Vera C Mackie

Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality

1. Introduction 2. Freedom 3. The new women 4. The red wave 5. The homefront 6. Citizens 7. Liberation 8. Action 9. Difference 10. Conclusion: embodied citizens.

The Language of Globalization, Transnationality and Feminism

This article considers recent feminist actions in the Asia-Pacific region, which have involved transnational collaboration. This provides a site for a discussion of the relationship between language, discourse, cultural practices, political economy, activism and social transformation. It is argued recent examples of transnational feminist collaboration have either been based on a logic of similarity and affiliation or on a recognition of mutual imbrication in structures of inequality.

How to be a girl: mainstream media portrayals of transgendered lives in Japan

Just before the turn of the twenty-first century changes to Japanese laws concerning the modification of reproductive capacity resulted in the removal of some legal barriers to the surgical modification of sexed bodies. These operations are variously known as ‘‘sex change’’ [seitenkan shujutsu], ‘‘sex adjustment’’ [seibetsu tekig o shujutsu], or ‘‘sex reassignment’’ operations [seibetsu saihantei shujutsu]. Medical facilities that perform such surgery usually do so only after the client has spent a substantial period of time living as a member of the gender they wish to acquire. There is now a significant number of individuals in Japan who have undergone such surgery or are planning to do so. These include both male to female (MtF) and female to male (FtM) transformations. In addition, there are those who live transgendered lives without undergoing radical surgery, some who undergo hormone treatment, and some who simply modify their dress and deportment and modulate their speech patterns. Gender identity is intimately linked to citizenship. Someone whose gender identity is ambiguous will have problems with all of the social systems that monitor individual identity. This may also lead to difficulties in gaining the kind of stable employment that is an important aspect of citizenship. This is one of the reasons why transgender individuals have often been found working in the entertainment and hospitality sectors, where regulations and paperwork may be looser than in permanent full-time occupations. According to the system of family registration [koseki] in Japan, personal records can also affect the fate of whole families, for it is often necessary to present an extract of the family register as verification of one’s

Dialogue, distance and difference: Feminism in contemporary japan

Abstract In this article, I examine the ways in which women’s groups in Japan have attempted to deal with issues of difference prompted by the co-existence of residents of different ethnicities in contemporary Japan, and the new issues raised by labour migration in the context of globalization of economies and labour markets. Japan’s place in contemporary East Asia can be clarified by using the term colonial modernity , to refer to Japan’s early 20th-century history; and the term postcoloniality to refer to the legacy of the colonial project in the culture of the metropolitan society. In representations of Japan’s contemporary “Others,” notions of gendered difference interact with representations of ethnic and cultural difference. Contemporary attempts to deal with these issues will be placed in the context of several decades of feminist activism in Japan.

Globalisation and Body Politics

‘Globalization’ is on everyone’s lips; a fad word fast turning into a shibboleth, a magic incantation, a pass-key meant to unlock the gates to all present and future mysteries. For some, ‘globalization’ is what we are bound to do if we wish to be happy; for others ‘globalization’ is the cause of our unhappiness. For everybody, though, ‘globalization’ is the intractable fate of the world, an irreversible process; it is also a process which affects us all in the same measure and in the same way. We are all being ‘globalized’ – and being ‘globalized’ means much the same to all who ‘globalized’ are (Bauman, 1998, p. 1).

In Search of Innocence: Feminist Historians Debate the Legacy of Wartime Japan

The hall was filled to overcapacity for all five days of the event. Sixty-four survivors from nine countries (South Korea, North Korea, the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Indonesia, East Timor and Japan) were in attendance. Prosecution teams from each country, an international audience of one thousand, and around three hundred journalists from Japan and abroad filled every corner of the hall. On 8 December the judges declared the opening of the trial, and the two chief prosecutors read the common indictment. . . . Counting video testimonies, twenty former ‘comfort women’ from nine countries testified at the Tribunal. The overwhelming intensity of each survivor’s testimony powerfully revived the history that had long been silenced and forgotten. On the day of the judgment, 12 December, the four judges declared their historic ruling through their summary of findings: ‘Emperor Showa is guilty’ and ‘the government of Japan bears state responsibility’. I will never forget the moment the judgment was read; it inspired cries of joy, clapping and a standing ovation from the audience.

The ‘Afghan Girls’: Media representations and frames of war

In this article, I survey almost a decade of visual representations of Afghan women, which have emanated from first world media organizations and have circulated in transnational media space. Only one of the photographs is explicitly linked with a political discussion. However, all of the photographs contribute to a set of possible statements about veiling and unveiling. Through discourse analysis informed by a genealogical approach, I demonstrate how these photographs contribute to the constitution of a set of power relations whereby the United States and its allies have sovereignty and where it seems ‘natural’ that these sovereign nations can intervene in the affairs of another nation, in the name of ‘saving’ the women of that nation. I argue that these photographs are part of the constitution of a particular regime of representation, where media representations are inextricably linked with military conduct.

Japan's Biopolitical Crisis: CARE PROVISION IN A TRANSNATIONAL FRAME

In this article I consider recent policies on care provision in Japan, including the employment of immigrant workers. My discussion is framed by Michel Foucaults concepts of ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’: a mode of governmentality focused on the management of populations. In the current age of economic globalization, however, biopolitics also crosses national boundaries. Raewyn Connell has described a ‘global gender order’ whereby gender relations are shaped by power structures which transcend the level of the nation-state. This involves the connections between different local gender orders and gender orders which transcend the scale of the nation-state. The migration of care workers involves gendered structures in both sending and receiving countries, in interaction with other dimensions of difference, including class, caste, ethnicity and racialized positioning. In order to understand the relationships between the providers and receivers of care, it is necessary to bring together the insights of the nation-focused concept of biopolitics and the multileveled perspective of the ‘global order of inequality’ and the ‘global order of difference’. Between the local and the global, there are also regional orders of inequality and regional orders of difference; care work involves relationships which are put into practice at local, intimate, interpersonal and embodied levels.

Introduction: Ways of Knowing about Human Rights in Asia

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted on 10 December 1948 by the United Nations General Assembly. We have thus seen 65 years of the international project of addressing human rights issues at a global level through the United Nations and associated organisations. Human rights occupy a paradoxical place in international politics. Human rights treaties address the most intimate issues of personal freedom, autonomy and self-determination, but the institutions developed for the promotion of human rights operate at a global level seemingly distanced from this intimate and individual scale. In human rights advocacy there is thus constant mediation between the individual, the local, the national, the regional and the global. In this collection of essays we consider human rights issues at the regional level – in some East and Southeast Asian nations and in their associated national and diasporic communities.

Rethinking sexual citizenship: Asia-Pacific perspectives

The term ‘sexual citizenship’ was largely developed in the Anglophone capitalist liberal democracies of the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The concept is thus inflected by broader understandings of politics in these places. In this article, the author first considers the specificities of ‘sexuality’ and ‘citizenship’ in these Anglophone capitalist liberal democracies. She argues that we need to provincialize these local understandings, for configurations of sexuality and citizenship in the UK, North America, New Zealand or Australia are just as contingent and locally specific as they are in the Asia-Pacific region. She then considers whether the term ‘sexual citizenship’ can be transplanted into places in the Asia-Pacific region with different political and economic systems, welfare systems and social structures, distinctive cultural understandings of sexuality and citizenship and different taxonomies of sexes, genders and sexualities.