Pedagogy of Democracy : Feminism and the Cold War in the U. S. Occupation of Japan

by Koikari, Mire

• ISBN13: 9781592137008
• ISBN10: 1592137008
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-06-28
• Publisher: Temple Univ Pr

Summary

Pedagogy of Democracyre-interprets the U.S. occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952 as a problematic instance of Cold War feminist mobilization rather than a successful democratization of Japanese women as previously argued. By combining or "using" three fields of research-occupation, Cold War, and postcolonial feminist studies-and examining occupation records and other archival sources, Koikari argues that postwar gender reform was part of the Cold War containment strategies that undermined rather than promoted women's political and economic rights. Koikari suggests that American and Japanese women leaders both participated in as well as resisted the ruling dynamics of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation. Thus,Pedagogy of Democracysheds new light on the complex and contradictory implications of Western feminist interventions in Asia. By applying a postcolonial feminist framework to American gender reform in the Cold War Asia-Pacific context-a subject hitherto understudied among feminist scholars-Pedagogy of Democracyreveals both the similarities and the differences between imperial feminisms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Author Biography

Mire Koikari is an Associate Professor in the Women's Studies Program at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Note on Japanese Names	p. xi
Introduction: Recasting Women in the U.S. Occupation of Japan	p. 1
Feminism, Nationalism, and Colonial Genealogies: Women's Enfranchisement and Constitutional Revision	p. 32
Feminism, Domestic Containment, and Cold War Citizenry	p. 75
Women, the Cold War, and the Question of Resistance	p. 121
Making the Body Respectable: Cold War Containment and Regulation of Sexuality	p. 159
Conclusion	p. 189
Notes	p. 193
Bibliography	p. 215
Index	p. 223
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.