Category: gender studies

UH Press around the Web: Summer Snips 2013

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The Summer 2013 issue of Hyphen Magazine (#27 – The Sex Issue) has an interview with Amy Sueyoshi on her book, Queer Compulsions: Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi. 

Stephen Hong Sohn’s Asian American Literature Fans Megapost blog review for May 31 included one for Relative Histories: Mediating History in Asian American Family Memoirs by Rocío Davis. (Look for the third title from the top.)

There’s still time to donate to an IndieGoGo project to raise money for a CD of 26 original and unique songs inspired by the poetry of the late Wayne Kaumualii Westlake. UH Press published the posthumous 2009 collection, Westlake: Poems by Wayne Kaumualii Westlake (1947-1984).

Robert J. Cabin, author of Restoring Paradise: Rethinking and Rebuilding Nature in Hawai‘i, wrote a related article in Earth Island Journal on successful ecological restoration projects. He also addressed questions on restoration ecology in an article earlier this year in American Scientist, titled “Nature Is Dead. Long Live Nature!” (Full article requires subscription or institutional access.)

Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia

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Seeing BeautyIn Indonesia, light skin color has been desirable throughout recorded history. Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia, by L. Ayu Saraswati, explores Indonesia’s changing beauty ideals and traces them to a number of influences: first to ninth-century India and some of the oldest surviving Indonesian literary works; then, a thousand years later, to the impact of Dutch colonialism and the wartime occupation of Japan; and finally, in the post-colonial period, to the popularity of American culture.

“In this book L. Ayu Saraswati offers a lucid and compelling accounting of how ideas of beauty and race circulate and become affective in transnational Indonesia. Offering a distinctive approach to global culture as an affective domain, as well a sharp and nuanced critique of histories of whiteness, this book will be of tremendous value to all scholars and students interested in unlearning the affective and aesthetic scripts of race.” —Sara Ahmed, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012)

Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning and Memory
March 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3736-5 / $25.00 (PAPER)

JANM’S “Discover Nikkei” Interviews Amy Sueyoshi

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SueyoshiQueerCompulsionsOn Saturday, January 19, 2:00 p.m., SFSU associate dean Amy Sueyoshi will appear at the Japanese American National Museum for a reading, discussion, and signing of her book, Queer Compulsions: Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi. In advance of her talk, JANM’s Discover Nikkei online network has published an in-depth interview by Andrew Way Leong (Northwestern University), posted in two parts.

Click here to read part 1, then link to part 2 from there (or simply click here).

Dr. Sueyoshi will also give a talk at the San Francisco Public Library on Tuesday, February 26. For more details, see the SFPL calendar.

A review of Queer Compulsions published in this month’s The Gay & Lesbian Review, which calls the book “…an important study. It is also worthwhile as a fascinating portrait of biracial and same-sex relationships at a pivotal time in American history.” An equally positive review appeared earlier in Nichi Bei Weekly.

Spirit Possession and Its Provocation of the Modern

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Fertile DisorderIn her innovative new book, Fertile Disorder: Spirit Possession and Its Provocation of the Modern, Kalpana Ram reflects on the way spirit possession unsettles some of the foundational assumptions of modernity. What is a human subject under the varied conditions commonly associated with possession? What kind of subjectivity must already be in place to allow such a transformation to occur? How does it alter our understanding of memory and emotion if these assail us in the form of ghosts rather than as attributes of subjective experience? What does it mean to worship deities who are afflictive and capricious, yet bear an intimate relationship to justice? What is a “human” body if it can be taken over by a whole array of entities? What is agency if people can be “claimed” in this manner? What is gender if, while possessed, a woman is a woman no longer?

Drawing on spirit possession among women and the rich traditions of subaltern religion in Tamil Nadu, South India, Ram concludes that the basis for constructing an alternative understanding of human agency need not rest on the usual requirements of a fully present consciousness or on the exercise of choice and planning. Instead of relegating possession, ghosts, and demons to the domain of the exotic, Ram uses spirit possession to illuminate ordinary experiences and relationships.

“Ram’s extraordinary capacity to combine meticulous ethnography of spirit possession and other expressions of ‘female disorder’ in Tamil Nadu with deep and provocative reflections on the history of modernity in the subcontinent is what gives this book its freshness and originality. Scholars in diverse fields, from South Asian feminist and subaltern studies to those constituted by anthropological and postcolonial critiques of contemporary forms of modernization, should find this book to be of absorbing interest.” —Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago

January 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3630-6 / $57.00 (CLOTH)

Anti-trafficking and the Sex Trade along the Mekong

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The Perfect Business
For those at the high end of the trafficking chain, the sex trade is an alluring and lucrative business: the supply of girls is constant, the costs of operations are low, and interference from law enforcement is weak to non-existent. Anti-trafficking organizations and governments commonly appropriate such market metaphors of supply and demand as they struggle with the moral-political dimensions of a business involving trade, labor, prostitution, migration, and national borders. But how apt are they? Is the sex trade really the perfect business? The Perfect Business? Anti-Trafficking and the Sex Trade along the Mekong, by Sverre Molland, is a provocative new book that examines the social worlds and interrelationships of traffickers, victims, and trafficking activists along the Thai-Lao border. It explores local efforts to reconcile international legal concepts, the bureaucratic prescriptions of aid organizations, and global development ideologies with on-the-ground realities of sexual commerce.

Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory
September 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3653-5 / $26.00 (PAPER)

New in Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory

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Refiguring Women Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma, by Chie Ikeya, presents the first study of one of the most prevalent and critical topics of public discourse in colonial Burma: the woman of the khit kala—“the woman of the times”—who burst onto the covers and pages of novels, newspapers, and advertisements in the 1920s. Educated and politicized, earner and consumer, “Burmese” and “Westernized,” she embodied the possibilities and challenges of the modern era, as well as the hopes and fears it evoked. In Refiguring Women, Ikeya interrogates what these shifting and competing images of the feminine reveal about the experience of modernity in colonial Burma. She marshals a wide range of hitherto unexamined Burmese language sources to analyze both the discursive figurations of the woman of the khit kala and the choices and actions of actual women who—whether pursuing higher education, becoming political, or adopting new clothes and hairstyles—unsettled existing norms and contributed to making the woman of the khit kala the privileged idiom for debating colonialism, modernization, and nationalism.

“Refiguring Women not only marks a milestone in Burmese historiography but makes a significant contribution to our appreciation of how ‘being modern‘ was understood in colonized societies. Deftly integrating visual and literary representations of Burmese women with the experiences of a people living under colonial control, this pioneering study explores previously untapped sources to provide new insights on the entangled relations between gender, colonialism, and modernity.” —Barbara Andaya, University of Hawai‘i, Manoa

Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory
January 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3461-6 / $45.00 (CLOTH)

Prostitution and Venereal Disease in Colonial Hanoi

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Luc XiWhat does it mean when a city of 180,000 people has more than 5,000 women working as prostitutes? This question frames Vu Trong Phung’s 1937 classic reportage Luc Xi. In the late 1930s, Hanoi had a burgeoning commercial sex industry that involved thousands of people and hundreds of businesses. It was the center of the city’s nightlife and the source of suffering, violence, exploitation, and a venereal disease epidemic. For Phung, a popular writer and intellectual, it also raised disturbing questions about the state of Vietnamese society and culture and whether his country really was “progressing” under French colonial rule. Translator Shaun Kingsley Malarney’s thoughtful and multifaceted introduction provides historical background on colonialism, prostitution, and venereal disease in Vietnam and discusses reportage as a literary genre, political tool, and historical source. A fully annotated translation of Luc Xi follows, in which Phung takes readers into the heart of colonial Hanoi’s sex industry, portraying its female workers, the officials who attempted to regulate it, the doctors who treated its victims, and the secretive medical facility known as the Nha Luc Xi (“The Dispensary”), which examined prostitutes for venereal diseases and held them for treatment.

“Among the most celebrated works of Vietnamese non-fiction reportage, Vu Trọng Phụng’s Luc Xi illuminates the culture of prostitution and the politics of venereal disease prevention in colonial Hanoi. Shaun Malarney’s translation of the text is both elegant and accurate and his detailed introduction provides useful historical context while advancing an important argument about social imbalances embedded within the institutions of colonial medicine. This is an exceptional work of historical scholarship.” —Peter Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley

Southeast Asia: Politics Meaning and Memory
November 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3467-8 / $45.00 (CLOTH)

Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shojo Manga

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Straight from the HeartManga is the backbone of Japanese popular culture, influencing everything from television, movies, and video games to novels, art, and theater. Shojo manga (girls’ comics) has been seminal to the genre as a whole and especially formative for Japanese girls’ culture throughout the postwar era. In Straight from the Heart: Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shojo Manga, Jennifer S. Prough examines the shojo manga industry as a site of cultural storytelling, illuminating the ways that issues of mass media, gender, production, and consumption are involved in the process of creating shojo manga.

“Straight from the Heart is a wonderful book, one that is timely and important in terms of academic interest in the anthropology of popular culture. Its originality lies in the author’s solid ethnographic approach to the topic and in her detailed description of the interactions between editors, artists, and consumers. Certainly it is time for such an in-depth English-language study of shojo manga. Prough’s work makes an important contribution to a number of fields—anthropology, Japan studies, gender/women’s studies, and cultural studies—and the writing style, organization, and length all make it an extremely attractive book for undergraduate course adoption.” —Laura Miller, Eiichi Shibusawa-Seigo Arai Professor of Japanese Studies, University of Missouri-St. Louis

November 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3528-6 / $24.00 (PAPER)

New Kuroda Title on Women and Buddhism in Premodern Japan

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HokkejiHokkeji, an ancient Nara temple that once stood at the apex of a state convent network established by Queen-Consort Komyo (701–760), possesses a history that in some ways is bigger than itself. Its development is emblematic of larger patterns in the history of female monasticism in Japan. In Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Orders in Premodern Japan, Lori Meeks explores the revival of Japan’s most famous convent, an institution that had endured some four hundred years of decline following its establishment. With the help of the Ritsu (Vinaya)-revivalist priest Eison (1201–1290), privately professed women who had taken up residence at Hokkeji succeeded in reestablishing a nuns’ ordination lineage in Japan. Meeks considers a broad range of issues surrounding women’s engagement with Buddhism during a time when their status within the tradition was undergoing significant change. The thirteenth century brought women greater opportunities for ordination and institutional leadership, but it also saw the spread of increasingly androcentric Buddhist doctrine. Hokkeji explores these contradictions.

“This book makes major contributions to at least three key topics: women and Buddhism, mainstream Buddhism in premodern Japan, and religious institutions as settings for cultural and religious life. It is the first study to provide readers with a detailed and comprehensive overview of a single specific religious site and the women who lived there. Although the number of works that deal with women and Buddhism continues to grow (testifying to the on-going interest in this topic), none to my knowledge have yet attempted such a sustained analysis of a female religious order. While the so-called new Buddhism of the Kamakura period attracts the most attention from scholars, this study demonstrates the importance of the mainstream religious centers of Nara (and Kyoto) for our understanding of religions in premodern Japan.” —William M. Bodiford, University of California, Los Angeles

April 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3394-7 / $50.00 (CLOTH)
Studies in East Asian Buddhism, No. 23
Published in association with the Kuroda Institute

Gender and Body in Japanese Women’s Fiction

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The Other Women's LibThe Other Women’s Lib: Gender and Body in Japanese Women’s Fiction, by Julia C. Bullock, provides the first systematic analysis of Japanese literary feminist discourse of the 1960s—a full decade before the “women’s lib” movement emerged in Japan. It highlights the work of three well-known female fiction writers of this generation (Kono Taeko, Takahashi Takako, and Kurahashi Yumiko) for their avant-garde literary challenges to dominant models of femininity. Focusing on four tropes persistently employed by these writers to protest oppressive gender stereotypes—the disciplinary masculine gaze, feminist misogyny, “odd bodies,” and female homoeroticism—Julia Bullock brings to the fore their previously unrecognized theoretical contributions to second-wave radical feminist discourse.

“Julia Bullock’s lively study fills a significant lacuna in our understanding of feminist theoretical development prior to the women’s lib movement of the 1970s. Dealing with three of the most fascinating and challenging authors of the era, Bullock’s sustained literary analyses are adroit, illuminating, and informative. Her study is lucid enough to open itself to bright undergraduates, but provocative enough to engage seasoned scholars of modern literature.” —Rebecca Copeland, author of Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan

April 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3453-1 / $25.00 (PAPER)

Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan-Pacific

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Since its inception in 1928, the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association (PPWA) has witnessed and contributed to enormous changes in world and Pacific history. Operating out of Honolulu, this women’s network established a series of conferences that promoted social reform and an internationalist outlook through cultural exchange. For the many women attracted to the project—from China, Japan, the Pacific Islands, and the major settler colonies of the region—the association’s vision was enormously attractive, despite the fact that as individuals and national representatives they remained deeply divided by colonial histories. Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan-Pacific, by Fiona Paisley, tells this multifaceted story by bringing together critical scholarship from across a wide range of fields, including cultural history, international relations and globalization, gender and empire, postcolonial studies, population and world health studies, world history, and transnational history.

“This book places at center stage an organization that embodies many of the crises of colonial modernity that scholars have been grappling with and refracts it through a set of actors and geographical locations that deserve to be better understood and taught widely. Paisley lays out her story in accessible yet analytically sophisticated ways that in turn make manifest the complex unfolding of cultural politics in the Pan-Pacific. The scholarship is extraordinarily impressive and represents the best kind of transnational research there is.” —Antoinette Burton, Bastian Professor of Transnational and Global Studies, University of Illinois

Perspectives on the Global Past
July 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3342-8 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

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