“So how do you compare women’s status in the U.S. and Japan?” Despite advance preparation, I had not anticipated this question. I froze. No, I was not defending my master’s thesis. The question was posed by an immigration officer at Milwaukee International Airport. I was returning to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, after a winter break in my native Japan, and my reason for re-entry, stated in my immigration document, was graduate education in sociology and women’s studies. Before me was a female agent of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), her blonde hair pulled back in a tight bun, her blue eyes expressionless, and her holstered handgun gleaming. At graduate school I was accustomed to handling questions under a figurative gun but never a literal one. If I gave a “wrong” answer, I wondered, would I get into trouble?
H-Diplo Essay 366
Essay Series on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars
14 September 2021
Doing Gender and International Relations in Madison, Honolulu, and Tokyo
https://hdiplo.org/to/E366
Series Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii
Essay by Mire Koikari, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
“So how do you compare women’s status in the U.S. and Japan?” Despite advance preparation, I had not anticipated this question. I froze. No, I was not defending my master’s thesis. The question was posed by an immigration officer at Milwaukee International Airport. I was returning to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, after a winter break in my native Japan, and my reason for re-entry, stated in my immigration document, was graduate education in sociology and women’s studies. Before me was a female agent of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), her blonde hair pulled back in a tight bun, her blue eyes expressionless, and her holstered handgun gleaming. At graduate school I was accustomed to handling questions under a figurative gun but never a literal one. If I gave a “wrong” answer, I wondered, would I get into trouble?
The question, baffling in this circumstance, was not entirely new for me. It was a common query in the Midwest, where assumptions of ‘liberated American women’ versus ‘oppressed Japanese women,’ ‘democratic America’ versus ‘undemocratic Japan’ prevailed. Framed as the ‘woman question,’ it also probes national status. I, an alien with a student visa, had to respond cautiously. Should I be ingratiating but disingenuous, (“American women enjoy far more freedom than Japanese women”), forthright but potentially offensive (“As a woman, I feel much safer in Japan; I find sexism in the U.S. paralyzing”), or simply academic (“We cannot compare these two categories of women without overgeneralizing; the question is not meaningful”)? That day my answer went something like this: “Women face numerous problems in Japan, but American women, too, experience sexism frequently. There are differences but also commonalities between the two countries when it comes to gender.” The officer broke into a wide grin and said, “You can go.” To this day I have no idea why she asked that question, but a lesson was learned: Gender matters in border-crossings between the U.S. and Japan.
Born and raised in Japan, I relocated to the US in the late 1980s, first for graduate education in Wisconsin, then for a research and teaching career in Hawaiʻi. Driving this cross-border journey – from Tokyo to Madison to Honolulu – was gender. My interest in the subject was sparked by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.[1] I read the ‘bible’ of the second-wave feminism in a Japanese translation from a local public library. It resonated. For a teenager – I was fourteen at the time – who was acutely aware of inequalities between women and men in Japan, the book not only named ‘the problem that has no name’ but also suggested the possibility of a rigorous and analytical approach to gender. An ‘American Dream’ was born: One day I would go to the U.S. and study gender. The rest is history, and in this personal history place mattered and still does.
My first foray into the land of my dreams was ten months spent as a foreign exchange student at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. My choice of this tiny community near the Wisconsin-Minnesota border was in no small part influenced by an NBC television series, Little House on the Prairie (1974–83).[2] Broadcast in Japan, the adventures of Laura Ingalls Wilder, a pioneer girl-hero who braved the frontier, became a huge hit, especially among children. I was one of them. Little did I understand that Little House was a Cold War artifact cultivating pro-Americanism in Japan, where other narratives (Gone with the Wind and The Sound of Music among them) also circulated. The beloved tale obscured the violence of the U.S. empire that informed both Laura’s childhood (which was evident in mistreatment of North America’s indigenous peoples) and my own (as reflected in the militarization of Asia and the Pacific a century later), and the history of manifest destiny that linked the two.
In Eau Claire, the spirit of courtesy – ‘Midwest Nice’ or ‘Minnesota Nice’ – was everywhere. Yet beneath the congenial façade lay unsettling dynamics. Living on the edge of downtown were Hmongs, Southeast Asian refugees displaced and relocated because of the Vietnam War, a history barely understood in a predominantly white community of German and Scandinavian descent. Another Asian war presented itself when my friend Eric took me to his grandmother’s home in Eau Claire. Upon learning that I was from Japan, his Nana, probably then in her nineties, took me to the attic, where she kept an antique Norwegian wooden trunk. From this family heirloom, she retrieved a December 1941 issue of Life magazine whose cover depicted the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. She bore no malice. She just wanted to show the magazine to her foreign guest because of the obvious – for her – connection between the two. Eric was gravely embarrassed, while I was too new to the country to understand Pearl Harbor’s grip on the American psyche.
Following my graduation from college in Tokyo, I returned to America for graduate training at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Celebrated as the ‘Berkeley of the Midwest,’ Madison prided itself on its progressive politics, yet it was progressivism of a certain stripe. ‘Race’ was often synonymous with ‘African American,’ and ‘international’ mostly referred to Europe and Latin America, sometimes Africa. Asians and Asian Americans were too alien to fathom and might as well not have existed. ‘Women’ was a heterogeneous category fragmented by race and other factors, divisions that complicated the meanings of ‘feminism.’ The Feminine Mystique began to retreat for me.
At the University of Wisconsin, graduate training in sociology was rigorous. I concentrated on three subfields – political sociology, historical sociology, and gender sociology – and learned sociology’s orthodoxies. My advisor Charles Camic guided me with exceptional grace as I sought a foothold in U.S. academia. Other members of the department, including Gay Seidman, Jane Collins, and Ann Orloff, helped me build a foundation in gender sociology. Gary Sandefur opened my eyes to the question of indigeneity, a topic that would assume much significance later. My minor field, women’s studies, complemented this process of learning, with Elaine Marks and her seminar playing an unforgettable role. A public lecture given by Cynthia Enloe blew me away because of its content as well as its performativity. Graduate students from South Korea, Taiwan, and Okinawa made me ponder the legacy of Japanese imperialism in East Asia and beyond.
In this milieu, another episode, one which was reminiscent of my encounter with Nana and Life magazine, took place. While on a road trip outside Madison, a friend and I stopped at a local diner. A polite and friendly elderly white man approached me, doffed his hat, and said, “You know, I had great time in Korea when I was young.” His reference to his (sexual) escapades was as startling as his confusion about nationality. In the pre-1945 Japanese empire, the categories of ‘Japanese’ and ‘Korean’ were as much tied to race as to nationality. Sexuality – Japanese women’s purported ‘sexual respectability’ and Korean women’s alleged lack thereof – reinforced the division and hierarchy between the two. This dynamic culminated in the system of ‘comfort women,’ Korean women subjected to sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army. The war ended in 1945; however, sexuality continued to inform Japan-Korea relations and resurfaced in Japanese sex tourism in South Korea in the mid-1960s. The Wisconsin veteran’s remark highlighted a new dynamic that entered this picture after World War II. Through postwar occupations, regional wars, and military buildups, U.S. dominance in Asia came to be codified in sexual terms. American men asserted their power over Asian women. For American soldiers who had “a good time” in Cold War Asia, differences among Asian women sometimes were inconsequential.[3]
Improbable as it may seem, it was the Midwest – America’s so-called heartland – that turned me to the question of gender and empire. The first stab at this colossal topic was my dissertation on the U.S. occupation of mainland Japan (1945–52).[4] Celebrated as the moment of ‘women’s liberation,’ the occupation was in fact driven by feminist orientalism that cast American women as feminist liberators and Japanese women helpless victims in need of rescue. Taking place amid postwar American expansionism, the occupation’s gender reform became an instance of ‘imperial feminism’ and left complex legacies for Japanese and American women alike. Japan’s ‘rebirth’ under U.S. ‘democratic’ tutelage, with women as its leading symbol, obscured the history of the Japanese and American empires before and after 1945.
In tackling my first historical project, I relied on the scholarship of gender and empire, an expanding field at the time. Chandra Mohanty,[5] Inderpal Grewal,[6] Anne McClintock,[7] Amy Kaplan,[8] Antoinette Burton,[9] Jane Hunter,[10] Ian Tyrrell,[11] Kristin Hoganson,[12] and Leila Rupp[13] elucidated complicated links between gender and race, feminism and empire, culture and geopolitics, and structure and agency, all salient in U.S.-occupied Japan. Their works were also full of suggestions about how to approach archives and handle historical documents.
Research at the National Archives and Records Administration in Suitland, Maryland, the MacArthur Memorial, Archive, and Library in Norfolk, Virginia, and the Japan Diet Library in Tokyo was intimidating and exciting. To stay on course, I repeatedly asked myself, nearly as mantras, “Where are the women?” and “How does gender matter?” The occupation records, rich in detail and full of surprises, revealed the origin, development, and consequences of the ‘imperial feminism’ that unfolded in U.S.-occupied Japan. Quotidian encounters between American and Japanese women were dynamic and multifaceted and highlighted their agency in myriad ways. Through archival digging, I came to observe and indeed feel the occupation’s “gendered and raced qualities, and their vicissitudes on the ground, where people live – and die.”[14] By staying close to the ground, I identified the “many fissures, contradictions, historical particularities, and shifts in imperial process” that animated postwar US-Japan relations.[15] The long-ago event came alive in its full intensity and complexity. I was hooked.
Following the completion of my dissertation, I moved to Hawaiʻi as an assistant professor of women’s studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. This ‘paradise on earth’ was suffused with a history of racism, militarism, and imperialism.[16] The USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, a short drive away, eloquently testified to the islands’ turbulent past. But there was more. Hawai‘i’s multicultural population was a product of its plantation past, exploitative commercial agriculture in which profit-seeking white planters recruited laborers from Asia and elsewhere. Tourists and agrochemical companies crowded the islandscape and indelibly marred it. The spirit of aloha mingled with military sights and sounds as the United States Pacific Command – renamed the United States Indo-Pacific Command in 2018 – extended its reach across the region. A few years after my arrival in the islands, the 9/11 assault on the World Trade Center – described by the media as the “Second Pearl Harbor” – led to a large-scale mobilization of Pacific Island soldiers.[17] A “paranoid empire” struggled to re-solidify its hegemony and resorted to an unprecedented level of violence around the globe, violence whose repercussions were visible in this militarized colony.[18]
At the center of these developments stood the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. A land-grant institution established in 1907, the university began as a research outpost and despite its remote location attracted American natural and social scientists interested in tropical agriculture, domestic science, and race studies. Its significance as a colonial institution continued after the Second World War. Against the backdrop of the early Cold War, in 1959 Hawai‘i was admitted as the fiftieth state and became a leading hub of international technical and educational exchange. The university and the East-West Center (established in 1961) played a key role in this anti-Communist endeavor by disseminating American technical expertise in agricultural science, civil engineering, and home economics and by promoting ‘people-to-people’ relations with U.S. allies in Asia and the Pacific. During the postwar “reordering” of American academia,[19] UH became its exemplary site, “managing” gender, racial, and national differences and sustaining US dominance at home and abroad.
Just as in the Midwest, everyday encounters on the ground – this time in the Pacific –turned me to the question of gender and empire. The new project focused on the U.S. occupation of Okinawa (1945–72).[20] Under Japanese colonial rule until 1945, the Okinawan community of indigenous islanders was transformed into the ‘Keystone of the Pacific’ during the US occupation. Cold War militarization led to staggering numbers of sexual assaults but, paradoxically, also spawned a large-scale reform movement to Americanize domestic life. Cold War domestic reform mobilized Okinawan women, American military wives, and the American home economists of Michigan State University, the East-West Center, and the University of Hawaiʻi, which created a vast network that was centered on the home and homemaking across the Pacific. Aiding this process were Okinawan Americans in Hawaiʻi who collaborated with the occupation authority and facilitated the Americanization of their homeland. Cold War U.S. rule in Okinawa was for me an engrossing topic.
In recasting the U.S. occupation of Okinawa as an instance of Cold War domestic mobilization, I benefited from Cold War cultural studies. Elaine Tyler May, Laura McEnaney, and Joanne Meyerowitz highlighted the centrality of women and domesticity in American national culture during the Cold War.[21] Mary Dudziak, Penny Von Eschen, Christina Klein, Robert Haddow, and Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann shed light on this culture’s international dimensions.[22] Amy Kaplan’s concept of “manifest domesticity” was essential as I tried to discern the linkage between homemaking and empire-building.[23] It was my task to apply these scholars’ insights to Okinawa and to explicate the relevance of Okinawa for this scholarly community.
The project required multiple trips to diverse locations across Asia, the Pacific, and North America. At the University of Hawaiʻi, I stumbled upon a large volume of records that revealed the imperialist genealogy of the university and the East-West Center. At Michigan State University, I discovered a vast array of sources on Cold War international technical and educational exchange in which Okinawa was prominent. At the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in College Park, Maryland, the records of the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands (USCAR) contained reams of documents on women and gender that had eluded historians’ scrutiny for decades. Driven by a conviction that “the empirical work of the historian, who follows the devil into the details, can be theoretically productive,” I was dogged in retracing women’s footsteps, however faint and elusive, across geographical boundaries.[24] I developed a priceless ‘archival hunch’ through these experiences, felt indescribable excitement in piecing together fragments of the past and recovering a history of women, and accumulated considerable mileage on my credit card.
However, it was only after I arrived in Naha – Okinawa’s capital – in January 2013 that I began to gain a real – and visceral – sense of the Cold War occupation and its consequences. Living in Okinawa meant inhabiting a space where American military aircraft were constantly in the air and the bones of the dead from the Battle of Okinawa remained buried. The local archives – the Okinawa Prefecture Archive, the Okinawa Prefecture Library, and the University of the Ryukyus Library – were full of information that was often inaccessible from outside. Equally if not more important, material objects from the occupation era told me many stories. Histreet, a small gallery in Okinawa City (formerly Koza), exhibited cooking pots and pans made from downed Kamikaze planes, children’s clothes recycled from U.S. military blankets, and drinking cups cut from Coke bottles.[25] Other museums displayed artifacts such as a wedding dress sewn from US military parachutes or cutouts of flour sacks once containing food assistance from Utah on which Okinawan war widows practiced Western-style embroidery. Haunted by these remnants from the past, I began to realize how historical writing was an embodied and embedded practice.
While in Okinawa, I began to envision my next (third) project. Having analyzed the Cold War in its early phase (which informed the occupation of Japan) and at its height (the occupation of Okinawa), I became interested in post-Cold War dynamics. At the time, Japan was reeling from the 2011 Great East Japan Disaster – a compound catastrophe of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown known as the Fukushima Disaster or 3/11 – that had devastated Japan’s northeastern region of Tōhoku. Following 3/11, mainland Japan experienced a surge of nationalism encapsulated by the slogan “Ganbarō Nippon” [Rise up, Japan] and militarism fueled by a successful U.S.-Japan joint military operation, Operation Tomodachi. Rising neoliberalism imparted further complexity to the situation by promoting self-help and self-care as a new national doctrine, by enlisting women as female agents of resilience, and by transforming the home into a primary site of preparedness. Hawaiʻi was part of this mobilization, a site of “healing tourism” where hula girls stood (or danced) as the feminized symbol of regeneration and local Japanese Americans served as grassroots ambassadors in post-disaster diplomacy. However, in Okinawa where I lived at the time, islanders’ reactions were markedly different, indeed subdued. A gap or ondosa (difference in temperature) between the mainland and the islands was palpable and highlighted Okinawa’s status as Japan’s ‘other’ and its complex relationship with the US and Japanese militaries. For a third time, local dynamics steered me toward the question of gender and empire and inspired a new project on post-disaster culture in Japan.[26]
In exploring cultural dynamics in post-3/11 Japan, the emerging field of gender and neoliberalism was replete with useful ideas. Catherine Rottenberg, Nancy Fraser, Angela McRobbie, Inderpal Grewal, and Michaele Ferguson and Lori Marso offered critical insights on gender, feminism, securitization, militarization, and globalization, all of which shaped and reshaped Japanese culture after the disaster.[27] However, to make sense of post-3/11 Japan, it was also important to situate the disaster and its aftermath within larger historical contexts. The 2011 nuclear catastrophe had its origin in Cold War-era dynamics, especially the “Atoms for Peace” program advocated by President Harry Truman and the international technical assistance involving General Electric and Westinghouse. That Fukushima, a hinterland in northeastern Japan, became a site of nuclear energy production had much to do with its status as Japan’s internal ‘other,’ a region whose marginalization has often been compared to Okinawa’s. My previous work on the Cold War, Okinawa, and empire provided a solid foundation for building my analysis of 3/11 and its aftermath.
This new project, like the others, entailed extensive archival research. I moreover ventured into a new space, the internet, where an astounding amount of information on 3/11 and its aftermath was available. Audiovisual records of the disaster proliferated online; local and national governments used the web to issue guidelines, solicit volunteers, and fan nationalism and militarism; the populace employed online forums to express their views, show their resolve, and criticize the government and the industry for failures in containing the crisis. Virtual archives on post-3/11 culture were elastic, expansive, and mesmerizing. Brief trips to Tōhoku in 2014 and 2015 pulled me away from the virtual to the real world, where the unending nature of 3/11 and the gap between the responses in Tokyo and Tōhoku to the disaster were hard to ignore.
The book was finished in March 2020. Having sent my manuscript to the press, I thought I could banish thoughts of cataclysms, at least for a while. I could not have been more wrong. As COVID-19 enveloped the world, a call for “resilience” spread like wildfire, and with it, other familiar dynamics – disaster militarism, disaster capitalism, and disaster nationalism – proliferated.[28] In the U.S., the pandemic exacerbated preexisting political acrimony. It also laid bare profound disparities in the American experience and “intensif[ied] fissures” in the country’s political, social, and economic life.[29] Violence erupted. Amid national and global crises, two things stood out for me. The murder of George Floyd revealed the depth of racism in the Midwest and debunked the myth of ‘Minnesota nice.’[30] The shootings at Atlanta-area spas provided a moment, however fleeting and inconsequential, to glimpse how the conjoined nature of American sexism, racism, militarism, and imperialism affected the lives of Asian women.[31] The dynamics that I had followed or, conversely, that had followed me through my trans-Pacific journey from Tokyo to Madison to Honolulu came home. In this new century of unending violence, scholarly craft requires not merely an abiding commitment to critical work. It also calls for an unwavering belief – faith, if you will – in the possibility of producing knowledge that can expose and mitigate, if not entirely disrupt or halt, ongoing dynamics.
Mire Koikari is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her publications include Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and the Cold War in the U.S. Occupation of Japan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008); Cold War Encounters in US-Occupied Okinawa: Women, Militarized Domesticity, and Transnationalism in East Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Gender, Culture, and Disaster in Post-3.11 Japan (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020). She was a Japanese Studies Fellow at the Japan Foundation and a Japan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
[1] Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963).
[2] Amy Fatzinger, “Learning from Laura Ingalls Wilder,” The Atlantic, September 9, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/09/laura-ingalls-wilders-little-house/569629/ (accessed June 13, 2021).
[3] Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon, eds., Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
[4] Mire Koikari, Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and the Cold War in the U.S. Occupation of Japan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008).
[5] Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminist Review 30:1 (1988): 61-88.
[6] Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
[7] Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995).
[8] Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).
[9] Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865 –1915 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
[10] Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
[11] Ian Tyrrell, Woman’s World, Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
[12] Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
[13] Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
[14] Catherine Lutz, “Empire is in the Details,” American Ethnologist 3:4 (2006), 594.
[15] Lutz, “Empire is in the Details.”
[16] Hōkūlani Aikau and Vernadette Gonzales, eds., Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawaiʻi (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
[17] Teresia Teaiwa, “Globalizing and Gendered Forces: The Contemporary Militarization of Pacific/Oceania” in Kathy Ferguson and Monique Mironesco, eds., Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific: Method, Practice, Theory (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008).
[18] Anne McClintock, “Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib,” Small Axe 13:1 (2009).
[19] Roderick Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
[20] Mire Koikari, Cold War Encounters in US-Occupied Okinawa: Women, Militarized Domesticity, and Transnationalism in East Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
[21] Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994).
[22] Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Robert Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty: Exhibiting American Culture Abroad in the 1950s (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997); Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, eds., Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009).
[23] Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).
[24] James Vernon, “The Ethics of Hunger and the Assembly of Society: The Techno-Politics of the School Meal in Modern Britain,” American Historical Review 110:3 (2005), 696.
[25] For the web version of Histreet, see Web Histreet – Okinawa City Postwar Data Digital Archive, www.histreet.okinawa.jp/histreet/FAA10/init?locale=en_US#gsc.tab=0 (accessed June 25, 2021).
[26] Mire Koikari, Gender, Culture, and Disaster in Post-3.11 Japan (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020).
[27] Catherine Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (New York: Verso, 2013); Angela McRobbie, Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Essays on Gender, Media and the End of Welfare (Cambridge: Polity, 2020); Inderpal Grewal, Saving the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-First-Century America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); Michaele Ferguson and Lori Marso, eds., W Stands for Women: How the George W. Bush Presidency Shaped a New Politics of Gender (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
[28] Mire Koikari, Webinar Lecture, “Godzilla, KonMari, Hula Girls: Building Resilience in Post-3.11 and Beyond,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYOdHZKTJA8 (accessed June 30, 2021).
[29] Ileana Diaz and Alison Mountz, “Intensifying Fissures: Geopolitics, Nationalism, Militarism, and the US Response to the Novel Coronavirus,” Geopolitics 25:5 (2020).
[30] Podcast, “Who Killed George Floyd? (with Patricia Jones Blessman, Tasha Green Cruzat, T. Mychael Rambo, Roderick Ferguson, Pamela Alexander, and George Woods),” Ms. Magazine, April 19, 2021, https://msmagazine.com/podcast/31-who-killed-george-floyd-with-dr-patricia-jones-blessman-tasha-green-cruzat-t-mychael-rambo-roderick-ferguson-pamela-alexander-and-dr-george-woods/ (accessed June 30, 2021).
[31] Viet Thanh Nguyen, “From Colonialism to Covid: Viet Thanh Nguyen on the Rise of Anti-Asian Violence,” The Guardian, April 3, 2021, www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/03/from-colonialism-to-covid-viet-thanh-nguyen-on-the-rise-of-anti-asian-violence (accessed June 30, 2021).
