Hospitable Friendship

Chapter 1 sets up the theoretical questions of female friendship across race, nationality, and gender. It establishes exclusivism in the philosophical discourses of friendship and hospitality and their political and ethical implications demonstrated by Jacques Derrida. It then discusses the practical challenges the three Victorian women travellers to Meiji Japan—Isabella Bird, Mary Crawford Fraser, and Marie Stopes—pose to the male homosocial model of friendship with their praxis of friendship and hospitality through their writing. It highlights the aporias of male philosophical theorizations and addresses them with female literary representations of real-life instances of cultural exchange and congress in a non-Western context. Drawing on feminist theorizations of open subjectivity and affective relationality, it presents alternative models and paradigms of friendship, which the book terms hospitable friendship, and argues for particular political affordances of literature for cross-racial female solidarity.

A Literary Diplomat

Chapter 3 discusses Mary Crawford Fraser and her Japan-related literary works to highlight political affordances of literature for cross-cultural female friendship and solidarity. Fraser opened up her writing space to her Japanese friends and enabled her readers to hear their voices in her writings. It examines Fraser’s friendships with Japanese people in A Diplomatist’s Wife in Japan (1898) and analyses the influence of these friendships on her fictional works. It brings to light the existence of a long-forgotten international reading society of women in Meiji Japan. It provides real-life examples of cross-racial, international female friendship, an underdeveloped resource in recent scholarship on Victorian travelogues. It demonstrates how Fraser mobilized literature as a safe space for a woman to carry out diplomatic tasks during the tumultuous period of treaty revision and the conclusion of Anglo-Japanese Alliance and strove to redress demeaning stereotypes of Japanese women.

A Traveller Who Laughs

Chapter 2 discusses Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880) by Isabella Bird, focusing on textual manifestations of intimacy between Bird and Japanese people, particularly her interpreter-guide Ito. Drawing on theoretical discussions in feminist anthropology and affect theory, it reveals the complexity of the politics between the traveller and hosts as well as Bird’s fluid identity and exceptional openness towards the alterity of Japanese culture. It also carries out a textual analysis of Itō no koi (Itō’s Romance) (2005), a retelling of Bird’s journey from Ito’s perspective by the twenty-first-century Japanese writer Nakajima Kyōko. It argues that Nakajima’s rewriting accords Bird and her contemporary Japanese women literary afterlife through their intergenerational female friendship. It also presents a thorough critique of the traditional androcentric paradigm of survival and friendship. It thus indicates the exciting possibility of travel writing in the field of world literature.

Elizabeth Seton, American Saint

Elizabeth Bayley Seton is the first native-born US citizen to be made a Roman Catholic saint. Canonized in 1975, Seton founded the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph, the first vowed community of Catholic women religious created in the United States. Seton’s sainthood marked the culmination of a role she first served during her life: a respectable, benevolent face for a church whose local leaders were eager to demonstrate its compatibility with American culture. Seton’s founding of the American Sisters of Charity was a more practical achievement and one that shaped the Catholic Church in the United States in tangible ways. Starting in 1809, when Seton began a school and vowed community in Emmitsburg, Maryland, the Sisters of Charity expanded throughout the United States, eventually running hundreds of schools and orphanages and offering both a spiritual home and a career path for women who chose it. Seton’s life is expressive for what it reveals about her era as well as for her distinctive achievements. Her prominence led to the preservation of decades of correspondence and spiritual writings. Through them it is possible to see with unusual clarity the ways in which the Age of Revolutions and the rise of Napoleon variously disrupted, reinvigorated, and transformed Catholic traditions; to observe the possibilities and constraints Catholicism offered a spiritually ambitious woman; and to witness changes in the relationship between Protestants and Catholics in the United States. Finally, Seton’s rich archive also renders visible one woman’s experience of intellectual inquiry, marriage, widowhood, motherhood, spiritual ambition, and female friendship.

Strategic sisterhood and the girlfriend gaze: Representation of girlfriendship in the Chinese TV drama Ode to Joy

This article examines the representation of girlfriendship (Winch A (2013) Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan) in the Chinese TV series Ode to Joy (2016–2017), and in particular, its representation of the interactions between urban women’s competence, experience of romance, postfeminist identity and class status in the Chinese gender context. Drawing on Winch’s concepts of ‘strategic sisterhood’ and the ‘girlfriend gaze’, we first explore how female friendship relies on networks of exchange in terms of economy, career and/or emotion, and then investigate the ways in which young women mutually monitor each other’s personal relationships to ensure their heterosexuality in society as a group.

Did you hear what she did to me? Female friendship victimization disclosures offer reputational advantages

Four studies (N = 1,653) tested the hypothesis that sensitivity to victimization in friendships is a mechanism through which women covertly transmit negative social information (gossip) about same-sex peers. In Study 1, women were more likely than men to question a same-sex friendship following violations denoting a friend’s lack of commitment or kindness. In Study 2, women were more likely than men to report disclosing such friendship violations to others. In Study 3, first-person disclosures about one’s own victimization were more trusted and approved than third-person disclosures about others’ victimization, suggesting such statements are not readily recognized as gossip. In Study 4a, men and women reported their female friends disclosed all types of friendship violations more frequently than did their male friends, but especially those surrounding commitment and replacement risk. In Study 4b, female perpetrators suffered worse reputational damage than did male perpetrators following divulgence of their poor treatment of same-sex friends. Taken together, these results suggest women disclose their victimization by same-sex friends, and such disclosures effectively impair same-sex peers’ reputations. These patterns raise the possibility that the greater fragility of female (versus male) friendships results, in part, from this effective, yet covert intrasexual competition strategy.