Women and Gender Studies Lecture Series: Health Disparities and Immigration Politics in Cold War Era Japan
Using oral history interviews and original archival research, Kinukawa will examine the ways Zainichi Koreans (ethnic Koreans residing in Japan) have attempted to access health care, and in the process, articulated their critique of U.S.-Japanese neo-imperialism in East Asia. Those stories reveal the limitations of demanding health care within the conventional frame of nation and citizenship, and assist the analysis of how the state developed a gendered and racialized notion of citizenship as a tool to maintain health disparities and other forms of oppression. She will also speak to recent concerns about elitism in transnational feminisms by exploring how Zainichi women activists sought transnational alliances with movements elsewhere, including socialist, communist and “third world left” movements in Asia and the black civil rights movement in the U.S.