2022 IFJP Conference Opening Plenary Conversation
Intersectionality and Humanity: Revisiting Feminist Aporia in Critical Race and Colonial Perspectives
Keynote Delivery by:
Lisa Yoneyama received a Ph.D. in Anthropology at Stanford University and taught Cultural Studies at University of California, San Diego, where she also served as Program Director for Japanese Studies and Critical Gender Studies. She joined the University of Toronto faculty in 2011. Yoneyama’s research concerns memory, violence, and justice with special focus on race and colonialism, gender, nuclearism, and transpacific Cold War and post-Cold War knowledge production. Her publications include: Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory (1999); a co-edited volume, Perilous Memories: Asia-Pacific War(s) (2001); Violence, War, Redress: Politics of Multiculturalism (in Japanese, 2003); and Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes (2016) which received the 2018 Best Book Award in Humanities and Cultural Studies, the Association for Asian American Studies. Yoneyama is currently working on a new book project, Co-Conjuring: Toward a Decolonial Nuclear Criticism, under the support of SSHRC-Insight Grant.
Keynote abstract:
That Modern Feminist Thought shares its lineage with the liberal Enlightenment and Humanism has continued to render certain feminist practices assimilable to the colonial-racial regime of knowledge that has long underpinned what we normatively uphold as political modernity and its foundational assumptions. I will revisit this familiar feminist aporia through exploring the genealogies of U.S. women of color feminism, third world/postcolonial feminism, and queer of color critique, to highlight their theorizations of difference, the human, and other ways of being and caring. At the same time, I will ask how “intersectionality”– a concept originally forwarded as an alternative legal doctrine yet variously deployed for extensive political ends such that the term appears to have lost its original relevance for some – can be repurposed as a critical methodology with which to challenge the universalism of liberal humanism/feminism and the attendant compartmentalization of academic knowledge, but ultimately, to strengthen coalitional possibilities. In the spirit of the conference organizers’ commitment to consider Asia “as a geographic location and imaginary that offers an important anchoring for global feminist conversations,” I will address as well how such largely North America-based critiques have transnationally resonated with some of the most urgent feminist engagements that have unfolded across and beyond plural “Asias,” however imagined.
Response Discussion by:
© Diego Franssens
Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa is a Belgian/Rwandan International Relations scholar and former journalist. She is Assistant Professor in Human Rights and Politics in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK and Senior Research Fellow of the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies, South Africa. Her research and teaching focuses on ways to decolonize (international) solidarity. Building on epistemic Blackness as methodology, she turns to recovering and reconnecting philosophies and practices of dignity and repair and retreat in the postcolony to theorise solidarity anticolonially. She has published in various (academic) journals, is the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics (with Shilliam, 2018) and Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning (with de Jong and Icaza, Routledge, 2018).
Karen Thornber is Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, where she has also held a range of leadership positions. A 2006 Harvard Ph.D., she is author of four scholarly monographs: Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Harvard 2009); Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures (Michigan 2012); Global Healing: Literature, Advocacy, Care (Brill 2020); and Gender Justice and Contemporary Asian Literatures (expected publication 2023). Professor Thornber is an award-winning translator of Japanese literature, author of eighty academic articles/book chapters, and (co)-editor of scholarly volumes on environment and indigeneity, aging, medical and health humanities, and trans-regional Asia.
Chaired by:
Ji Young JUNG(鄭智泳) is a Professor of Women's Studies and Director of the Asian Center for Women's Studies (ACWS) at Ewha Womans University, Korea. She finished her Ph.D. in History at Sogang University, Korea (2001) and spent a year as a visiting scholar at the Asian Institute of University of Toronto, Canada (2013-2014). Her research concerns gender history, post-colonial studies, and memory studies with focus on the family system in Korea. Her scholarly monograph, The Construction of order and its Fissures: The family register and women in the late Chosŏn Korea (Sogang Press, 2015), examined the gender making process and its unresolvable contradictions. She co-edited Site of Memory in East Asia (Kawade Shobo Press, 2011) and co-authored Women and Confucianism in Chosŏn Korea: New perspectives (SUNY, 2011) and Asian Families and Intimacies (SAGE, 2021). She has published numerous articles on the marginalized women and the paradoxical gender norms of late Chosŏn and colonial modern Korea. She is currently working on a new project “Race and Gender: Global Korea, Neo-Racialization and Intersectionality” under the support of the National Research Foundation of Korea.