ABSTRACT
Traditional gender discourses position adult men as family breadwinners and women as family caregivers. This chapter discusses masculinities and femininities that diverge from and therefore challenge the powerful discourses of the male breadwinner and female caregiver. It specifically investigates ikumen, white-collar professional women, and single women, and argues that they can be considered alternative masculinities and femininities. The culturally iconic corporate salaryman and full-time housewife represent archetypes of hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity in post-World War II Japan. The chapter shows how the oppositional masculinities and femininities simultaneously reaffirm, disaffirm, and reconfigure archetypical forms of masculinity and femininity. It focuses on hegemonic and non-hegemonic gender discourses but also recognizes that other discourses exist alongside and intersect with each other. The chapter discusses how white-collar working mothers engaged in continuous full-time employment and single women can be seen as non-emphasized femininities. It presents the results of some qualitative interview data with women who combine marriage and family with a career.
