Weaving from the Margins: An Ecofeminist Critique of The Song of the Weaving Women

Abstract

This study employs ecofeminism as a theoretical framework to examine its applicability and critical value within Okinawan regional literature. Emerging in the latter half of the twentieth century, ecofeminism aims to expose the shared objectification and oppression of nature and women under patriarchal systems and capitalist logic at the ideological level. It emphasizes the construction of an ecological ethics centered on coexistence, cooperation, and local knowledge. Okinawa, positioned at the geographic and cultural margins of Japan’s national narrative, with its unique colonial history, military trauma, and cultural heterogeneity, endows its literature with potent criticality and decentering potential. Centering on Kishaba Naoko’s The Song of the Weaving Women as the primary text, this study focuses on the literary representation of binary oppositions within the work and explores ways to deconstruct traditional logocentric thinking. Through analysis of female embodied experience, local ecological knowledge, and cultural practices, it seeks ethical pathways beyond binary oppositions toward harmonious coexistence. The research concludes that the text not only offers a systematic critique of modernity’s discourse structures but also, from an ecofeminist perspective, exemplifies a reimagining of ecological ethics and cultural subjectivity in regional literature.