The concept of an unmarried Japanese woman carries a variety of changing meanings for both women and men. In the past unmarried Japanese women were viewed as a conceptual anomaly vis-à-vis the dominant rhetoric of universal marriage. In contemporary Japan women are marrying later or even choosing not to marry at all. Demographers view the personal actions by unmarried women as cumulatively accounting for a large component of the declining birthrate. Such analysis of vital records has instilled panic among government officials already fearful of the rapidly aging population and its effect on Japans future as a nation. In this dissertation I explore how unmarried Japanese women create and sustain their identities despite a public rhetoric that marginalizes, degrades, or even denies their existence as a social category. I argue that unmarried Japanese women are not parasite singles, the homogenous entity that the Japanese government and media have portrayed them to be. Nor are they a part of an explicit, organized feminist revolution. Drawing upon social theories which examine the tensions between practice and ideology, agency and structure I argue that unmarried Japanese are responding to a specific set of economic, political, and social conditions in which they find themselves. The cultural dialogue associated with being unmarried exposes how the government naturalizes and rationalizes the marital union to support its interests in maintaining productivity of the core (male) workforce, and the reproduction of future Japanese citizens. Based on ethnographic data collected in a city in rural Japan, I discuss how linguistic expressions and metaphors create images of being married, how normative rhetoric about productivity in relation to womens life course defines appropriate employment and leisure activities, and how unmarried womens bodies are a site of state control through contraceptive regulations and other government policies. A focus on the discourse surrounding unmarried women exposes how they are positioned as key players in the maintenance of latent cultural logics regarding the family, work, nation, and reproduction. Even so, through their everyday enactments of being unmarried, through resistance and compromise, unmarried women in this local city force and enforce change in the social landscape of contemporary Japan.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-05052004-112248 |
| Date | 25 June 2004 |
| Creators | Noll, Tamiko Ortega |
| Contributors | Andrew Strathern, Kathleen DeWalt, Akiko Hashimoto, Nicole Constable, L Keith Brown |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-05052004-112248/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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