This book provides the first full-length, English-language investigation of the multiple and often contradictory ways in which mothers who kill their children were portrayed in 1970s Japan. It offers a snapshot of a historical and social moment when motherhood was being renegotiated, and maternal violence was disrupting norms of acceptable maternal behaviour. Drawing on a wide range of original archival materials, it explores three discursive sites where the image of the murderous mother assumed a distinctive visibility: media coverage of cases of maternal filicide; the rhetoric of a newly emerging women's liberation movement known as man ribu; and fictional works by the Japanese writer Takahashi Takako. Using translation as a theoretical tool to decentre the West as the origin of (feminist) theorizations of the maternal, it enables a transnational dialogue for imagining mothers' potential for violence. This thought-provoking work will appeal to scholars of feminist theory, cultural studies and Japanese studies.

Exposes the cultural alterity inherent to different understandings of women who kill their children Challenges the all-too-familiar dichotomy drawn between 'the West' and 'the Rest of the World' Goes beyond gender and motherhood studies to examine the fraught relationship between cultural and area studies

Autorentext
Alessandro Castellini is LSE Fellow in Transnational Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.

Inhalt
Introduction.- Chapter 1.- Filicide in the media: news coverage of mothers who kill in 1970s Japan.- Chapter 2. The Women's Liberation Movement in 1970s Japan.- Chapter 3. Contested meanings: mothers who kill and the rhetoric of man ribu.- Chapter 4. Filicide and maternal animosity in Takahashi Takako's early fiction.- Conclusion.