Coed Revolution

The Female Student in the Japanese New Left

Chelsea Szendi Schieder

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781478011453, 9781478010425
• eBook ISBN: 9781478012979
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

In the 1960s, a new generation of university-educated youth in Japan challenged forms of capitalism and the state. In Coed Revolution Chelsea Szendi Schieder recounts the crucial stories of Japanese women's participation in these protest movements led by the New Left through the early 1970s. Women were involved in contentious politics to an unprecedented degree, but they and their concerns were frequently marginalized by men in the movement and the mass media, and the movement at large is often memorialized as male and masculine. Drawing on stories of individual women, Schieder outlines how the media and other activists portrayed these women as icons of vulnerability and victims of violence, making women central to discourses about legitimate forms of postwar political expression. Schieder disentangles the gendered patterns that obscured radical women's voices to construct a feminist genealogy of the Japanese New Left, demonstrating that student activism in 1960s Japan cannot be understood without considering the experiences and representations of these women.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Gendering the Japanese New Left
• 1. Naive Politics: A Maiden Sacrifice for Postwar Democracy
• 2. “My Love and Rebellion”: The Politics of Nurturing, the Logic of Capital, and the Rationalization of Coeducation
• 3. Is the Personal Political? Everyday Life as a Site of Struggle in the Campus New Left
• 4. “When You Fuck a Vanguard Girl . . . ”: The Spectacle of New Left Masculinity
• 5. “Gewalt Rosas”: The Creation of the Terrifying, Titillating Female Student Activist
• Conclusion: Revolutionary Desire
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index