Translating Maternal Violence

The Discursive Construction of Maternal Filicide in 1970s Japan

Alessandro Castellini

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781137538826
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides the first full-length, English-language investigation of the multiple and often contradictory ways in which mothers who kill their children were portrayed in 1970s Japan. It offers a snapshot of a historical and social moment when motherhood was being renegotiated, and maternal violence was disrupting norms of acceptable maternal behaviour. Drawing on a wide range of original archival materials, it explores three discursive sites where the image of the murderous mother assumed a distinctive visibility: media coverage of cases of maternal filicide; the rhetoric of a newly emerging women's liberation movement known as ?man ribu; and fictional works by the Japanese writer Takahashi Takako. Using translation as a theoretical tool to decentre the West as the origin of (feminist) theorizations of the maternal, it enables a transnational dialogue for imagining mothers' potential for violence. This thought-provoking work will appeal to scholars of feminist theory, cultural studies and Japanese studies.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• List of Tables
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Filicide in the Media: News Coverage of Mothers Who Kill in 1970s Japan
• 3: The Women’s Liberation Movement in 1970s Japan
• 4: Contested Meanings: Mothers Who Kill and the Rhetoric of ūman ribu
• 5: Filicide and Maternal Animosity in Takahashi Takako’s Early Fiction
• 6: Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index