AMERASIA JOURNAL

Following are two introductions to Amerasia‘s women’s issue “Where Women Tell Stories” by guest editors Stephanie Santos and Mary Uyematsu Kao.  Accompanying the text are more photos from the “Buildin’ Bridges and Stirrin’ Waters” event on November 5, 2009 at UCLA’s Powell Library Rotunda.

Introduction

Stephanie and Freeda, from the Women's Studies Ph.D program.

Ethical Dialogues

When we began working on this journal, I thought this issue of Amerasia was going to be a feminist issue.  However, feminism—mainstream liberal feminism to be exact—was inadequate in articulating the narratives and knowledge of Asian American women.  Jacqui Alexander wrote that to address liberal feminism’s ingrained sexual and racial mythologies, feminists must “become fluent in each other’s histories.”  In this issue, we attempt to contribute to this greater fluency, initiating dialogue by bringing in the herstories of Asian American women.

Chandra Mohanty wrote of the challenges that lie in crafting noncolonized dialogues to enable a critical, multicultural feminism.  Such dialogues are necessarily fraught with tension, because they entail destabilization and decentering of the traditional referents of white, mainstream, liberal feminism.  One way to begin, suggests Mohanty, is to figure out how to “engage in ethical and caring dialogues across the divisions, conflicts, and individualist identity formations that interweave feminist communities in the United States.”

The articles in this issue attempt to build ethical and caring dialogues between these divisions.  What happens when feminism, for example, is centered around the needs and concerns of immigrant garment workers in New York’s Chinatown?  Katie Quan, in “Memories of the 1982 ILGWU Strike in New York Chinatown,” remembers the strike staged by members of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), and the significance of organizing in the lives of the union members, as well as to the larger community.  She writes, “The women participated in union activities, but also in non-labor events. . . .  Labor and community were seamlessly integrated—what was good for workers was good for the community, and vice-versa.

What happens when feminism is centered around the needs and concerns of immigrant mothers of color?  Laura Pulido, in “Immigration Politics and Motherhood,” notes how despite efforts to unite women based on “a general politics of motherhood,” mainstream feminists have not offered any real support to mothers from politically subordinated groups, such as immigrant women.  Pulido’s article highlights how the motherhood of “racially and socially despised” mothers remains unrecognized by mainstream feminists.  In fact, Pulido argues that motherhood’s potential to link diverse constituents is often thwarted by nativism and racism.

What happens when feminism is centered around the needs and concerns of transnational Filipinas and Filipina Americans, who collaborate within an “ever changing terrain of women’s organizing?”  Annalisa V. Enrile and Jollene Levid, in their article “GABNet:  A Case Study of Transnational Sisterhood and Organizing,” acknowledge the challenges of transnational organizing.  Their response to Mohanty’s call for crafting ethical dialogues includes “a transformative style [of] organizing that is guided by actions and political campaigns in the Philippines but made concrete in the United States, sensitive to context and situation of the American mainstream and the marginalized Filipino immigrant communities.”

Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales and Jocyl Sacramento, in their article “Practicing Pinayist Pedagogy” contribute further to decentering mainstream liberal feminism.  For the authors, Pinayism is a praxis that allows Pinays to “connect the global and local to the personal issues and stories of Pinay struggle, survival, service, sisterhood, and strength.”  Through discussions of concrete pedagogical strategies such as boodoo doll creation and critical performance, Tintiangco-Cubales and Sacramento go beyond mainstream feminism to “engage the complexities and intersections” of multiple Pinay subjectivities, which in addition to gender also encompass, among other factors, class, race/ethnicity, spirituality, educational status, diasporic migration, and citizenship.

This issue of Amerasia Journal begins with articles grouped under the section “Narrative,” as many of the articles deal with giving voice to herstories that have been subjugated.  Jolie Chea, in “Refugee Acts,” engages in an act of critical remembering as a way to subvert hegemonic historical accounts, writing “(t)hrough my grandmother, I have learned to see and listen to mouths that were not speaking, but bodies that were being. . .to think of new, alternative ways of seeing, to contest that which has already been established and not by our own selves, but by others.”  In “Mother, May I?,” Carrie Usui shares how a shared type II diabetes diagnosis allowed her mom and herself to move “in between mother and daughter lines, between caregiver and person in care, learning together in how to live this new life, while at the same time better understanding our pasts.”

The second section, “Power,” addresses the themes of collaborations between women of color, between activists for social justice.

We end with a section on “Knowledge,” often painfully gained from the place-making and activist efforts detailed in the first two sections.  “This work [organizing around women’s issues] can also be dangerous,” writes Ketu Katrak in her article “Transnational Links:  South Asian American Women’s Organizations and Autonomous Women’s Groups in India,” since activists risk greater violence.  “It may be as strategic,” Katrak states, “to subvert the system from within. . .and to live another day in order to tell one’s story.”

Though this is the first Amerasia Journal specifically designated a “women’s issue,” it is not the first time that Amerasia has dealt with issues affecting women.  However, we do recognize that both feminist analysis and ethnic studies have weaknesses in articulating the herstories of Asian American women.  This issue is our own attempt to craft bridges between these discussions.  It is our hope that other scholars and activists would in turn fill in the gaps and elisions in the work that was begun here.

Initially, I approached this issue of Amerasia Journal as a feminist issue, one that would highlight the key tenets of Asian American feminisms.  I have since seen how sexist oppression by itself is not an inclusive enough foundation on which to build feminist solidarity.  In fact, this formulation leads to what Roshni Rustomji identifies as a “salvation” narrative in her article “Subverting the Hierarchy, Collaborating Narratives.”  Feminists who are privileged through factors like race, class, or citizenship get trapped into the mindset of asking, “What can I do for them?”  This is a feminism still centered on oneself as a referent, one who is acting for and not in solidarity with the Other.

bell hooks offers a powerful method of shifting this emphasis by recasting the phrase “I am a feminist” into “I advocate feminism.”  hooks has defined feminism as “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.”  hooks’ recasting allows us to focus on ending sex- and gender-based oppressions by addressing their many intersecting causes.  Emphasizing the action of advocating feminism, instead of a feminist identity, also allows for more dynamic political involvements, whether with undocumented mothers, refugees, immigrant garment workers, or social justice activists.

This is perhaps my roundabout way of saying that despite my misgivings about the term, I see this Amerasia Journal women’s issue as an issue that advocates feminism—one that contributes to the practice of multicultural and antiracist feminisms.

—Stephanie D. Santos

Virtual Sisterhood

Somehow, since the 1960s and 70s, sisterhood got sideswiped by “feminism.”  For some of the younger generations, they are being sold a bill-of-goods that feminism is all about “self-empowerment.”  Self-empowerment is good for every healthy human being, especially in the kind of society we are living in here in the U.S.  But self-empowerment has been commodified, just as having an African American president has become America’s latest commodification in an attempt to drag our asses out of a huge financial abyss.  Self-empowerment has been repackaged away from its original intents, and now comes at us as straight-up individualism to enable you to play the capitalist rat-race game of dog-eat-dog social norms.  This weakens a people and keeps you divided so you can remain conquered.  The dynamics of today’s situation with social and political movements of the left in total disarray, this really has to be a soul-searching time on the real lessons learned from the 1970s movements.

More from “Virtual Sisterhood,” below the fold…

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