Barbara Molony

Staying on the line : blue-collar women in contemporary Japan

This is a persuasive, multilayered analysis of a vital but little-examined sector of the Japanese workforce--the female permanent blue-collar worker. Through personal accounts of factory life, the author examines why these women work, what satisfaction they find in remaining in the workforce, and how they meet the demands of work and household, caught in a contradiction between traditional socio-cultural ideology and modern economic reality.

Review: Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and the Cold War in the U.S. Occupation of Japan, by Mire Koikari. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008. 226 pp.

‘‘fields of contention’’) and focuses attention on why location matters for health social movements. She concludes in Part III with an extended case study of one breast cancer patient, following her across the changing contours of Bay area COAs. She also looks at changes in these COAs in the twenty-first century, using concepts of risk to examine emerging assemblages of technologies, discourses, and forms of embodiment and subjectivity in and around the biopolitics of breast cancer. Klawiter deftly synthesizes complex theoretical literatures, expansive historical horizons, and detailed ethnographic and interview data and crafts a remarkable narrative that contributes to multiple fields of research. She also provides a helpful conceptual vocabulary for further research into terrains of patient activism. This book will be of value to anyone interested in social movements, the politics and policy of breast cancer, and patient activism and organization. Sociologists of all stripes will find something of value in this important book.