Native name 青木やよひ | ||
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Died 25 December 2009, Itō, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan | ||
Aoki Yayoi (1927–2009) was a Japanese scholar and eco-feminist critic. She wrote extensively on sexuality, abortion rights, reproductive technologies, and women in the workplace. While she accepted short-term positions at various universities and community colleges, Aoki maintained a non-institutional status.
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Scholarship
One of Aoki's most notable publications was "Feminism and Imperialism", which she wrote in the 1980s. The work analyzed the relationship between the Japanese imperial institution and the patriarchal Japanese household, and showed how this relationship was central to the construction of the modern Japanese nation-state. She argued that the model systemically marginalized women, and raised the question of whether such a model was still legitimate in contemporary Japan and, if so, what its consequences were for the family unit and women. She was also particularly interested in how Japanese honorifics influence power politics.
Controversy with Chizuko Ueno
In the mid 1980s, Aoki was involved in a public debate with Chizuko Ueno, where Aoki's feminist principles were accused of being essentialist for romanticizing the problematic construct of the "feminine". Chizuko eventually wrote Can Women Save the Earth?, critiquing Aoki's analyses by showing that her work relies on an oversimplification of terms taken out of context. Because of Aoki's use of the term "feminine principle" and her emphasis on reintroducing caring and nurturing values into contemporary society, her work has also been criticized for being too emotionally charged, maternalist, or utopian.
Women and technology
Aoki's analyses regarding technologies were situated within the global geopolitical context. Aoki was particularly concerned about the impact of new technologies (especially reproductive technologies) on third world women, and argued that one must consider a variety of contexts within which women develop a relationship to technology. For example, Aoki cited that a Japanese woman may have a liberating or empowering experience with reproductive technologies while a South Indian woman's experience with the same technology might be involuntary.
Aoki was also wary of contemporary society's growing dependence on technology, since she believed it led to political apathy, war, and nuclear disasters. She argued that we should be developing a more self-reliant system of existence.
In 1990, Aoki, alongside several women's rights groups, opposed a government proposal to restrict Japan's abortion law as she argued that the policy would infringe on a woman's right to control her body.
Women and the future
While Aoki recognized that the economic independence of woman is crucial to the feminist movement, she argued that "if all it achieves is the right of passage of woman into existing male social structures and practices, I don't know that we have achieved very much". She cited alternative value systems like the ecological feminism of Denmark or the Green Party in West Germany as other routes that feminism should explore.