Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls: Being ‘Half’ in Japan |
Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls: Being ‘Half’ in Japan
Multilingual Matters
2009-12-03
280 pages
210 x 148 (A5)
Paperback ISBN: 9781847692320
Hardback ISBN: 9781847692337
Laurel Kamada, Lecturer Professor
Tohoku University, Japan
This is the first in-depth examination of “half-Japanese” girls in Japan focusing on ethnic, gendered and embodied ‘hybrid’ identities. Challenging the myth of Japan as a single-race society, these girls are seen struggling to positively manoeuvre themselves and negotiate their identities into positions of contestation and control over marginalizing discourses which disempower them as ‘others’ within Japanese society as they begin to mature. Paradoxically, at other times, within more empowering alternative discourses of ethnicity, they also enjoy and celebrate cultural, symbolic, social and linguistic capital which they discursively create for themselves as they come to terms with their constructed identities of “Japaneseness”, “whiteness” and “halfness/doubleness”. This book has a colourful storyline throughout—narrated in the girls’ own voices—that follows them out of childhood and into the rapid physical and emotional growth years of early adolescence.
Tags: Japan, Laurel Kamada, Multilingual Matters