Escaping Work and Finding Love: Shifting Discourses of Women's (Re)productive Labour in the Japanese Television Drama Nigehaji.

The popular 2016 television drama Nigehaji gained attention for directly engaging with various challenges faced by women in contemporary Japan. The drama depicts a young female university graduate who enters into a 'contract marriage' and earns a salary for carrying out the work of a housewife. Through positioning the unpaid labour of housewives as a form of paid labour, Nigehaji's unconventional exploration of (re)productive work and employment appeared to challenge hegemonic discourses of women's roles more keenly than typical work-related dramas. However, I argue that the drama destabilises and renegotiates the boundaries of hegemonic gender models without directly challenging traditional norms. This renegotiation appears to be enabled by post-feminist discourses which allow for the coexistence of traditional norms and the notion of women's empowerment through paid labour without seeming overtly contradictory. Nigehaji proposes a variety of life choices available to the contemporary subject, which marks a shift from earlier dramas in which women often had to choose between work or marriage. This emphasis on the diversity of women's available choices is reminiscent of 'choice feminism', wherein women's 'empowerment' can be measured by their freedom of choice, a sentiment that can fail to recognise the potentially patriarchal or gendered nature of some of these choices. While scholarship on post-feminism has generally been located within Western contexts, this article contributes to a wider understanding of how post-feminist discourses of women's changing gender roles are being articulated within Japanese popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]