Rethinking the politics of gender and agency: an encounter with the ‘otherness’ of medieval Japan

Abstract

This article engages with recent debates within feminism itself to rethink women, gender, body, and agency as conceptual categories for reading medieval Japanese literary/Buddhist texts. It questions the unreflexive transposition of contemporary understandings of concepts to the past, on the grounds that this produces anachronistic readings of the worlds we seek to understand. It argues that in medieval Japanese texts gender did not function as a 'social' category posited against the 'natural' fact of sex, and that gender was a kind of script and that it was the specificity of the gendered performance, rather than the sexual attributes and reproductive functions of the body, that gave substance to the categories 'male' and 'female.' The article also offers a critique of contemporary uses of the term agency in analyses of women and Buddhism in medieval Japan, arguing that agency here is defined as something possessed by autonomous individuals with free will, whose natural inclination is to strive to resist against the oppressive conditions of their lives. This modern liberal conception of agency, which is secular in nature, grants agency to humans alone. This anthropocentric view of the world necessitates the evisceration of the agency of gods, buddhas, dreams and material objects, all of whom are central actors in the cosmological/social world of medieval Japan. Rethinking the politics of gender and agency: an encounter with the 'otherness' of medieval Japan The last few decades have seen a veritable explosion of academic writings that seek to analyze how gender and power operated in the historical, religious, and literary texts of medieval Japan. Scholars have become increasingly attentive to the workings of power and politics, and to the ideological underpinnings of even the most refined of courtly narratives and poetic compositions. Gender is a category that allows for an analysis of how one comes to occupy one's place in the social world as a man and woman. However, it is woman, the unprivileged and marked term of the man-woman binary that, for the most part, has taken centre-stage in research on gender in medieval Japan. Scholars have sought to reveal how the sex/gender system operated in the production of knowledge across a wide range of disciplines, and how it privileged the lives and activities of men, and systematically neglected or denigrated women and their roles in society. Medieval Japanese Studies, for the most part, has taken its cue from the work undertaken by sixties and seventies feminism, making its primary task the reinstatement of women into the historical, religious and literary narratives from which they have been written out, and in so doing radically questioning the androcentric biases of scholarly writings in the field. A four-2 volume collection published in Japanese in 1989, under the title Shîrizu: josei to bukkyô (Women and Buddhism Series) and an edited volume in English, entitled Engendering Faith: Women and Buddhism in Premodern Japan, which followed in 2002, for example, heralded...