Monday, April 27, 2009

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 18th-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.

Monday, April 20, 2009

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

Monday, April 13, 2009

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).