Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls, livre ebook

This is the first in-depth examination of “half-Japanese” girls in Japan focusing on ethnic, gendered and embodied ‘hybrid’ identities. Challenging the myth of Japan as a single-race society, these girls are seen struggling to positively manoeuvre themselves and negotiate their identities into positions of contestation and control over marginalizing discourses which disempower them as ‘others’ within Japanese society as they begin to mature. Paradoxically, at other times, within more empowering alternative discourses of ethnicity, they also enjoy and celebrate cultural, symbolic, social and linguistic capital which they discursively create for themselves as they come to terms with their constructed identities of “Japaneseness”, “whiteness” and “halfness/doubleness”. This book has a colourful storyline throughout - narrated in the girls’ own voices - that follows them out of childhood and into the rapid physical and emotional growth years of early adolescence.

Chapter 1: Constructing Hybrid Identity in Japan

Chapter 2: Examining Discourses of ‘Otherness’ in Japan

Chapter 3: The Participants and the Data Collection

Chapter 4: Negotiating Identities

Chapter 5: Claiming Good Difference; Rejecting Bad Difference

Chapter 6: Celebration of Cultural, Symbolic, Linguistic, and Social Capital

Chapter 7: Discursive ‘Embodied’ Identities of Ethnicity and Gender

Chapter 8: Discursive Construction of Hybrid Identity in Japan: Where has it Taken Us?