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Patriarchy in East Asia: A Comparative Sociology of Gender
The role and significance of patriarchy in East Asia varies greatly according to the interplay between deeply entrenched cultural norms, economic change, and government policy. The aim of this book, therefore, is to offer an historical perspective on these issues combined with an analysis of the transitions and outcomes that have occurred in the status of women over the course of modernization and industrialization in five East Asian societies - Japan, South Korea, North Korea, Taiwan, and China.
The narrative is interwoven with a discussion of contemporary issues such as the persistence of tradition and gender discrimination, how gender roles undermine the development of healthier marriage and family relationships (and better relations among the generations), the lack of full equality for women in employment, falling birth rates, and rising divorce rates.
Patriarchy in East Asia is the first study of its kind undertaken by a sociologist who is fluent in all of the local languages, thereby providing a rare level of access in terms of research of primary sources.
The narrative is interwoven with a discussion of contemporary issues such as the persistence of tradition and gender discrimination, how gender roles undermine the development of healthier marriage and family relationships (and better relations among the generations), the lack of full equality for women in employment, falling birth rates, and rising divorce rates.
Patriarchy in East Asia is the first study of its kind undertaken by a sociologist who is fluent in all of the local languages, thereby providing a rare level of access in terms of research of primary sources.
346 pages, Hardcover
First published November 30, 2012
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October 3, 2014
Finally, I have found a great work - a detailed, thoughtful and balanced study by someone fluent in all languages of the societies studied, acquainted to an expert level with their customs and arguably not beholden to a particular point of view, which would otherwise cloud an objective analysis of a situation, especially given the increased importance and political co-opting of the gender studies in recent years.
The work is preceded by a rarely seen definition, at least in my studies, of the livelihood of a traditional patriarchal housewive - as a complementary member of a marital or cohabiting diad carrying out gendered productive and reproductive labour, modern housewive as a relatively free of primitive productive labour through home automation, but burdened with a supplementary reproductive and formative responsibilies removed from the male parent and a contemporary housewive, balancing the corporatist views on primacy of socially productive labour with a resurgence of the importance of the family life (however the crux of responsibility is placed upon the individual, while the crux of profit on a corporation), which is essential and serves to ground the study in a common set of criteria, applying to superficially similar but deeply culturally distinct countries of the Far East.
The following chapters pertain to the general pattern of transformation of East Asian society and the particular cases as well and concludes with a transversal comparison, the motivations behind the book and a set of topics to research.
To me, this is a very important book, as it follows without fail several simple and one complex hypothesis of mine - namely, the North Korean society owing to the classical dichotomies of mind-body and secular-spiritual which were exacerbated by the communist doctrines themselves rooted in body-hating anti-sexual doctrines of the Catholic and Orthodox Christianty, devolved into a personality-cult society which has not been seen on this planet since the ancient Egypt, due to worst forms of internal repression, rooted themselves in the worst practices of the native cultures and colonial administrations of Japan, China and Russia. Men were de-facto stripped of their male sexuality and serve as eunuch slaves to the state (in the pointless NK military and unfunctional industry) or "impersonal" corporate slave eunuchs, shipped by thousands to Russia and China as slave labour for the heavy industry. The initially liberal divorce law aimed at freeing women was instead used by the slave-owning elite to facilitate hidden polygamy and serial mistress acquisition, and lessen the already minimal responsibilites of men in the NK society. This threatened the Kimist society fomenting displeasure, due to sudden return of sexuality to the virtually emasculated NK men.
Through doctrinal abuse of "spiritual purification" and "self-restraint", the NK elites created a society which perverted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights using the reasoning of the modern liberation feminism against itself - by putting a triple burden on North Korean women. By making the Kim family into a set of primal Male Gods endowed which allowed and expressed sexuality and the wife of Kim Il Sung into a primal Female God and destroying the traditional Korean family lineage systems by cultural extinction, physical extermination and atrocities as well as meaning replacement ("the newspeak" which can be found in translated Chongryon brochures) - the NK system enslaved women as well, burdening them not only with spiritual and reproductive labour, tbut also with servicing the 'spiritially enhanced' "eunuchs" in the army and industry, and the only real labor in a failed state - farming and animal husbandry, on which the survival of all the NK society depends - and ideologically ambivalent labour due to the unmistakeably salient bancrupcy and impotence of the state in its failure to provide the overseeing male role , which ultimately makes North Korean women the "purifiers in need of a purification".
Another hypothesis refers to the vastly differing outcomes of identical and seemingly gender-positive policies in countries with varying degrees of basic personal freedoms.
The gender-obliviating policies in Maoist China ironically resulted in a revival of the worst forms of Quing hypocrisy regarding sexuality, exploitation and progressive disempowerment of women based on the literalist interpretation of the principle "equal in mind - equal in body" and a Westernized reading of the Chinese history by Mao and his environment. In turn this led to understandable and well-motivated apprehension from the Chinese women in the Great Leap Years and a subsequent desire to move OUT of the workforce as the positive self-assured and individualist image and increased income were vastly offset by the loss of communal status in the traditional power and familial structures and potential severely negative impact health and safety in 70ies - 00ies China dominated by dangerous, dirty or difficult manual work and unequal labor contracts due to the state-motivated need of increasing exports. As of today the transformation of the Chinese women into contemporary housewives is still incomplete, so that the role itself is not yet under criticism.
We may yet see a new flame of labor movement as well as a new familial complementarity and inclusive equality movement, led by the Chinese women of the newly developed knowledge sector.
In Taiwan and Japan we see the two dissimilar end results of the transformation - relatively high wage equality in Taiwan and very high rates of secondary and tertiary education and employment of women, which in certain sectors overtakes male by a large margin, but resulting in lower communicative capacity, lower compatibility as a counterpart to increased choice and the lowest in the region sub-replacement birth rate of 0.85 children per breeding pair, which might not necessarily be positive for the countries themselves, but might be instructive to the rest of mankind.
Again, in Japan we are already seeing a new turn away from the first and second waves of corporatist-beholden feminism - turning women into useful asexual work-units, as a type of 'second men' used towards the new post-third wave sex-positive and inclusive feminism, which is ironically and incidentially close to the initial complementarity and matrilinearity of the societies traditionally considered as 'partiarchal', taken without its stiffling doctrinal gender image and forced identities.
The work is preceded by a rarely seen definition, at least in my studies, of the livelihood of a traditional patriarchal housewive - as a complementary member of a marital or cohabiting diad carrying out gendered productive and reproductive labour, modern housewive as a relatively free of primitive productive labour through home automation, but burdened with a supplementary reproductive and formative responsibilies removed from the male parent and a contemporary housewive, balancing the corporatist views on primacy of socially productive labour with a resurgence of the importance of the family life (however the crux of responsibility is placed upon the individual, while the crux of profit on a corporation), which is essential and serves to ground the study in a common set of criteria, applying to superficially similar but deeply culturally distinct countries of the Far East.
The following chapters pertain to the general pattern of transformation of East Asian society and the particular cases as well and concludes with a transversal comparison, the motivations behind the book and a set of topics to research.
To me, this is a very important book, as it follows without fail several simple and one complex hypothesis of mine - namely, the North Korean society owing to the classical dichotomies of mind-body and secular-spiritual which were exacerbated by the communist doctrines themselves rooted in body-hating anti-sexual doctrines of the Catholic and Orthodox Christianty, devolved into a personality-cult society which has not been seen on this planet since the ancient Egypt, due to worst forms of internal repression, rooted themselves in the worst practices of the native cultures and colonial administrations of Japan, China and Russia. Men were de-facto stripped of their male sexuality and serve as eunuch slaves to the state (in the pointless NK military and unfunctional industry) or "impersonal" corporate slave eunuchs, shipped by thousands to Russia and China as slave labour for the heavy industry. The initially liberal divorce law aimed at freeing women was instead used by the slave-owning elite to facilitate hidden polygamy and serial mistress acquisition, and lessen the already minimal responsibilites of men in the NK society. This threatened the Kimist society fomenting displeasure, due to sudden return of sexuality to the virtually emasculated NK men.
Through doctrinal abuse of "spiritual purification" and "self-restraint", the NK elites created a society which perverted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights using the reasoning of the modern liberation feminism against itself - by putting a triple burden on North Korean women. By making the Kim family into a set of primal Male Gods endowed which allowed and expressed sexuality and the wife of Kim Il Sung into a primal Female God and destroying the traditional Korean family lineage systems by cultural extinction, physical extermination and atrocities as well as meaning replacement ("the newspeak" which can be found in translated Chongryon brochures) - the NK system enslaved women as well, burdening them not only with spiritual and reproductive labour, tbut also with servicing the 'spiritially enhanced' "eunuchs" in the army and industry, and the only real labor in a failed state - farming and animal husbandry, on which the survival of all the NK society depends - and ideologically ambivalent labour due to the unmistakeably salient bancrupcy and impotence of the state in its failure to provide the overseeing male role , which ultimately makes North Korean women the "purifiers in need of a purification".
Another hypothesis refers to the vastly differing outcomes of identical and seemingly gender-positive policies in countries with varying degrees of basic personal freedoms.
The gender-obliviating policies in Maoist China ironically resulted in a revival of the worst forms of Quing hypocrisy regarding sexuality, exploitation and progressive disempowerment of women based on the literalist interpretation of the principle "equal in mind - equal in body" and a Westernized reading of the Chinese history by Mao and his environment. In turn this led to understandable and well-motivated apprehension from the Chinese women in the Great Leap Years and a subsequent desire to move OUT of the workforce as the positive self-assured and individualist image and increased income were vastly offset by the loss of communal status in the traditional power and familial structures and potential severely negative impact health and safety in 70ies - 00ies China dominated by dangerous, dirty or difficult manual work and unequal labor contracts due to the state-motivated need of increasing exports. As of today the transformation of the Chinese women into contemporary housewives is still incomplete, so that the role itself is not yet under criticism.
We may yet see a new flame of labor movement as well as a new familial complementarity and inclusive equality movement, led by the Chinese women of the newly developed knowledge sector.
In Taiwan and Japan we see the two dissimilar end results of the transformation - relatively high wage equality in Taiwan and very high rates of secondary and tertiary education and employment of women, which in certain sectors overtakes male by a large margin, but resulting in lower communicative capacity, lower compatibility as a counterpart to increased choice and the lowest in the region sub-replacement birth rate of 0.85 children per breeding pair, which might not necessarily be positive for the countries themselves, but might be instructive to the rest of mankind.
Again, in Japan we are already seeing a new turn away from the first and second waves of corporatist-beholden feminism - turning women into useful asexual work-units, as a type of 'second men' used towards the new post-third wave sex-positive and inclusive feminism, which is ironically and incidentially close to the initial complementarity and matrilinearity of the societies traditionally considered as 'partiarchal', taken without its stiffling doctrinal gender image and forced identities.
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