| Born in 1932 and raised during the Pacific War period, the author Takahashi Takako entered Kyoto University in 1950, just a few short years after women had been granted such fundamental rights as the opportunity to vote, be elected to public office, and receive the same education as their male compatriots. Her life and literature may therefore be seen as a precious documentation of the process of gender role (re)negotiation in the face of changing societal norms. This thesis explores the way Takahashi inscribes the concept of "femininity" in her literature, and how this narration is influenced by her own consciousness of occupying a liminal position between the poles of societally intelligible masculinity and femininity. I pay close attention to the cultural, historical, and linguistic barriers that the author faced in attempting to articulate versions of feminine possibility that did not yet exist, or were relegated to the cultural unconscious of the society that she inhabited. I demonstrate the ways in which this project placed Takahashi in a highly ambiguous position, not only with respect to patriarchal authority, but also by complicating her sense of solidarity with her own gender.; Chapter One addresses Takahashi's narration of femininity within the enclosure of the "traditional" family structure, focusing on the author's employment of the trope of the "demonic" woman as a means of resistance to conventional feminine roles. Chapter Two explores the way Takahashi's narrative construction of feminine corporeality both subverts and complies with the "misogynist" notion of a body/soul binary distinction that is gendered along a feminine/masculine axis. Chapter Three investigates Takahashi's articulation of female homoeroticism, and the ways in which this longing for same-sex intimacy is complicated by the larger cultural context of compulsory heterosexuality. Chapter Four takes as its object of interest Takahashi's non-fiction writings, focusing explicitly on her conflicted engagement with the discourse of the Japanese feminist movement of the 1970s, and the way that her own resistance to "politics" seems to have prompted her to distance herself from that movement. |
