“Women’s Thoughts” ―We Remember You
Chizuko’s Blog No. 50
“Women’s Thoughts” ―We Remember You
Written by Chizuko Ueno
(Shueisha International, 2013/6/26)
I’ve got a new book published: “Women’s
Thoughts” ―We
Remember You.
It’s the
first book I’ve written solely about feminism for quite a while.
It’s divided into two sections: Ⅰ．Re-reading “Women’s Books” and Ⅱ．Reinterpreting
the World with Gender. In Section Ⅰ, I wrote about
books written by five Japanese women (Kazue Morisaki, Michiko Ishimure, Mitsu
Tanaka, Taeko Toyooka and Noriko Mizuta), and in Section Ⅱ, books by six foreign authors (Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Eve
Sedgwick, Joan Scott, Gayatri Spivak and Judith Butler).
I
wrote brief introductions to their works on the cover page of each section. I
put great effort into this book, though I say so myself.
Ⅰ．Re-reading “Women’s Books”
“The words that became my body and soul” ― is how I would describe their writing. To read books is to retrace others’ experiences. I’ve been reading their books since I was young. Then, I was too young and too immature to find the right words to express myself. Even when I tried, the words I had with me were so few that they never felt right. It was then that they gave me the “women’s words” through their books. I found that these women had created their words from struggles similar to mine. It was because they were written in my mother tongue that their words touched my heart. I’d like to tell you how much I was inspired by these women who came a little ahead of me. This was my motivation to write this book.
Section
Ⅰ is a collection of
works by Japanese female authors. I introduced them chronologically, so you
will see that they were mainly published from the 60’s to 80’s. This is because this period was the predawn of
feminism and the time when “women’s thoughts” were formed. Maybe I was lucky that I developed my character
in that period.
In
this section, I covered Kazue Morisaki, Michiko Ishimure, Mitsu Tanaka, Taeko Toyooka
and Noriko Mizuta. These five women are a little older than me. Their words
touched my heart deeply. Words of male writers never touched me the way they
did. Only female writers gave me words which inspired me so much. How could it
be just a coincidence? I’ve lived in their era and listened to their words. I’d like to hand down what I received from them to women of
the next generations.
Ⅱ．Re-interpretating the World with Gender
Some readers may find it strange that I included two male philosophers in this book, Foucault and Said, although the book is titled “Women’s Thoughts.” But I’d like to interpret “Women’s Thoughts” as “the thoughts which create a borderline between men and women.” Or, more technically, they’re the thoughts that expose the system which creates a borderline between men and women. If that’s true, I can’t omit Foucault’s contribution to the exposure and can’t ignore Said in post-colonialism.
And
of course, I learned a lot from the pioneers of gender theories from
poststructuralism to deconstruction, such as Scott, Spivak, Sedgwick and
Butler. There are those who criticize gender theories as being “imported theories,” and I’d like to respond to them with Spivak’s words. When asked if gender theories weren’t foreign words to Japanese women, she said, “We can use whatever tools available no matter who made them.”
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Original Text by Chizuko Ueno （http://wan.or.jp/ueno/?p=3183）
Translated by N. Tajima
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