Narratives of sexuality and embodiment: Performative identities and abject agency in contemporary fiction and poetry by Japanese women writers

This study examines poetry and fiction by three contemporary Japanese women authors within feminist theoretical frameworks concerned with the performativity of gender and sexual identities. One of the goals of this study is to examine narrative strategies which construct alternative visions not only of "femininity" or "womanhood," but also of the female body itself. A chapter on the centrality of the physical body in the early poetry of It o Hiromi explores the points of intersection and divergence between Ito's poetics and contemporaneous feminist theory, and considers the possibilities for feminist readings of the abject female bodies Ito depicts. This dissertation also takes up recent theoretical approaches to performativity and the body, arguing that contemporary Japanese women writers create performative texts that foreground and perform the body as a means of destabilizing rigid gender norms that persist in Japan. A chapter on Matsuura Rieko's The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P demonstrates how her sophisticated use of citation and parody makes the novel a performative text that subverts hetero-normative approaches to the body and sexuality. A third chapter on the short stories of K ono Taeko discusses Kono's focus on female sexuality, in particular masochistic desire, and takes up questions of abjection, masochistic agency, and performative masochism that can be traced in Kono's stories. The common thread linking each of these chapters is the argument that the centrality of the body in these texts problematizes dominant constructions of the female body as the locus of reproduction and maternal instinct, and that through the granting of agency to abject bodies these authors reclaim the body as a performative site for the exploration of non-normative identities, sexualities, and embodiments.