09-25 Sonia Amin Public Lecture

SONIA NISHAT AMIN: Revisiting the Trauma of 1971: Selina Parveen in the Killing Fields of Rayer Bazaar

UHM Women’s Studies Colloquium Series Fall 2009
A presentation and discussion by:
Professor Sonia Nishat Amin
Department of History at the University of Dhaka and the Arthur Lynn Andrews Chair at the UHM School of Pacific and Asian Studies

Friday, 9/25/09
12:30pm-2:00pm
Saunders 637

This paper attempts to reconstruct the struggle of poet, journalist, editor and Freedom Fighter, Selina Parveen leading up to her tragic death at the hands of the Pakistani army and their collaborators in Bangladesh's War of Liberation, 1971. Selina Parveen is one of the few women who have been honoured by the commemorative stamps issued by the state in remembrance of the 'Martyred Intellectuals'. Yet her life story is often obliterated by the amnesia of historians who tend to gloss over the role of women in history. In this paper I would like to briefly reconstruct the trajectory of Parveen's life and struggle as part of the Bengalee Resistance in 1971 - from the start of her career as an independent journalist to the last moments of her brutal death in the killing fields of Rayer Bazaar.

Fall 2009 Women's Studies Colloquium Schedule

Fall 2009 Colloquium Series

09/11 Kimberlee Bassford (filmmaker) discusses Patsy Mink: Ahead of the Majority

* co-sponsored with the Center for Biographical Studies, the Bridge to Hope Program, UHM Women’s Center, the UHM Archives Department and the UHM Political Science Department

09/18 Anne Keala Kelly (filmmaker) discusses Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai`i

10/02 Michael J. Shapiro (UHM-Political Science) “Mother’s Talk and Mother’s Arms: Edward P. Jones’ Washington, DC”

· co-sponsored with the Political Science Department

10/16 Kathryn Davis (UHM-Second Language Studies) TITLE TBA

10/23 Elyssa Faison (University of Oklahoma-History) “Gender and Labor in Korea”

· co-sponsored with the UHM Center for Korean Studies

11/13 Brianne Gallagher (UHM-Political Science) “The Blog of War: (Re)producing U.S. Soldiers in an Age of Terror”

· co-sponsored with the Political Science Department

12/04 Women’s Studies Capstone Presentations

TITLE(S) TBA

All colloquia take place at Saunders Hall, Room 637 from 12:30-2pm on the (Friday) date noted above. Please contact Bianca Isaki (bisaki@hawaii.edu) for more information.

More pictures from Ruth Dawson's retirement reception

We are going to miss you Ruth!

Women's Studies Colloquium May 1 (F)

Women's Studies Colloquium Series Spring 2009
May 1 (F) 12:30-2:00 Saunders 541

One of Women's Studies faculty members, Dr. Ruth Dawson is retiring at the end of this semester. This special talk by Dr. Dawson is followed by a reception to celebrate her accomplishments and a new start. Please come and join us!


"Framed! A Gendered take on Words and Images"

by Ruth Dawson (Women's Studies, UHM)

Abstract: Using examples that range from Hawaii, modern and ancient, to 18^th-century Germany, this talk explores gendered narratives of looking and being looked at and asks us to think how these acts are represented in a mural we walk past almost daily, in transcripts of abortionist trials, and at other sites where words and images interact.

Ruth Dawson is a professor of Women’s Studies, a position she reached after many years in the non-tenure-track wilderness in which increasing numbers of UHM faculty will probably soon be confined. She earned her Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, and, as her three thick personnel folders in the Dean’s office attest, has probably been terminated more often from the University of Hawaii than all her Women’s Studies colleagues combined—after all, lecturers get ceremonially terminated every semester! In addition to the varied teaching, which she loves, her research focuses on the rediscovery and reassessment of eighteenth-century German women writers, the analysis of representations of Catherine the Great of Russia and of Catherine as an early woman celebrity, and critiques of the exploration texts that resulted from the Cook voyages in the Pacific.

April 24 (F) 12:30-

Women's Studies Graduate Certificate capstone presentation

Mapping Convergence: Feminism, Nationalism, and Indigenous Women Writers

Sarah Smorol (American Studies, UHM)

Abstract: “Mapping Convergence” is a talk that explores the places where feminism has been integrated into Nativist/Indigenist and Nationalist movements through literature by women writers from the Chicana, Native American and Native Hawaiian communities. Particular attention is placed on the period from the late 1970s to early 1980s when a plethora of books were published focusing on contributions from Native women writers.

Speaker bio: Sarah Smorol is a second-year PhD candidate in American Studies and working towards the Advanced Women’s Studies Graduate Certificate at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Previous education includes a B.A. in Language and Cultural Studies from the State University of New York Empire State College and an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies (Cross-Cultural Arts and Literature) from San Diego State University.

Room: Saunders 541

Open to public

WS Colloquium April 17 Friday

Japanese Women's Participation in Transnational Women's Activism, 1870s-1880s

Rumi Yasutake (Konan University, Japan)

--Co-sponsored with Center for Japanese Studies--

April 17 (Friday)

12:30pm-1:30pm, Saunders 541

Abstract

This paper examines interaction among American and Japanese men and women in the Tokyo-Yokohama area during the 1870s and 1880s, focusing on the inception of a Japanese women's union in Tokyo of the World Woman's Christian Temperance Union(WWCTU), the largest women's organization in turn-of-the-century America. The Japanese women's union was formed through
efforts of Mary C. Leavitt, a "round-the-world missionary” dispatched by the WWCTU. By that pivotal moment, Japan had fully recognized the need to Westernize and modernize itself to sustain its integrity from the threat posed by the Western powers. Preceding Leavitt were American missionary women, who had arrived in Japan along with government officials, traders, and industrialists. The presence of American women in Japan, which demonstrated material wealth and advanced technology of America, were welcomed by Japanese men and women in the 1870s and 1880s when Japan looked up to the Western nations for its model for civilization. From a macro-point of view, American women, who came to Japan for the expansion of their religious beliefs or of their moral movement, looked to be effective agents of American, especially cultural, imperialism. However, when you closely examine interactions between American and Japanese men and women, the seeming expansion of American cultural values and customs appears to be far more complex and illusive. This paper investigates collaboration and contention among American and Japanese men and women who responded to
Leavitt's call to organize a WCTU union in the Tokyo-Yokohama area in the 1880s.

Rumi Yasutake is a professor in the Faculty of Letters, Konan University in Kobe, Japan.
She is the author of the book Transnational Women's Activism: The United States, Japan, and Japanese Immigrant Communities in California,1859-1920 (New York: New York University Press, 2004).

Women's Studies Colloquium April 16

April 16:

“A Japanese in Every Jet” Gender, Mobility, and Modernity in Postwar Japan

By Dr. Christine Yano (Professor, Dept. of Anthropology, UHM)
Date: Thursday April 16
Time: 3:00 pm—4:30 pm
Location: Korean Studies Auditorium, East West Rd (opp. Moore Hall)

(Refreshments Provided)

See attached flyer for more information.

Abstract:
In 1964, the Japanese government lifted international travel restrictions, opening the floodgates for international travel. By May 1967, Life magazine proclaimed, “Newest Stewardess Fad: A Japanese in Every Jet,” featuring Japanese stewardesses on eleven international carriers.

This paper examines the “Japanese-in-every-jet” phenomenon through the experiences of Japanese stewardesses who flew for the world’s premier carrier, Pan American World Airways.
It suggests that the job took elite Japanese women out of the national home and into the corporate sphere of Pan Am’s global cabin and foreign ports of call.

Free and open to the public.

WS colloquium March 20, 2009

Battle of the Sexes in the New Millennium

Examining Sport and Gender

Trina Kudlacek

(UHM, Office of Student Athlete Academic Services)

March 20 (Friday)

12:30pm-1:30pm, Saunders 541

Abstract

The 1970’s were a pivotal decade for the empowerment of women and women’s involvement in sport reflected the spirit of the times. In 1972, Title IX was passed and in 1973 Billy Jean King played Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes”. Now, 36 years later, both women and men, are becoming more aware of how traditional gender roles shape and restrict their participation in sport as in larger society. This talk will examine the importance of sport, as a socially constructed and gendered institution, through which hegemonic masculinity is reproduced and reinforced.

Trina Kudlacek received her Doctorate of Education in Sport Psychology and Counseling from Temple University in Philadelphia Pennsylvania. Her academic focus has been on diversity issues in athletics with particular emphasis on race, ethnicity, and gender. She has worked in academic support services with college student-athletes for 17 years and currently has a position as an academic adviser for the Office of Student Athlete Academic Services at UH Manoa. In addition to academic advising, Trina currently teaches two courses on line at Oregon State University, one in the Exercise and Sport Sciences entitled "Power and Privilege in Sport" and the other "Women in Sport" through the Women's Studies Department. She also teaches a course in the sociology of sport in the Kinesiology and Rehabilitation Science Dept. at UH Manoa. She is the author of a textbook chapter on sychosocial issues of college student-athletes and has also presented at national and international conferences on coach/athlete relationships, diversity issues for student-athletes of color, and academic support strategies for student-athletes.

Rainbow bridge academic fair

Women's Studies participated in the Rainbow Bridge Academic Fair.
More on the Rainbow Bridge Program:

The Rainbow Bridge program will familiarize prospective community college transfer students with the Mānoa campus, inform them on policies and procedures which affect their enrollment at Mānoa, showcase various academic and student service programs, and provide opportunities for students to network with Mānoa faculty and staff.


If you are transfer students to Manoa and would like to know more about Women's Studies, please contact 956-7464, or email any of our faculty members.

WS colloquium March 13 (F) Legal Responses to World War II Sexual Violence: The Japanese Experience

Legal Responses to World War II Sexual Violence: The Japanese Experience

Yuma Totani

Department of History, UHM

--Co-sponsored with Center for Japanese Studies--

March 13 (Friday) 12:30pm-1:30pm, Saunders 541

Abstract

Since the establishment of international tribunals in the 1990s, there have been debates concerning the extent to which justice systems can help victims and perpetrators of mass atrocity begin the process of confronting the past and restoring the fabric of torn communities. This paper explores how rape, sexual slavery, and other forms of sexual violence that accompanied the Japanese conduct of war were documented at WWII war crimes trials on the one hand and the present-day civil lawsuits on the other. By comparing the two types of legal proceedings, Totani considers the possibilities and limitations of the judiciary in achieving justice, establishing accountability, and restoring the dignity of the victims of atrocity.

Yuma Totani obtained her Ph.D. in History at the University of California at Berkeley, in 2005. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University, in 2005-2006. She is currently an assistant professor of History at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her representative publication is The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008). The Japanese edition, Tōkyō saiban: dai 2-ji taisen go no hō to seigi no tsuikyū (Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 2008), is translated and revised by the author.

Student group

Students affiliated with Women's Studies program created a group called Collective for Equality, Justice & Empowerment. Check out their website here

CEJE will be organizing the Feb 27 panel on violence against women.

Feb 27 Colloquium

CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE: LINKING GENDER & RACE”

February 27, 2009
12:30 – 1:30
SAUNDERS 541

PANEL SPEAKERS:

NJOROGE NJOROGE, PhD. Department of History (UHM)
JENNIFER ROSE, J.D. Gender Equity Specialist (UHM)

How is structural violence produced and reproduced?
Experienced and expressed?
Negotiated and navigated?
Accommodated and resisted?

This colloquium will, from various angles, address these profound, perplexing, and perennial questions in specific contexts, and through the insights of activists and academicians in the field and on the ground.


ORGANIZED BY THE COLLECTIVE FOR EQUALITY, JUSTICE & EMPOWERMENT
ceje@hawaii.edu

Feb 20 talk: Toward a Feminist Analysis of the Collapse of Public Education

Toward a Feminist Analysis of the Collapse of Public Education
Mari Matsuda Law School, UHM

--Co-sponsored with Department of Political Science--

February 20 (Friday)12:30pm-1:30pm, Saunders 541

Abstract: This talk brings a feminist theory/critical race theory perspective to the analysis of the collapse of public education. Universal, quality public education as an ideal is an accepted part of liberal discourse in the United States, belied by the reality of large numbers of children with no access to minimally decent education. The actual expectation and experience of most American families is that finding adequate education for their children is a significant challenge. In Hawaii, educated parents are increasingly unwilling to send their children to public schools, a trend mirrored in other urban areas, and exacerbating a have vs. have-not education system. There are many material and ideological reasons for the decline of the public school. This talk will focus on the gendered aspects, considering, for example, the effect of teaching as “women’s work,” the abandonment of the feminist strategy of comparable worth, “private sphere” and privatization, and the third shift that women work in order to maintain functions – such as team mom and fundraiser – that shore up the defunded system of public education. I would like to make a tentative link to the larger problem of public quietude in the face of completely unacceptable social realities. Why do we accept largely inadequate public services, whether in health care, education, mental health, elder care – any number of areas that we all need, desperately, at one time or another? What is it about late-capitalist patriarchy that imposes the collective sense that created problems are intractable realities, and that organizing for change is futile?

Ann Dunham: A Personal Reflection

An article from Anthropology News, written by Dr. Alice Dewey and Dr. Geoffrey White.

news related to our previous panel on Ann Dunham

We organized a panel discussion on the contribution on Ann Dunham, the mother of President Barak Obama, in last September (see previous post). Here are some news related to the conference.

"A woman of the people:A symposium recalls the efforts of Stanley Ann Dunham to aid the poor "(Star Bulletin)

"Obama's mother's work focus of UH seminar" (Honolulu Advertiser)


"Long-range love of Obama’s absent mother" (Times online)

100 years of women at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa

Link to women's history walking tour at University of Hawai'i at Manoa. This site was created by Dr. Ruth Dawson and her students. Enjoy!

January 30 (Friday) WS Colloquium

Women's Studies Colloquium Series (Spring 2009)
January 30 (Friday) 12:30pm-1:30pm, Saunders 541

Riding Astride: Self-Representation in Wrangling Women: Humor and Gender in the American West

By Kristin M. McAndrews (Department of English, UHM)


Abstract

In “Riding Astride: Self Representation in Wrangling Women: Humor and Gender in the American West,” I will discuss the way in which female identity emerges in a collection of stories I gathered from women who work with horses in Winthrop, Washington, a legally mandated Western theme town. To understand the complex cultural dynamics of these women and the humor they employ in storytelling, I found it necessary to commit myself to this geographic location in order to begin comprehend humor and gender in the American West. I also discovered the need to include my own experience, analyzing my off-centered relationship with the women I interviewed and the community I researched. What resulted from my work was another way in which to consider scholarship of women’s narratives.


Speaker bio: Kristin M. McAndrews is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa. She works with folklore, oral narratives, auto/biography, humor, tourist and gender studies and culture and cuisine. Most recently, she has researched on the 1850 visits to Paris by Lot Kamehameha and Alexander Liholiho. Working at Bishop Museum and the National Library of France in Paris, she is looking at the ways in which these future rulers of Hawai`i enter and exit the discourse of the Grand Tour, a traditional narrative of upper class European young men.

Spring 2009 Women's Studies Colloquium at University of Hawai'i at Manoa

Jan 30 (F) Kristin M. McAndrews (UHM, English)

“Riding Astride: Self-Representation in Wrangling Women: Humor and Gender in the American West”

Feb 20 (F) Mari Matsuda (UHM, Law School)

“Moving Education from the Public to the Private: A Critical Race Theorist and Feminist Analysis of the School Problem”

Feb 27 (F) Njoroge Njoroge (UHM, History) and Jenn Rose (UHM, Gender Equity Specialist)

“Critical Reflections on Structural Violence: Linking Race and Gender”

--Organized by Collective for Equality, Justice, and Empowerment (CEJE)--

March 13 (F) Yuma Totani (UHM, History)

“Legal Responses to World War II Sexual Violence: The Japanese Experience”

--Cop-sponsored with Center for Japanese Studies--

March 20 (F) Trina Kudlacek (UHM, Office of Student Athlete Academic Services)

“The Battle of the Sexes in a New Millennium: Examining Sport and Gender”

April 16 (R) Chris Yano (UHM, Anthropology)

“A Japanese in Every Jet”: Gender, Mobility, and Modernity in Postwar Japan

--Co-sponsored with Center for Japanese Studies and anthropology department--

*note that this talk is at Moore Hall 319 and starts at 3:00.

April 17 (F) Rumi Yasutake (Konan University)

“Japanese Women's Participation in Transnational Women's Activism, 1870s-1880s”
--Co-sponsored with Center for Japanese Studies--

April 24 (F) Women’s Studies Graduate Certificate capstone presentation

“Feminism, Nationalism and Indigenous Women Writers” by Sarah Smorol

May 1 (F) Ruth Dawson (UHM, Women’s Studies)

“Memory sticks: a backward look at UHM Women's Studies”


12:30-2:00, Saunders 541 unless otherwise noted

Fall 2008 Women's Studies Colloquium at University of Hawai'i at Manoa

Sept 12 (F)
“DR. Stanley Ann Dunham: An Extraordinary Woman and Her Work”
Alice Dewey (UHM anthropology), Nancy Cooper (UHM anthropology), and Bron Solyom (Jean Charlot Collection at UHM Library)

Sept 19 (F)
“Sexuality and Ethnicity: Issues from a Philippine Perspective”
Lilia Quindoza Santiago (UHM Indo-Pacific Languages)
co-sponsored with Center for Philippine Studies

Sept 26 (F)
“Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific”
Kathy Ferguson (UHM Women’s Studies and Political Science)
Monique Mironesco (UH West Oahu, Political Science)
co-sponsored with Department of Political Science

Oct 10 (F)
“The Women of Liulichang: Female Collectors and Bibliophiles in Late-Qing China”
Shana Brown (UHM History)
co-sponsored with Center for Chinese Studies

Oct 31 (F)
“'Japanese Eyes, American Heart': Race, Nation, and Masculinity in Japanese American Veterans' WW II Narratives”
Mire Kokari (UHM Women’s Studies)

Nov 14 (F)
“Smoke, Sex, and “Masculine” Women: Tobacco in the Early Modern World”
Matt Romaniello (UHM History)