Subaltern Feminisms: Rethinking Politics, Praxis, and Theory from the Margins

The books under review enrich the global component within feminist scholarship, centering non-western histories, struggles, and debates on issues of gender, sexuality, reproduction, violence, religion, nation, globalization, trafficking, imperialism, and neo-liberalism. Reflecting the intellectual and political vibrancy of feminist scholarship on, from, and about Asia and its connections with the wider world, Roces’s and Shigematsu’s monographs focus on the Philippines and Japan, while Loomba and Lukose’s volume concentrates on the South Asian countries of India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Each of these studies refuses the ahistoricity of the linear model of “waves” dominant within western feminist thought, highlighting instead the intellectual and political energies that have galvanized feminist theorizing and actions within the non-Atlantic-centered margins. They also demonstrate the impossibility of grasping historical experiences of and from the margins through a template derived from a universalized western location. By focusing on the indigeneity of feminist thought within non-western locations, these texts present alternatives to the provincial and reified articulations of gender within dominant Euro-Anglo-American feminisms.

As a non-western “first world” capitalist economy, Japan occupies a particular positionality of “in-betweenness.” While Japan is a dominant player in Asia, its non-white and non-western status marks its socio-cultural marginality within the larger geopolitical arena. Shigematsu’s monograph on Uman ribu, the Japanese women’s liberation movement in the 1970s, foregrounds Japan’s in-betweenness while also globalizing the history of feminisms. In tracing ribu’s genealogies, fissures, and contradictions, Shigematsu deploys “a kind of transdisciplinary and translocational” approach (xviii). Japanese feminists, Shigematsu argues, did not operate exclusively within the insular intellectual and political boundaries of the nation. Ribu’s radical feminism is situated within an interlocking scalar framework, where its “Japaneseness” does not necessarily mean relinquishing its “multiplicity of origins and points of connections, within and beyond the nation” (xxvi).

In Shigematsu’s reading of radical feminist politics via a Japanese lens, the dominant Anglo-American script of feminist theorizing is effectively defamiliarized. Such Japanese theorists of radical feminism as Tanaka Mitsu are not simplistically presented as mere additions to our historical cast, though that contribution is not insignificant given how often non-western thinkers remain invisible within the western feminist canon. Focusing on Tanaka Mitsu and her contemporaries, Shigematsu pushes open the range of gender, sexual, and political issues impacting women in non-western locations. In the innovative resolutions, strategies, and articulations Japanese women furnished to address feminist issues, they drew from and negotiated their localized histories and experiences, which in turn unfolded within an interconnected world.

Urban bourgeois Japanese feminists in the 1960s and 1970s organized around issues of women’s sexuality, reproduction, violence, imperialism, and left-wing politics. The “Liberation of the Toilet,” or the manifesto of the ribu women, through its “explicit, sexual, and vulgar language,” simultaneously sought to politicize sexualized subjectivities of Japanese housewives and comfort women. The manifesto declared: “The chastity of the wives of the military nation and the dirtied pussies of the ‘comfort women’ are both two extremes of a structure of consciousness that denies sex” (18). Ribu politics were sharply attuned to recognize the ideological loops that connected the romanticized and idealized national constructions of the peace-loving Japanese mother with state-sanctioned sexual aggression against other colonized Asian women (19). Ribu activism and theory unpacked the overlapping and tangled organizational logic of patriarchal power structured along axes of sexuality, reproduction, and imperialism.

The ribu’s slogan on women’s procreative capacities called for “the creation of a society where we want to give birth.” Ribu women were seeking a wider socio-cultural transformation...