Contested Meanings: Mothers Who Kill and the Rhetoric of ūman ribu

Abstract

Castellini investigates how the Japanese women’s liberation movement (ūman ribu) critically engaged with the growing visibility of child-killing mothers that characterized media coverage in late postwar Japan. Extending the account of ribu’s critical stance on the maternal initiated in the previous chapter, Castellini delves here into the movement’s expressions of solidarity with mothers who kill their children and unpacks ribu’s complex rhetoric around the image of the kogoroshi no onna (“child-killing” onna). He foregrounds the extent to which the movement’s solidarity and support for these criminalized mothers acquired the status of counter-hegemonic acts of dissent that challenged widespread understandings of filicidal mothers as either “bad” or “mad,” and called into question idealized notions of motherhood, maternal love and the sanctity of the mother–child bond.