UC San Diego

This dissertation examines writings by women in the Japanese empire, analyzing their negotiations of gender in the metropole and the colonies and territories of Taiwan, Korea, and China between 1895 and 1945. From the Meiji era, the Japanese government attempted to modernize its subjects through social reforms and the assignation of normative gender roles: men to fight for expansion as masculinized soldiers, women to reproduce and raise future imperial subjects as feminized Good Wives and Wise Mothers. Examining writings that discuss this gendered modernization, this comparative and multiregional project argues that women writers employed the performative of writing both to fit into and to break out of constructed categories (such as "educated", "professional", and "Westernized"), categories that were based on the promise of progress and liberation but that created new power hierarchies. The dissertation thus contributes to the scholarship an intercolonial study on gender in the Japanese empire. The five chapters of this dissertation explore different social institutions related to the construction of modern womanhood over a normalized female life course. Chapter 1 argues that students in the puppet state of Manchukuo constructed, through composition assignments, labels of educated/uneducated, Japanese/non- Japanese within an institution of education that was purported to promote equality. Chapter 2 argues, by examining works by Taiwanese writer Yang Ch'ien-ho and Korean writer Kang Kyŏng-ae, that the establishment of a modern selfhood through labor was impossible under Japanese imperial modernity. Chapter 3 analyzes writings by Japanese educator Hani Motoko to argue that Hani's ideas on modern, liberal marriage reproduced oppressions of women under capitalist social structures, despite encouraging women's self-realization and improvement. Chapter 4 analyzes Japanese- and Korean-language works by Chang Tŏk-cho to argue that they offer women's communities as alternatives to patriarchal kinship. Chapter 5 analyzes works by Xiao Hong and Yosano Akiko to argue that notions of "belonging" are rooted in one's freedom of movement. By extending its frame beyond single national contexts and conceiving the empire as a spatial and temporal continuum, this dissertation connects colonial gender construction with contradictions between idealized and lived womanhoods in East Asia today