Abstract

In 1971, a young woman attempted to enter graduate school at Kyoto University. Her undergraduate advisor attempted to dissuade her. This ‘incident’ prompted a heated dispute that rallied student activists to support the young woman, dubbed R-ko, and channeled the anger of female students at this elite university toward what they understood to be implicit gendered bias undergirding the university and its definition of who constituted an academic. This article considers this dispute in detail, and attempts to understand this localized campus dispute in the wider context of postwar public debates in Japan on the question of women’s access to higher education. Universities serves as a key sites for the production of new knowledge and for the training of those deemed suitable to become professionalized knowledge producers in modern societies, and the public debates examined here indicate the processes by which gendered logic produced the ‘common sense’ of knowledge production in postwar Japan. To illuminate the gendered implications of these negotiations over who can and should participate in knowledge production in postwar Japan, this article adapts Gramsci’s insights on the power arrangements embedded in ‘common sense’ and employs a feminist analysis to investigate how a gendered logic inflected a more widely accepted ‘common sense’ that could obstruct women from entering educational institutions and participating in producing knowledge. It takes seriously the documents left by a transitory activist movement – a moment – to understand the historical strategies mobilized to counter such ‘common sense’, and also the challenges such critiques have met.

摘要

1971 年，一名年轻女子试图进入京都大学的研究生院。她的本科导师试图劝阻她。这一“事件”引发了一场激烈的争论，学生活动家团结起来支持这位被称为 R-ko 的年轻女子，并将这所精英大学的女学生的愤怒引向了她们所理解的隐含的性别偏见，这是大学及其定义的基础谁构成了学者。本文详细考虑了这一争议，并试图在日本战后关于女性接受高等教育问题的公开辩论的更广泛背景下理解这一局部校园争议。大学是产生新知识和培训被认为适合成为现代社会专业知识生产者的关键场所，这里考察的公开辩论表明了战后日本性别逻辑产生知识生产“常识”的过程。为了阐明这些关于谁可以和应该参与战后日本知识生产的谈判的性别含义，本文改编了葛兰西关于嵌入“常识”的权力安排的见解，并采用女权主义分析来调查性别逻辑如何影响更多广泛接受的“常识”可能会阻碍女性进入教育机构并参与知识生产。它认真对待由短暂的激进主义运动留下的文件——片刻——来理解为对抗这种“常识”而动员起来的历史策略，以及这种批评所遇到的挑战。