It's actually not just Sengoku! There's this entire argument in Japanese history about when women were best off, and basically all anyone can agree on is the Edo was not it. There are people who say Sengoku, people who say Kamakura, people who say Heian, people who say Nara, and people who say Asuka. And that's just what I've read; I'm sure there's someone out there arguing that Hino Tomiko proves it was Muromachi.
I don't have a definitive answer for why the feminist slant is so strong in English-language scholarship, but I think it might have something to do with the ways of framing Japanese history: after violently repudiating the explicitly Japanese-exceptionalist scholarship (I'm talking foreigners, here), you have the Marxist lens and the feminist lens, and possibly the literary lens for the Heian era. Outside of those, you're building your own framework of analysis at the same time you're trying to analyze a specific topic, which is even harder than it sounds. Some people are doing that, too, which is leading to interesting additions of Foucault-influenced theory, but, still, if you don't want to analyze using Marxist class-shift, the easiest alternative is feminist frameworks. Whereas in Japan, while feminist scholarship is alive and thriving, it's working against literally hundreds of years of anti-feminist backlog (whereas, for example, feminist scholarship is a prominent framework in Japanese manga-analysis--no such backlog). It's kind of like trying to do revisionist feminist history of the ancient Greeks: it's out there, it exists, but it's mostly drowned out by common wisdom that Athenian women didn't do politics and Spartan women were physically trained only so they bore stronger sons.
Anyway, yes, that's what happens when someone pokes me about my specialty. :-) What text was that on the English Civil War, if you happen to remember?
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Date: 14 Mar 2012 08:34 am (UTC)I don't have a definitive answer for why the feminist slant is so strong in English-language scholarship, but I think it might have something to do with the ways of framing Japanese history: after violently repudiating the explicitly Japanese-exceptionalist scholarship (I'm talking foreigners, here), you have the Marxist lens and the feminist lens, and possibly the literary lens for the Heian era. Outside of those, you're building your own framework of analysis at the same time you're trying to analyze a specific topic, which is even harder than it sounds. Some people are doing that, too, which is leading to interesting additions of Foucault-influenced theory, but, still, if you don't want to analyze using Marxist class-shift, the easiest alternative is feminist frameworks. Whereas in Japan, while feminist scholarship is alive and thriving, it's working against literally hundreds of years of anti-feminist backlog (whereas, for example, feminist scholarship is a prominent framework in Japanese manga-analysis--no such backlog). It's kind of like trying to do revisionist feminist history of the ancient Greeks: it's out there, it exists, but it's mostly drowned out by common wisdom that Athenian women didn't do politics and Spartan women were physically trained only so they bore stronger sons.
Anyway, yes, that's what happens when someone pokes me about my specialty. :-) What text was that on the English Civil War, if you happen to remember?