Description
Book SynopsisShows how female cosmopolitanism re-contextualises the well-known Western male romance with the Orient: Japanese women are now the agents, narrating their own desires for the "modern" West in ways that seem to defy Japanese nationalism as well as long-standing relations of power not only between men and women but between Japan and the West.
Trade Review“Taking cover under her more innocuous theme of the recent internationalization of Japanese women’s lives and careers, Karen Kelsky bluntly asks one of the great taboo questions in Japanese studies: why do so many Japanese women, if given the chance, prefer white husbands over those of their own ethnicity? What are the historical and psychological reasons for a powerful attraction enshrined in popular culture since
Madame Butterfly but until now never critically examined, certainly not from a modern feminist perspective? Kelsky’s provocative answers to these questions make her
Women on the Verge the first study we have of Japan’s eroticization of the West, in a world already so full of books that would tell us how the West has eroticized Japan.”—John Whittier Treat, Yale University
“Kelsky insightfully treats desire as a complicated and contradictory complex, something inspired as much by pragmatic as erotic concerns. The narratives she offers are rich and impressive and her skills as a fieldworker as well as command of the ethnographic scene in Japan are striking. This is a compelling, engaging, and important work.”—Anne Allison, author of
Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess ClubTable of ContentsIllustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Note on Japanese Names and Terms xiii
Introduction 1
1. The Promised Land: A Genealogy of Female Internationalism 35
2. Internationalism as Resistance 85
3. Capital and the Fetish of the White Man 133
4. (Re)flexibility in Inflexible Places 202
Conclusion: Strange Bedfellows 227
Notes 249
Bibliography 259
Index 283
