ABSTRACT
This study aims to address cultural power of the Japanese family/law and the women's resistant movement to it. It focuses women's 'everyday' form of social movement in order to keep family names in marriage, called 'fufubessei.' In doing so, this paper discusses how Japanese women's everyday legal mobilization provides a cultural space through which women resist the state's construction of their subject positions in marriage and develop their new subjectivities. It argues that family name serves both as symbolic embodiment of cultural/state patriarchy and a contested cultural and legal terrain where various forms of women's resistance take place. Women's challenge to the reified gender roles represented in family name change led them to create negotiated "individual" subjectivities through their creative use of formal law that the law does not expect.
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