EAS388 Lecture 4 – Good Wives, Wise Women
• Maturity in modern world is industrialization but also about normative western world and that
was not shared in the beginning of the West
• How to think about the past, tradition, what we now say traditional we think is in the past is
actually invented
• 1930s, you see a post-modern Civil Code values as well as practices prior to the ways in which
sexuality, behaviour became regulated by it
o Example, the traditional of Asian women under Confucianism, women Chasity was
sacred, women had to be monogamous but we see women freely going to relationship
with men
o With historical information that Robert Smith gives really is the invention that happened
in the Civil Code that gives an idea of what women are about in Japan
• Modern Myths and Invention
o Theorizing family, marriage, motherhood
o Theorizing Historical Representation
o INVENTION od “tradition” and the “authentic” culture
o BATTLES over what constitutes “tradition” and “authenticity”
▪ Of what normative women in Korea and elsewhere
o “tradition” and “culture” as highly loaded terms in non-Western context
• Modernization becomes more liberating for mothers, instead modernization is actually going
backwards
• Did the women in the West go through the same passage as Eastern women had to overcome?
o The norms of gender were all modern after western
o What was normative in the West Anglo-American world becomes another layer in the
non-Western colonized world
o When elites had to modernize themselves, they had to refer to this new sexual norms
that were emerging in the civilized west
• Politics of Knowledge
o Pierre Bourdieu
▪ “genesis amnesia”
• Being a good wife under Confucianism, all women internalize it is
actually not true
• We forget the origin and when this invasion was invented and for what
purpose was this invented
• “good wives, wise mothers” is a recreation in the maternity
o Michel Foucault:
▪ “people are shown not what they were, but what they must remember having
been…if one controls people’s memory, one controls their dynamism”
• Japan
th
o In the middle of 19 century, Japan as we know it today emerged
o Before that was a feudal state and became empires o Meiji regime of modern Japan introduced a policy, highly gendered policy
o Gendering try to promote citizens if Japan were to be accepted in the hierarchy of race
to live up to the west
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