"Dangerous Women, Deadly Words" is a materialist-feminist,
psychoanalytic analysis of a modern Japanese literary trope--the
dangerous woman--in the works of three twentieth-century writers:
Izumi Kyoka (1873-1939), Enchi Fumiko (1905-86), and Nakagami Kenji
(1946-92). Linked to archaisms and magical realms, the trope of the
dangerous, spiritually empowered woman culls from and commingles
archetypes from throughout the Japanese canon, including mountain
witches, female shamans, and snake-women.
In radical opposition to the conventional interpretation of the
trope as a repository for transhistorical notions of "female
essence" and "Japaneseness," the author reads the dangerous woman
as connected in complex ways with twentieth-century Japanese
epistemological upheavals: the negotiation of modern phallic
subjectivity, modernization of a homosocial economy, the radically
changed status of women, reified maternity, compulsory
heterosexuality, and the function of literature.
The dangerous woman enabled the literary birth of a modern,
phallic, national subject as its constitutive Other, the locus of
"originary" desire, thus the domain of the Lacanian Real and,
accordingly, the abject. Determined by the cultural abhorrence that
gives shape in language to the earliest psychic processes of
separating self from not-self, the dangerous woman is also the
locus for "jouissance, " a type of erotic pleasure that threatens
the stability of the experiential subject.
The book's close literary readings are deeply anchored in the
gendered cultural and literary characteristics of three periods in
Japan's modernity. The author traces the trope of the dangerous
woman through its establishment as a male imaginary by gothic
storyteller Kyoka, its subsequent cooption for female erotic agency
by Enchi, and its ultimate destabilization by Nakagami through a
phallic retroping of archaisms partly dependent on an equation of
the social discourses on outcaste pollution with those of
homosexual and female abjection.
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