Scream from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan

Preface: Feminism and Violence in the Womb of Empire

P R E F A C E Feminism and Violence in the Womb of Empire After more than a decade-long U.S.-led globalized war of terror that has punctuated the onset of the twenty-first century, what are the conditions of possibility for feminist politics in this age of Empire? What have been the interventions as well as the fault lines of feminism(s) in such times? This book begins by posing questions about the interrelationship of feminism, imperialism, and violence to delve into the frequently disavowed conditions of violence that make many feminisms possible. To pose such questions at this historical moment seems particularly urgent given the ways that certain feminist discourses have been rallied in the name of U.S.-led multinational crusades to protect women’s liberty and freedom in places like Afghanistan. The patriotic support of liberal feminist institutions (such as the Feminist Majority Foundation) have endorsed the invasions of other nations as a means to liberate women.1 If notions such as women’s liberation can be invoked to help cosmeticize imperialist warfare, then how should we reassert the imperatives and strategies for women’s liberation today? More than forty years ago, a women’s liberation movement—called ūman ribu—was born in Japan amid conditions of violence, radicalism, and imperialist aggression. The movement was catalyzed by the forces of capitalist modernity and infused with anti-imperialist politics directed against what was deemed to constitute a U.S.–Japanese neo-imperialist postwar/Cold War reformation. Given the broader imperialist conditions that constitute feminisms through and across the borders of the United States and Japan, one of the tasks at hand for feminists located in the centers of Empire is to selfre flexively and critically analyze the different kinds of violence within the subject of feminism and the feminist subject as a means of confronting and x PR EFAC E potentially more effectively disrupting the systemic forms of violence that constitute our conditions of existence. In recent decades, the hypervisibility of women who have authorized and sanctioned massive forms of imperialist state violence has been notable. On the global stage, Madeleine Albright’s (in)famous public statement that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children, even prior to the official invasion, was “worth it” was followed by the prominence of Condoleezza Rice, and now Hillary Rodham Clinton, as the advocates of U.S. foreign policy .2 These stateswomen serve as the most visible apogees of the convergence of liberal feminism and imperial power. Given how liberal feminist political goals for women’s equality has largely enabled the rise of such elite women and has created the institutional space for women, myself included, to enter and occupy positions in the U.S. academy, I am disturbed by the relative hesitation, if not reluctance, of feminists to theorize the capacities, complicities, and desires for power, domination, and violence in women. Informing this book’s trajectory is a concern about the capacity of feminist subjects—including feminist-identified scholars and activists and those sympathetic to and informed by feminist politics—to engage with the questions , manifestations, and modalities of violence constitutive of our political horizon. Haunting the writing and completion of this book are thus unresolved questions that arise through a confrontation with the ways in which hegemonic (liberal and radical) feminist paradigms and particular kinds of feminist discourses have contributed to U.S. domestic and imperialist state violence.3 After the Abu Ghraib torture scandal and the sensational images of U.S. Army Private Lynndie England and her compatriots engaging in sexualized racial violence, feminist authors such as Barbara Ehrenreich declared that the era of naïve feminism has seen its own demise.4 In contrast to the sensationalization of women’s use of violence as a gender aberration, feminist scholars like Jacinda Read have argued that the popularization of the role of vigilante women in the mass media is an aftereffect of the infusion of second wave feminism into mass culture.5 The valorization of gun-toting women getting even or outdoing men has become a staple part of popular culture. While some feminists may desire such forms of women’s empowerment, the attempt to blame women’s violence on the emergence of feminism is a perilous endeavor.6 The origins of violence do not lie exclusively within the bounds of feminism; however, the empowerment of women perhaps has enabled the production of new kinds of violent female subjects. Liberal feminist tenets have constituted...