Coed Revolution

Reviewed by: Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left by Chelsea Szendi Schieder Christopher Gerteis (bio) Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left. By Chelsea Szendi Schieder. Duke University Press, 2021. xii, 212 pages. $99.95, cloth; $25.95, paper; $25.95, E-book. Chelsea Szendi Schieder's Coed Revolution is a fascinating deep dive into the gendered structures of student activism in 1960s Japan. Hers is not a history of the Japanese women's movement but is instead a close study of female students as a "site of tension" within the male-dominated radical political movements that shaped postwar Japan. What interests Schieder is the extent to which women could rise to positions of leadership within the New Left movement. She builds her study from the observation that normative social roles did not only define the limits of women's political participation; normative practices mediated how women could express their desire for radical political change. Schieder reconstructs the history of women who instead of subordinating themselves to concentric patriarchal structures chose to battle the overarching hierarchies of socioeconomy that bolstered the whole global geopolitical landscape. To them, the problem of patriarchy was a symptom of systemic inequality all the way up, and all the way down. Oguma Eiji's two-volume epic, 1968, is the most commonly referenced history of late 1960s student activism. 1 While offering mention of significant female actors, Oguma focuses on how mass youth activism was an arena in which a generation of young people imagined themselves the vanguard of a global revolutionary moment. Oguma argued that they were instead representative of an ennui born of a generational identity crisis far more about self-discovery than political revolution. The strength of this well-crafted book is Schieder's tenacious interrogation of how gender and sexuality overdetermined young middle-class students' engagement with radical politics. Schieder enables a rethink of Oguma's observation that sites of political protest became an involuted space for generational encounter and political irrelevance. She builds on this by arguing that the movement's objectification of women as sites of desire overdetermined the political choices available to even the most radical women activists. Coed Revolution shows the reader how a gendered hierarchy defined what women could achieve in the arena of radical politics. Indeed, Schieder argues that within Japan's New Left movement "desire for the young woman [End Page 205] often eclipses discussions about what young women desire." Schieder examines the "processes by which young women are given voice and are silenced, as icons of vulnerability and violence, in postwar Japan." The problem manifested itself in Japan as a pernicious assumption that women were "representatives of a nonideological naive politics" and that radical women specifically were unnatural and dangerous (p. 167). In this Schieder most closely resonates with Setsu Shigematsu's Scream from the Shadows, which is a brilliant study of radical feminism in Japan since the 1970s. 2 Scream from the Shadows is a chastisement of the field for failure to sufficiently build on feminist works about and from the era. Schieder's Coed Revolution is the logical successor to Shigematsu's pathbreaking work. When read together, Shigematsu and Schieder show how the male-dominated youth politics of the era embraced notions of gender that alienated and defined many of the young radical women who founded radical feminist organizations of the 1970s. Schieder identifies key archetypes of women, paper doll cutouts deployed by media and movement to describe leftist politics across the decade of the 1960s: from the maiden martyr Kanba Michiko (chapter 1) to the sexualized "Gewalt Rosa" Kashiwazaki Chieko (chapter 5). After her death during the 1960 protests against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, Kanba was portrayed by national media and social movements as a sacrificial indictment of the postwar state and symbol of the vulnerability of democracy. By the late 1960s, militant women were described as "Gewalt Rosas" exemplified by Kashiwazaki whose jailhouse memoir embraced the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg and celebrated the emotional rush of making violent revolution. Schieder further unpacks the process by which young women's political voice was dismissed as "nonideological naive politics," which included the

Battle · New Left · Normative · Patriarchy · Political activism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law