Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Transgressions of the Everyday: Stories of Mother-Son Incest in Japanese Popular Culture

Transgressions of the Everyday: Stories of Mother-Son Incest in Japanese Popular Culture positions 2:3 Winter 1994 Circulating in the mass media of low- to relatively highbrow publications (magazines for young women such as JoseiJishin, for adult women such as Fujin @-on, and for mixed adult audiences such as Gendai no me), the tale of mother-son incest knits together two plots. T h e first narrative is entrance exam preparation. Referred to as jukenben@ (literally, exam preparation) or “exam hell” (shikenjigoku), it typically lasts from one to two years, can cost families vast sums of money, is a time when students are expected to sacrifice friends and hobbies to spend long hours in study, and characteristically involves incredible efforts on the parts of mothers.’ Exams determine acceptance into high school and university, and thus in Japan’s “school record society” (gakurekishakai),where the schools one attends are the single most important factor deciding employment and career, exam results largely determine adult identity, social status, and job security, at least for males. Coupled to this story is an incest story about the transgressive union of mother and son in sexual passion. T h e articles describe these to be “fearful,” shock i ng , “su rpr ising ,” upsetting,” and sca ry ,” descriptors http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png positions asia critique Duke University Press

Transgressions of the Everyday: Stories of Mother-Son Incest in Japanese Popular Culture

Allison, Anne
positions asia critique , Volume 2 (3) – Dec 1, 1994
Download PDF
33 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/duke-university-press/transgressions-of-the-everyday-stories-of-mother-son-incest-in-R5VtTL9HhT

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 1994 by Duke University Press
ISSN
1067-9847
eISSN
1527-8271
DOI
10.1215/10679847-2-3-467
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

positions 2:3 Winter 1994 Circulating in the mass media of low- to relatively highbrow publications (magazines for young women such as JoseiJishin, for adult women such as Fujin @-on, and for mixed adult audiences such as Gendai no me), the tale of mother-son incest knits together two plots. T h e first narrative is entrance exam preparation. Referred to as jukenben@ (literally, exam preparation) or “exam hell” (shikenjigoku), it typically lasts from one to two years, can cost families vast sums of money, is a time when students are expected to sacrifice friends and hobbies to spend long hours in study, and characteristically involves incredible efforts on the parts of mothers.’ Exams determine acceptance into high school and university, and thus in Japan’s “school record society” (gakurekishakai),where the schools one attends are the single most important factor deciding employment and career, exam results largely determine adult identity, social status, and job security, at least for males. Coupled to this story is an incest story about the transgressive union of mother and son in sexual passion. T h e articles describe these to be “fearful,” shock i ng , “su rpr ising ,” upsetting,” and sca ry ,” descriptors

Journal

positions asia critique – Duke University Press

Published: Dec 1, 1994

There are no references for this article.