Parameters of Identity

I'll be presenting my paper "Virgin Territory: The Modern Feminist History of Takamure Itsue" tomorrow afternoon at Parameters of Identity: Place, Practice, and Tradition in East Asia, a graduate conference hosted by the Institute of East Asian Studies at UC Berkeley. Here's the abstract:

A leading feminist figure in her own lifetime and after her death, the pioneering women's historian Takamure Itsue (1894-1964) stood at the crux of many powerful and interrelated intellectual and social movements. Takamure's continuing relevance and controversial position as a feminist and intellectual figure lie in her unique integration of disparate intellectual and social currents such as feminism, modernism and anarchism into a distinctive vision of an ancient Japanese past that, having been delineated, could be used as a criticism of and in the present and as an ideal for the future by calling into question received notions of the "Japanese" past. Takamure's genealogy-based historiography was predicated on and called attention to the fluidity of cultural practices around marriage and kinship in the Japanese archipelago over time, but, ironically, her admiration for the deep past of the Yamato culture led to her embracing a nationalist pan-Asianism. In this paper I explore the multiplicity and even the contradictions of Takamure's views, as well as her maternalist feminism, which united them. Taken all in all, Takamure the intellectual must be understood as a modernist, whose feminist modernism has many similarities to the thought of other popular intellectuals of the modern period; the differences between her thought and that of more well-known figures such as Yanagita Kunio are both the product and the emblem of the alternate ways in which women experienced and participated in the construction of modernity and mass culture in imperial Japan. Takamure's historiography, predicated as it was on a contextualized but limited understanding of social institutions in the archipelago up through the Heian period, deftly illustrates the intellectual pitfalls that may open up when a scholar challenges a particular fixed notion, even as the basic assumptions of Takamure's thought may challenge the modern construction of history itself.