CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Takimoto, Akari |
|---|---|
| Title | (Re)thinking Relation Through the Movement of Words In Response to the Notion of Contemporary Feminist Solidarity between Japanese Women and South Korean Women |
| Summary | This thesis concerns the contemporary notion of feminist solidarity between Japanese women and South Korean women, raised by the #MeToo inspired Japanese feminism. While this form of solidarity is often celebrated in the name of sisterhood through the feeling of empathy upon assumed homogeneity in the experience of oppression as a woman, Zainichi feminist critiques have warned that such form of solidarity repeats epistemic violence by flattening the historical and ongoing traces of Japanese coloniality and racism. As a response, my thesis examines the alternative ways to think of relation without the assumption of the prior identitarian subjects who are willing to build solidarity out of empathy, out of confidence in one’s knowledge, or out of conscious responsibility, and I do so by drawing on Derridean notion of the other and/as Language. By speculatively examining language or the movement of words as the point of reference to question ethical and political implications of relation, I turn to the instances of reading, citing, interpreting, translating the words of the other as sites of thinking. As a site of this approach, first, I discuss relation through examining the situation of reading and translation by turning to the South Korea feminist novel Kim Ji-young Born 1982, which was translated into Japanese in 2018 and became a bestseller in Japan. Secondly, I discuss through the traces of words by turning to the North Korean song Imjingawa written in 1965 and its circulation in Japan, which has certain ‘unexpected’ resonance to the notion of feminist solidarity addressed in this thesis. In so doing, this thesis attempts to suggest alternative to think of relation from the impossibility, from the limitation, from the abyss. |
| Supervisor | Yoon, Hyaesin |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/takimoto_akari.pdf |
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