2013.07.29 Mon
“Women’s Thoughts” ―We Remember You
Chizuko’s Blog No. 50
“Women’s Thoughts” ―We Remember You
Ⅰ.Re-reading “Women’s Books”
“The words that became my body and soul” ― is how I would describe their writing. To read books is to retrace others’ experiences. I’ve been reading their books since I was young. Then, I was too young and too immature to find the right words to express myself. Even when I tried, the words I had with me were so few that they never felt right. It was then that they gave me the “women’s words” through their books. I found that these women had created their words from struggles similar to mine. It was because they were written in my mother tongue that their words touched my heart. I’d like to tell you how much I was inspired by these women who came a little ahead of me. This was my motivation to write this book.
Ⅱ.Re-interpretating the World with Gender
Some books influenced me so deeply that they don’t appear in my bibliography. It’s been a while since I had this idea. They’ve developed my theories and thoughts so deeply that they’ve become part of my body and soul, so how can I separate them from me and cite them as references for my own books? I even find it hard to cite particular sentences from them because I can’t specify which sentences inspired me. I usually borrowed thoughts and theories of other authors to create my own, but I’m not ashamed of that. The point is how and from whom I borrowed the thoughts, and how I used them to form my own ideas. The foreign books I dealt with in this book are the ones that influenced me deeply. I also introduced them chronologically.
Some readers may find it strange that I included two male philosophers in this book, Foucault and Said, although the book is titled “Women’s Thoughts.” But I’d like to interpret “Women’s Thoughts” as “the thoughts which create a borderline between men and women.”Or, more technically, they’re the thoughts that expose the system which creates a borderline between men and women. If that’s true, I can’t omit Foucault’s contribution to the exposure and can’t ignore Said in post-colonialism.
————————————————————————–
Original Text by Chizuko Ueno (http://wan.or.jp/ueno/?p=3183)
Translated by N. Tajima
カテゴリー:Book (B-WAN)