Domestic Lives & Other Borders: The Moral Landscape of Housework in Japan

Abstract

Building on three weeks of ethnographic research in Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan, this thesis explores how discursive practices reproduce moral understandings of the world, starting with the practice of housework. While the household is a well-documented subject for the reproduction of social norms, divisions of labor, and gender inequalities, this thesis examines not only how "doing" housework begets "doing" gender, but also how discursive practices function as discursive “borders,” emphasize the moral weight of discursive practices in their production of particular “truths.” In Chapter 1, I introduce the concept of legibility to better understand how morality is discursively communicated, specifically through housework. Chapter 2 draws on the work of the imaginary to understand how discursive borders themselves are an exercise of the imagination, working to produce gendered ideal subjectivities, i.e. a normative argument for who should do housework. Chapter 3 continues the work of the imaginary to better understand how interlocutors theorize and mobilize notions of “the local,” “the global,” and what flows of moral assumption are relayed between these socio-spatial discourses. In Chapter 4, I attend to the perhaps surprising ways in which housework and other landscapes enable productive formations of discursive borders and meaningful fulfillment. Ultimately, this thesis builds on queer and feminist interventions in anthropology while seeking to address how borders take on an active form in border-ing, addressing transnational anxieties on normative notions of gender, citizenship, and belonging.