Writing as political strategy: Asian women’s writing

Abstract

Japanese women writers do not have to fight against the overt political restrictions and the economic, religious, and class oppression that other Asian women have to confront before they can use writing as a kind of political strategy. However, a deeply rooted cultural, social, and aesthetic heritage for women writing is not necessarily an advantage, but can be a decided disadvantage. To break out of a thousand-year-old tradition in which stereotypical images have been preserved and to advance a new alternative through a disruption between gender and genre represents a workable political strategy for Japanese women writers. Its literary context is different from that in other Asian countries, but similar in the fact that politics does inform literary creativity.