Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series. London; New York: Routledge, 2016. xii, 210 pp. (Illustrations.) US$148.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-138-90530-6.
This book explores the relationship between normative femininity and the increasing number of cases of eating disorders and self-harm in Japanese society. Both scholars and public commentators commonly suggest that the association of thinness with ideal femininity in the media and entertainment industry is a cause for women starving themselves to the point of developing mental illness. Advertisements, magazines, and websites frequently promote advice on losing weight and weight-loss products, which sends women a clear message that their worth hinges upon their thinness. This book offers new insight into and understanding of the relationship between contemporary Japanese femininity and eating disorders and self-harm. Hansen argues that “contradictive femininity,” contemporary normative femininity in Japan, demands that women navigate multiple subject positions, which often conflict with each other, and as a result, it is responsible for an increase in eating disorders and self-harm among women. She makes her argument by exposing the common cultural messages about normative femininity in storylines and female character constructions in a variety of narratives and visual cultures.
In this book, Hansen uses contradictive femininity to characterize contemporary normative Japanese femininity. Thanks to expanding legal rights and opportunities, Japanese women can explore and enjoy full participation in the social world and take on multiple roles and social identities beyond the domestic sphere. However, traditional gender expectations that tie women to the domestic sphere as mothers and homemakers and the obligation to serve men’s desires and needs remain strong. By adopting Judith Butler’s concept of gender performance, Hansen argues that to gain social acceptance and approval Japanese women must navigate and balance multiple subjectivities, all while continuously living up to the dominant cultural meaning of desirable femininity. Contradictive femininity, the fragmentation of one’s self, affects Japanese women more than their Western counterparts because of the failure of Japanese feminism to liberate women from domesticity and the continued celebration of their contribution to the private sphere. For Japanese women, this gender performance is challenging precisely because they must move back and forth between subjectivity and non-subjectivity.
Hansen uses the doppelgänger motif—a “classic literary element that is characterized by its ability to destabilize the unified self and counter oneself as another” (41)—in her analysis of female character constructions and storylines to show the fragmented nature of the contemporary self and the gender performance of contradictive femininity, including self-directed violence, in dealing with this fragmentation. In Japanese narratives and visual cultures, contradictory femininity is performed either by multiple characters, each of whom assumes a distinctive social position, or by a single character with an inhuman ability that can exist only in a fantasy world. However, real women cannot split themselves into multiple selves or acquire inhuman abilities to navigate multiple social roles and identities. Thus, real women face the challenge of performing contradictive femininity. Moving back and forth between an identity that highly values one’s subjectivity and an identity that requires the suppression of one’s agency causes psychological and emotional stress for contemporary Japanese women.
In the second half of the book, Hansen argues that self-directed violence, such as eating disorders and self-harm, is a nonnormative strategy for dealing with the challenge of performing contradictive femininity. In contemporary and classic literary works and visual culture, “appetite control and thinness” and “self-reproach and pain tolerance” (119) are described as expected normative feminine competences for social acceptance. In particular, eating insatiably is considered a monstrous quality, whereas refusing to eat is associated with being a good woman and vomiting with purifying the self. These feminine competences are closely tied to eating disorders and self-harm. Developing and exercising these feminine competences are necessary for societal acceptance and validation, but embracing them to the extreme would cross the line and receive a negative societal response. In other words, the line between what is desirable and what is pathological becomes blurred. For women who are struggling with navigating multiple subject positions, exercising these feminine competences is a strategy to resolve their fragmented self because these competences will always bring societal acceptance to women regardless of their positions/identities at the moment. Moreover, becoming simultaneously a victim and a victimizer allows women to move easily between two opposing selves. Hansen shows that self-directed violence often appears in Japanese narratives and visual culture as a result of women’s inability to navigate contradictory social positions, with their body symbolizing the entrapment in gender expectations that they over-conform to or can never escape. With the abundance of literary works, manga, and images in contemporary Japan that have a theme of self-directed violence, Hansen warns that self-directed violence has become a lifestyle some women adopt as a kind of gender performance. Japanese media’s increasing use of self-directed violence as a topic/theme for consumption and entertainment promotes women’s identification with and normalization of this lifestyle.
This book shows the pervasiveness of the fragmented self of contemporary Japanese women and its consequence, contradictory femininity, by examining not only literary narratives and entertainment forms such as manga and films but also TV dramas and commercials, print advertisement, and artwork. The gender performance of contradictory femininity described in this work provides valuable insights into the struggles of contemporary Japanese women who seek to advance socially and escape the entrapment of being a social category. Hansen’s analysis of eating disorders and self-harm as contradictive femininity performance to cope with the fragmentation of the self has serious implications for the mental health of Japanese women today. If this is a form of gender performance, then their self-directed violence will persist and increase because it is closely tied to their gender identity. Though fictional characters and storylines can reflect real social conditions and experiences of women, the analysis remains theoretical. To truly understand how contemporary Japanese women navigate between dominant cultural messages of desirable femininity and opportunities that allow them to expand their social roles, we need to listen to real women.
Akiko Yasuike
California Lutheran University, Thousand Oaks, USA