ARDEA VALLEY

女心と秋の空 (Onnagokoro to aki no sora) is a Japanese proverb which translates into English as: A Woman's Heart and the Autumn Sky. It is meant to highlight how tempremental women's emotions are - just like the tempestuous and unpredictable Japanese autumn weather. This, like many proverbs, holds an inter-subjective understanding of women, one that falls into sexist archetypes of women's fragility and unreliability, a view which does not hold up under any form of scrutiny.

 

Languge however is tempestuous, and so rather than reading the kotowaza as intended I would focus on the fact that our understanding of what constitutes 'woman' is as shifting as the autumn sky. Femininty and conceptions of womanhood are constantly in flux, and so through a lens of cultural analysis I looked to elucidate the sexually emancipatory and sexist ways in which feminism and erotic production altered perspectives of 'woman' in the late Showa Era. 

​

Kronos is an University of Oxford student ran magazine which ran A Woman's Heart and the Autumn Sky: Deviant Feminity, Pink Film, Uman Ribu, and the Distance between Sexual and Sexist Expression in late Showa Japan (1960-1989) in their 2020 issue themed 'Distance'. It is based off a larger body of research I have performed on the themes of sexuality and gender in a historical context.

​

​

​

​