Noriko Muraki

I am a Ph.D. candidate in social-cultural anthropology. I received my BA in English Literature from Waseda University in 1984, and worked as a company employee in Tokyo for more than ten years. My experience of gender discrimination in both the labor market and the work place initially brought me to Women’s Studies, in which I earned my MA from the University of Northern Iowa in 1999. My dissertation research was supported by a Social Science Research Council (SSRC) International Dissertation Research Fellowship. My dissertation, tentatively entitled, “Social Transformation, Subjectivity, and Middle Class Citizenship among Female College Students in Tokyo,” examines Tokyo lower-tier college women’s negotiation of the meanings of adult female middle class citizenship in a socio-economically transforming Japan, as recent corporate downsizing, labor market transformations, and college reforms have complicated the ways in which college women realize middle class membership. I argue that in the context of their college lives and employment search, college women arrive at daily senses of social distinction, and that it is through such differentiation processes that they both make sense of, and subvert, the meanings of conventional female middle class membership. I particularly appreciate that women’s class-specific life trajectories and other personal coordinates differently mediate their employment choices and future lifecourse imagination. Hence my dissertation contributes to the theoretical discussions of finely differentiated senses of social distinction as well as on the effects of global restructuring and downsizing on the creation of new subjectivities among young women in Japan.

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