Rethinking the politics of gender and agency: an encounter with the ‘otherness’ of medieval Japan
| Autor: | Rajyashree Pandey |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2018 |
| Předmět: |
Cultural Studies
History 060101 anthropology Sociology and Political Science media_common.quotation_subject 05 social sciences Buddhism 0507 social and economic geography Gender studies 06 humanities and the arts 050701 cultural studies Feminism Politics Anthropocentrism Agency (sociology) Free will Natural (music) 0601 history and archaeology Anachronism Sociology media_common |
| Zdroj: | Japan Forum. 32:461-483 |
| ISSN: | 1469-932X 0955-5803 |
| Popis: | This article engages with recent debates within feminism itself to rethink women, gender, body, and agency as conceptual categories for reading medieval Japanese literary/Buddhist texts. It questions the unreflexive transposition of contemporary understandings of concepts to the past, on the grounds that this produces anachronistic readings of the worlds we seek to understand. It argues that in medieval Japanese texts gender did not function as a ‘social’ category posited against the ‘natural’ fact of sex, and that gender was a kind of script and that it was the specificity of the gendered performance, rather than the sexual attributes and reproductive functions of the body, that gave substance to the categories ‘male’ and ‘female.’\ud The article also offers a critique of contemporary uses of the term agency in analyses of women and Buddhism in medieval Japan, arguing that agency here is defined as something possessed by autonomous individuals with free will, whose natural inclination is to strive to resist against the oppressive conditions of their lives. This modern liberal conception of agency, which is secular in nature, grants agency to humans alone. This anthropocentric view of the world necessitates the evisceration of the agency of gods, buddhas, dreams and material objects, all of whom are central actors in the cosmological/social world of medieval Japan. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
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