Fertile Cosmofeminism: Ruth L.Ozeki and Transnational Reproduction

"Women Have No Need of Borders"
Women have no need of borders
We need only bear the child of the man we love
Race, nationality, religion—none matter
Men war to make women theirs
They make boundaries, they make nations
But women have no need of borders
We need only to love.

Nakagaki Sachiko (1993)¹

In an era of globalization, are women the ideal subjects without borders? Mythologizing the role of women around the world, the poetry of the Japanese homemaker Nakagaki Sachiko suggests that women embody transcultural values from the moment they embrace particular ideologies of femininity. Eliding female desires with romantic love, maternal concern, and sentimental longing, the poem "Women Have No Need of Borders" asserts that the private world of cultural feminism offers the clearest public possibilities for an avant-garde global identity. Women stand at the forefront of transnational forms of life, and as the rhetoric of childbearing suggests, they control the reproduction of this world without borders.

In this essay, I explore how cosmopolitan feminist visions of motherhood and fertility emerge in the fiction of the Japanese American writer Ruth L. Ozeki. In Ozeki's work, the world of female fertility and maternity cannot be so easily divested from the public complications of "men war[ring]" to which Nakagaki alludes in her poem. When women want children in Ozeki's first novel, My Year of Meats (1998), they find themselves immersed in a discourse of reproduction that situates the intimate workings of the childbearing body within the social politics of public health, family formation, racial mixing, meat eating, and corporate profit. The story of an Asian American filmmaker whose documentaries market American meat to Japanese women, My Year of Meats exposes the collusion between global television and corporate agribusiness in the transnational spaces across the Pacific Ocean. These collaborative worlds of media and meat take their greatest toll upon the lives of women, specifically at the charged sites of their sexuality and fertility. In its narrative construction, My Year of Meats relies upon this link between fertility and violence to exploit the discursive strategies that empowered transnational feminist activism in the 1990s. As the novel unites women to oppose challenges to their fertility, it seeks to extend the conceptual tactics of activism in order to shape an even more powerful political imaginary. In doing so, the novel suggests a crucial role for literature in the development of cosmofeminism. The feminist literary strategies of the novel attempt to give birth to a new form of cosmopolitan community.

The rhetoric of cosmopolitanism has proliferated over the past decade, as scholars seek to understand actions, identities, and ideas that seem to elude the constraints of well-defined social borders. Since "cosmopolitanism" is an old word dense with historical signification and changing connotations, its etymological meaning of "world citizenship" has been used both literally and metaphorically for centuries. Stoic philosophers described themselves as citizens of the world, offering both forms of dissent against unconditional political loyalty and philosophical justifications for expanding imperial powers (Nussbaum 1996, 6-7, 9, 10; Malcomson 1998, 233). Eighteenth-century European and American philosophes continually congratulated themselves on their cosmopolitan outlooks, and in doing so, associated the rhetoric of cosmopolitanism with the cultural capital of an exclusive, well-traveled, intellectual class (Schlereth 1977, 1-2). In contemporary scholarship, cosmopolitanism has been used to describe exiles, refugees, and strangers as well as world travelers, elites, and intellectuals. Depending upon the author, cosmopolitanism might refer to psychological conditions, political organizations, international relations, cultural sensibilities, moral stances, works of art, or social geographies.² As a result, cosmopolitanism in contemporary usage is not well defined, and some of its exponents suggest it should not be (Pollock et al. 2000, 577).

However, throughout this essay, the rhetoric of cosmopolitanism serves a more specific purpose that draws upon one strand of its history. In particular, I use the language of cosmopolitanism to describe progressive and enabling responses to the dilemmas created by globalization. These responses attempt to avoid both the tyranny of imperialist knowledge and the silence of parochial retreat, offering us...