This paper reviews the broad topic of gender theory and feminism as a movement. Modern theories of feminism have struggled over how best to resolve the tensions between “sexual difference” and “equality.” The reason why women are not afforded “human rights” is that womenʟs bodies have “differences” from men's. In first-wave feminism, which arose at the beginning of modern society, feminists insisted on the rights of the individual woman as a mother. Second-wave feminism at the end of modern society criticized the role of mother as the basis of rights and insisted upon rights as being based on women's bodies.

One way to argue against the proposition that “anatomy is destiny” is to point out that “gender role divisions” are socially constructed. One may further suggest that “gender” is also constructed by society. A post-structuralist approach makes it possible to think that “biological sex” or “the body” is also constructed linguistically, leading to the notion of “intersectionality.” Today we face the different problem of how to grasp the “body” in the controversy of the definition of “woman” or “women.”

The number of male workers has increased in the “female-dominated occupations” of care facilities in Japan. At the same time, male care workers tend to hold better job positions than their female counterparts. This paper elucidates the process by which the idea of “care as a female job” is replaced by “male being an ideal worker” in care facilities under the marketization of welfare, thus, reproducing socio-economical male domination. Focus is placed on the practices of “hegemonic masculinities” performing bodies that work long hours. The ideal of “tailor-made care” under long-term care insurance（LTCI）requires care workers to engage in self-sacrificing care practices that have been traditionally performed by women at home. However, as “self-sacrificing professionals” are also required to work long hours in care facilities, the situation demonstrates “hegemonic masculinities” performing bodies that work long hours. Male workers who work long hours can easily obtain managerial positions under the management, based on the model of “self-sacrificing professionals” ; contrarily, the practice of “hegemonic masculinities” performing bodies that work long hours has not been connected with workersʼ “skills,” and part-time workers are also entitled to be managers at the care facility which eliminates the ideal of self-sacrificing professionals by outsourcing the night shift to other workers. This means that “local” practices might change the existing male domination if many workplaces allow this kind of “undoing gender.” However, practices of “doing gender,” through which men are regarded as “ideal workers,” are repeated in many marketized care facilities. The marketization of welfare facilitates the use of the skills of female workers with lower pay and status than male workers, and sets back the feminist goal of the valuation of female care-work.

This paper examines the masculinities of “Ikumen” , the child-caring men in Japanese policy for work-family balance, and discusses the effects and problems of caring masculinities.

This paper explores the Ikumen figures shown in the leaflets and posters used by the Japanese policy “Ikumen project” from 2010 to 2018. Ikumen is a father figure who not only takes child-care well, but also works hard as a breadwinner. Ikumen takes almost the same quality of child-care as mothers, but they have less time for child-care than mothers. The work style of Ikumen is influenced by the Salaryman masculinity, the Japanese hegemonic masculinity post World War II. Therefore, they cannot achieve gender equality in child-care.

“Caring masculinities” is a new kind of masculinity for gender equality, and includes caring which is considered as femininity. It is an important strategy in the EU to make men caring. Caring masculinities makes it easy for both masculine men and companies to accept caring men. However, this strategy also has a problem in that it is difficult to exclude the domination of hegemonic masculinity from caring masculinities. For achieving gender equality in care, it is important to exclude any gender norms from caring, as argued by feminist care theories.

Gender studies have considered only women, not men, as parties involved in the reproduction process. However, with the increase in novel reproduction related medical technologies, men’s involvement in reproduction is being reaffirmed. The frame of argument（self-body-self-determination）that gender studies rely on can only inadequately discuss this situation. The elucidation of men's reproductive experiences is a contemporary issue that gender studies should address.

Therefore, this paper focuses on prenatal testing as an example of new medical technology. Based on the analysis of interviews with ten men who underwent/considered this test, this paper clarifies the “linguistic resources” and “role categories” men relied on to indicate their “being a party” to reproduction. It found that the “linguistic resources” were “ourselves,” “my child,” and “our child,” and the men involved themselves in reproduction by practicing “parental role” among multiple role categories.

As a result, this paper derived two characteristics of men's reproductive experiences: (1)Male subjectification process in reproduction is anticipating and becoming involved in the future parental role. This can be called an indirect process. (2)The main rhetoric of male subjectification in reproduction, that is, the practice of parental role, contains patriarchal nuances in the structure of the argument, independent of individual men's intentions.

It is commonly believed that educational choices are only determined by academic grades. Despite controlling for academic grades, they are still affected by social class. Thus, academic grades constitute a crucial variable in empirical studies on education and social stratification. Since it is difficult to obtain data on academic grades through social surveys, many social surveys use a five-point Likert scale to measure academic grades. The scale aims to compare participantsʼ ranks during their third year of junior high school. In Japan, most junior high school students recognize their academic grades because they advance to high school through entrance examinations. Thus, this study hypothesized that self-reported academic grades are relatively fixed and correlate with high school rankings. The data from a longitudinal survey launched in 2012 focusing on second-year high school students and their mothers was used; and a follow-up survey was conducted in 2019. These surveys included questions regarding self-reported academic grades and high school names. Since academic grades were also repeatedly requested in the followup survey, we can compare the responses between 2012 and 2019. Each high school ranking score, which was calculated based on the relative position of academic grades, was estimated based on the name of the high school. Furthermore, we were able to compare self-reported academic grades with each high school ranking. The results showed that self-reported academic grades are reliable indices, since their responses can be regarded as consistent. Self-reported academic grades were related to each high school ranking, and this study did not find any notable tendency toward mismatch of responses. Based on logistic regression models, including variables predicting university acceptance, it was concluded that when conducting social surveys, self-reporting is an effective and simple method of obtaining information about academic grades.

This paper focuses on how X-jendā one of the gender identity categories referring to a non-binary gender identity is used for self-positioning, despite its social meaning and definition being plastic and unspecified. Categories that refer to gender minorities have been argued to be components of medical norms and binary gender order in cases such as gender identity disorder, which is a well-known medicalized category in Japan. Recently, studies have focused on the process of abandoning the idea of identifying oneself with a certain category or self-image, that cannot be expressed by any gender identity category. However, there has been insufficient examination of how non-binary gender identity categories are operated for self-positioning by gender nonconformists in Japan.

Therefore, I empirically explored the ways in which X-jendā was used, through semi-structured interviews with ten individuals who identified themselves as Xjendā. As a result, four types of narratives were clarified: reinterpreting experiences, epistemological disconnection with pre-existing categories, tentative sense of belonging, and grounds for political claims. X-jendā is used in an attempt to avoid the negative meanings of preexisting categories and to position the self, living in an unstable manner in a gender binary society, while avoiding the categorical pursuit of the self. These practices are accompanied by those of institutionalizing care for the gender nonconforming self and body under the same category, which leads to conflicts among gender nonconformists. These results contribute to the discussion of gender categorization that has focused on the process of differentiating the self from preexisting gender identity categories in a way that they show the multiple practices that can be worked in both a collaborative and contradictory manner and how their consequences are enabled by the plastic nature of X-jendā.

Educational differences in norms and socially constructed preferences regarding child rearing may lead to educational differences in how time is allocated for paid work, housework, and children. This paper explores the relationship between parent-child activities and parental time in paid work and housework, and whether these relationships differ by parental education, using a sample of married parents from the National Family Research of Japan 2018. For less-educated mothers, the frequency of educational activities was positively related to the frequency of housework, however, no such relationship was observed among more educated mothers. This suggests that while more educated mothers try to put aside time to teach their children from their daily housework routine, less educated mothers tend to perform educational activities in the natural flow of life. For less educated fathers, frequency of educational activities was negatively related to their hours of paid work; however, no such relationship was observed among more educated fathers. This suggests that more educated fathers strive to devote time to their children even when working long hours. These results imply that more educated parents value active involvement with their children, which leads them to prioritize parentchild activities, particularly educational activities. Furthermore, given the lack of progress in reducing fathersʼ working hours, the emergence of more educated Japanese fathers, who devote themselves to both paid work and educational activities of their children, suggests possible widening disparities among children in terms of parental time investment.

Ethnomethodology has mainly focused on analyzing audio or video data of talk-ininteraction. Recently, however, ethnomethodological studies analyzing text data are gaining increasing attention in Japan. This paper aims to develop methodological arguments to provide goals, methods, and perspectives of ethnomethodological studies of text data. First, based on previous ethnomethodological studies, this paper presents a fundamental principle of ethnomethodological studies of text data. Instead of treating texts as mere representations of social phenomena or resources for analysis, ethnomethodology analyzes them in their own right and elucidates how they are made understandable as particular actions. Second, responding to conversation analysts' criticism regarding the difficulty of using co-participants' understandings as analytic resources in texts, this paper defends the ethnomethodological analyzability of text data. Third, building upon Goffman's idea of participation framework and conversation analysts' critical examination of it, this paper states that it is a crucial task to elucidate how writers and readers form participation frameworks around texts. In addressing this issue, I argue for the importance of paying attention to interfaces as both constraints and resources for the practice of writing and reading texts. Fourth, this paper analyzes an Amazon.co.jp review text of an English comedy film and a comment on the review, thereby showing that an analysis of how writers/readers form participation frameworks around texts contributes to the elucidation of the intelligibility of the texts as actions. Finally, my methodological argument contributes to the reconsideration of the relationship between ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, focusing not only on tensions but also on possibilities of collaborations.