Online Talk#15: Tricksters and Troublesome Women: Strategies of Gendered Identities and Social Change in Two Moments in

Speakers: Chelsea Szendi  Schieder (Professor,  AGU) and Daniela Lazoroska (Postdoc, AGU)

　In this discussion, Daniela Lazoroska (Aoyama Gakuin University) and Chelsea Szendi Schieder (Aoyama Gakuin University) introduce two moments in postwar Japanese social movements that may be used to reconceptualize ideas about gendered political and social participation. Lazoroska explores women’s experiences of leadership in solar energy communities in post-3/11 Japan, and their appeal to "disembodied" knowledge as a way of evading positioning. Schieder discusses how women’s entry into postwar Japanese politics was predicated on an idea about women’s “apolitical” authenticity, a strategy that defined much of the housewife activism of the 1950s and 1960s. In conversation, we tease out the resonances, and reflect on which subjects or political subjectivities are seen as possessing moral legitimacy to instigate social change. We propose the framework of the “trickster” to explore how some politically active women may play in the space between gendered…