Negotiating gender equality in daily work: an ethnography of a public women’s organisation in Okinawa, Japan
View/ Open
Date
04/07/2011Author
Narisada, Yoko
Metadata
Abstract
This doctoral research is a contribution to the understanding of social activism and its
socio-cultural formation in postcolonial Okinawa. It is based on eighteen months of
fieldwork including participant observation and interviews at a public women’s
organisation, Women’s Organisation Okinawa (WOO). This project centres on the
lived practices of staff who attempted to produce and encourage gender equality in
the public sector under neoliberal governance. I demonstrate through ethnographic
analysis how the practice of law and social movements is distinct from the ideals of
such movements as well as the particular individuals involved in them.
WOO was established in the public sector by local government in alliance with
various grassroots groups in Okinawa in the late 1990s. WOO embraced the dreams,
hopes and anticipations of various actors - users and workers - who had been
involved in the establishment, but in reality, it also contained various contradictions.
First, WOO was a new workplace for those who wanted to work in activism and be
paid for their work, but also reproduced precarious, low-waged, gendered labour.
Second, WOO was a site which put law into practice, but it revealed that law
internalised the inconsistency between what people had originally expected of the
law and what law enacted as a result of institutionalisation. Third, WOO
unexpectedly became a focal point of contact between neoliberal and feminist
governance through public services and the requirements of performing
accountability for citizens and for feminist activism. Thus frontline practitioners
attempted to bridge the gap between ideal, reality, law and practice and to negotiate
with neoliberal and feminist governance in the labour process.
This thesis demonstrates how the inconsistencies between ideal and reality arose in
the daily working practices of staff positioned between citizens, laws and social
movements. More precisely, it explores how staff attempted to negotiate,
accommodate and struggle with the gap between ideal and reality through their lived
experience, rather than fiercely resisting or merely being subject to a form of
governance or reality. In doing so, the thesis reveals how unstable and problematic
the notion of ‘gender equality’ was as it was deployed at WOO.