maternal violence was disrupting norms of acceptable maternal behaviour. Drawing on a wide range of original archival materials, it explores three discursive sites where the image of the murderous mother assumed a distinctive visibility: media coverage of cases of maternal filicide; the rhetoric of a newly emerging women's liberation movement known as ūman ribu; and fictional works by the Japanese writer Takahashi Takako. Using translation as a theoretical tool to decentre the West as the origin of (feminist) theorizations of the maternal, it enables a transnational dialogue for imagining mothers' potential for violence. This thought-provoking work will appeal to scholars of feminist theory, cultural studies and Japanese studies.

Spis treści

Introduction.- Chapter 1.- Filicide in the media: news coverage of mothers who kill in 1970s Japan.- Chapter 2. The Women’s Liberation Movement in 1970s Japan.- Chapter 3. Contested meanings: mothers who kill and the rhetoric of ūman ribu.- Chapter 4. Filicide and maternal animosity in Takahashi Takako’s early fiction.- Conclusion. 

O autorze

Alessandro Castellini is LSE Fellow in Transnational Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.