Radical Feminist Politics and the New Left in Japan: Revolution, Relationality and Violence
Speaker: Setsu Shigematsu, Postdoctoral Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University; University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow
The rise of women's liberation movement in 1970 marked the beginning of a radical feminist politics that emerged in response to the New Left in Japan. In 1972, the mass media televised a political conflict between the state and a sect called the United Red Army. The production of this televised spectacle constituted a crises for the New Left in that it de-legitimized the use of "revolutionary violence." Shigematsu's talk will discuss how members of the women's liberation movement responded to this crises as an example of their radical feminist politics. This response involved a re-articulation of a woman's role in "revolutionary violence" and a radical notion of relationality.
Setsu Shigematsu received her doctoral degree from Cornell University in 2003, with an interdisciplinary background that traverses the fields of Asian and Asian American Studies, and critical gender studies. Her intellectual and scholarly concerns include the historical relationship between U.S. and Japanese imperialisms, transnational liberation movements, comparative feminist and critical theory, media and cultural studies. She has published articles on women's movements, the transnational circulation of Japanese popular cultural forms, revisionist history and feminist philosophy. Dr. Shigematsu is writing a book which offers a cross-disciplinary analysis of the history, politics and philosophy of the women's liberation movement that emerged in Japan from the late 1960s to the 1970s. She is also editing an anthology on US militarism as specific modality of colonialism in the Asia-Pacific.
Please visit the following link for details on all the talks in this series