Intersectionality and humanity: A keynote for “remapping the feminist global”

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. This article, originally presented as a conference keynote address, revisits the familiar feminist aporia through exploring the multiple genealogies of feminisms to highlight their theorizations of difference, the human, and other ways of being and caring. It also reconsiders how “intersectionality” – a concept originally forwarded as an alternative legal doctrine yet extensively deployed for various 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. The article addresses how some of the largely North America-based conversations can resonate transnationally and effectively with some of the most urgent feminist engagements that have unfolded across and beyond plural “Asias,” however imagined.

KEYWORDS:

• Racialized humanism
• cold war feminism
• comfort women redress
• universalism
• intersectionality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 “Centering Asia as a way of disrupting hegemonic discourses requires a reckoning with race, racialization and the dynamics of gender discourses that are shaped by western and colonial influences. We invite diverse scholars and knowledge producers to convene under this theme to engage in multi-levelled and nuanced conversations about how issues of race, gender and racialization are conceptualized and entwined, how they manifest, what meanings they carry, especially when using terminologies developed and spread from imperial spaces. We hope to stimulate scholarly debates that think through implications of these alternate discourses in light of the urgent need to dissect ramifications of racial, ethnic and gendered discriminations particularly when examined from Asian and postcolonial settings.” “Call for Submissions for #IFJP2022 “Remapping the Feminist Global: A Multi-vocal, Multi-located Conversation.” https://www.ifjpglobal.org/all-calls/#shortcut_CFP2022 [last accessed July 11, 2023].

2 Focusing on the U.S. policies in the Middle East, McAlister (2001) summarized the Cold War U.S. foreign policy as follows: “Drawing on the anti-British and anticolonial rhetoric that formed the heart of American national origin stories, U.S. policy-makers and pundits suggested that an American-dominated international order would best guarantee the expansion of democracy and secure the liberty of all nations. In 1951, Charles Hilliard's right-wing tract coined the phrase “benevolent supremacy” to describe this approach, but the essentials of his argument traversed the political spectrum” (47).

3 The preceding discussion on the WHR regime and what I observe in the following section regarding the United State”s Cold War liberal governmentality and its transpacific entanglement with Japan in Asia and the Pacific region are discussed in detail in Yoneyama (2003a, 2016).

4 Tomoko Fujiwara, dir., The Gift from Beate (Committee of The Gift from Beate, Tokyo: Nippon Eiga Shinsha, 2004).

5 Statement by Gordon made in 1999 and quoted in “Feminist Secretly Wrote Part of Japan’s Constitution,” New York Times, January 24, 2013.

6 “Japan court upholds ban on same-sex marriage but raises rights issue.” BBC News, November 30, 2022. www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-63807092 (last accessed July 10, 2023). In 2022 Tokyo District Court ruled that the exclusion of same-sex couples from the institution of marriage is not unconstitutional on the grounds that Article 24 inscribes marriage as a binary bond between the two sexes.

7 “Japan’s Women Could Be Model in Postwar Iraq,” Rocky Mountain News, April 16, 2003. A few months later, Gordon wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times and reiterated her point. See the New York Times, October 1, 2003.

8 David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, “U.S. Has a Plan to Occupy Iraq, Officials Report,” New York Times, October 11, 2002.

9 Roger Pulvers, “Beate Sirota Gordon, An American to Whom Japan Remains Indebted,” Japan Times, January 13, 2013.

10 See Nebolon (2017) for the concept of “settler militarism.”

11 Atsuta (2022) succinctly points out the critical difference between the two concepts and why they need to be distinguished.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa Yoneyama

Lisa YONEYAMA is a Professor at the University of Toronto. Her publications include Hiroshima Traces (UC Press, 1999), Perilous Memories (co-edited, Duke UP, 2001), Violence, War, Redress (in Japanese, Iwanami, 2003), and award-winning Cold War Ruins (Duke UP, 2016). Yoneyama’s current project, “Decolonial Nuclear Criticism,” is supported by a SSHRC-Insight Grant.