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C H A P T E R T H R E E The Liberation of Sex, Onna, and Eros The Movement and the Politics of Collective Subjectivity Ribu refers to a social movement, a political identity, and a living philosophy and spans multiple temporalities. From its rupturing moment of emergence in 1970 to its rearticulations four decades later, its dynamic constitution has been forged through a collective contestatory process. This chapter elaborates how ribu emerged as a social movement by focusing on the work of several of its key activists who shaped ribu’s central concepts and were part of the movement’s core organizing groups during the first half of the 1970s. These central concepts—the liberation of sex, onna, and eros—marked the beginning of a new movement.1 The symbiotic relationships among ribu’s core concepts, the collectivity of its subjects, and its organizing principles comprise ribu’s dynamic movement formation. Ribu is both a collective and a subjective identity, and its political significance and relative cohesion inheres in the tension between how different subjectivities articulate and animate its collective politics. By tracing the main protests and events of its incipient years, I explicate ribu’s organizing principles and structuring logics in the formation of this new collective subjectivity. Ribu’s organizing principles fostered autonomous action, multidirectional organizing, and a centrifugal dynamic that produced multiple fronts of protest. Ribu’s interactions with the New Left, the mass media, and the state constitute several of its diverse sites of intervention and conflict. By delineating ribu’s representative events, protests, and campaigns, this chapter demonstrates how the political significance of social movements inheres in the formation of a collective subjectivity that engages in historic critical conflicts and symbolic interventions to forge a new horizon of possibilities.2 66 T H E L I B ER AT I O N O F S E X , ONNA, A N D ER O S In the second half of the chapter, I explain how ribu’s representative campaigns surrounding abortion and unmarried mothers further illuminate how ribu’s core concepts were imprinted by its anticapitalist politics and several of its key activists: Yonezu Tomoko, Mori Setsuko, Tanaka Mitsu, Saeki Yōko, Miki Sōko, and Iwatsuki Sumie. The movement initiated a legacy of activism for reproductive freedom and feminist anti-imperialist organizing and led to the organic development of a women-centered relationality and lesbian love.3 This chapter underscores the relationship between the collective and the subjective by exploring how the relationships between key activists was pivotal in directing and shaping ūman ribu’s distinctive radical feminist politics. Key Concepts and Core Groups On April 26, 1970, at a political rally organized by students from Tama Fine Arts University in Tokyo, four women, wearing black helmets with sex painted in white, hijacked the event by jumping on the stage to announce the formation of their group.4 Thought Group SEX (Shisō Shūdan Esuīekusu) was one of the earliest ribu campus-based groups that formed at Tama Fine Arts University in April 1970. Two of its founding members, Mori Setsuko and Yonezu Tomoko, would continue to be key figures in the movement over the next decade. The conspicuous naming of this group emphatically expresses a determinative concept of ribu, namely, the “liberation of sex” (sei kaihō). This group sought to politicize a new theorization of sex and to center its relevance. Its practice of disrupting and intervening in an existing political forum was characteristic of many ribu groups that adopted the existing style of confrontational direct-action politics. In this manner, many ribu groups sought to politicize the exclusion of gender politics from existing student movements, and at the same time, they began to form their own women-only autonomous groups. Mori Setsuko recounts that it was her visceral and cognitive dissonance within the male-dominated student movement that catalyzed her to form the new women-only group. Despite that she was given “preferential treatment” by male activists and was being treated and trained like the other men (versus being treated like the other women students who were assigned to more domestic duties), she said that the gap between her experience and the treatment of the other women made her acutely conscious of the problem of sex discrimination. Specifically (and akin to Miyaoka’s experience, described in chapter 2), Mori states it was during her training on how to use the gebabō (bamboo poles, wooden...

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