[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Jaseel P [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”] & Rashmi Gaur
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India.
Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–11. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.03
Abstract received: 31 March 2021 | Complete article received: 2 June 2021 | Revised article received: 5 Dec 2021 | Accepted: 16 Dec 2021 | First Published: 05 February 2022
(This article is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Precarity and Performativity in Post-Fordist Japanese Workplace: A Reading of Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman
Abstract
The socio-economic phenomenon of post-Fordism strengthened the growing Japanese economy since the 1970s. However, the economic recession in the 1990s led to the birth of the precariat in Japan. A country known for permanent employment and long-term stability was replaced by policies that enabled a new class of temporary workers. These vulnerable part-time employees, also called freeters, are victims of anxiety and social pressure. They led a life of insecurity and hopelessness. This ontological vulnerability prevalent in modern workplaces has profound repercussions on gender relations and identity formation and attempts to resist and expose these hegemonic powers shape the central theme in Sayaka Murata’s deadpan comedy Convenience Store Woman (2018). The protagonist Keiko, a freeter herself, struggles to live up to the societal expectations of marriage, motherhood, and a stable career. The workspace, which the protagonist of the novel considers as her safest place despite being a forcibly normalised environment, could not hold its illusion of stability for long as it becomes a precarious space of crisis. Precarity experienced under post-Fordist capitalism forces institutionalised forms of recognition where the performances of identities are regulated and constructed to ensure survival. The textuality of the workspace in the novel parallels the world outside of it, making the convenience store a microcosm for the capitalist world after globalisation. With Judith Butler’s studies on gender performativity and precariousness, and textual analysis of the novel, the authors of this paper study how anxiety-ridden precarious living conditions can also become a foundation for alternative performances troubling gender categories, thereby transcending the narrow social scripts rooted in exclusion and inequality.
Keywords: Precariousness, Gender Performativity, Japan, Post-Fordist Capitalism, Resistance.
