Korean American Diaspora

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Korean American Diaspora

• Dr. Young Rae Oum
• Hanyang International Summer School
• Session 12
• Gender and nationalism

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Session 12 Gender and nationalism

• Inderpal Grewal, On the new global feminism and
  family of nations

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Session 12 Gender and nationalism

• Brief history of Indias partition
• India achieved independence from Britain after
  350 years of colonial ruling.
• The British left India in two pieces, based on
  religion Pakistan as an Islamic state, and India
  as a secular state.
• The partition was a result of the British divide
  and rule principle, and the congress and the
  Muslim league (resulting from different
  nationalist movements). The partition was violent
  and displaced 15 million people. Border crossing
  was particularly violent women were victimized
  on both sides of the border.

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Session 12 Gender and nationalism

• Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, separated
  from Pakistan after a war. India and Pakistan has
  been to war twice since the partition over
  Kashmir. People in all three nations are still
  dealing with the legacy of the partition.
• Grewals experience of a Conference on Sikh in
  Punjab and Muslims in Kashmir
• A white male doctor affiliated to a US based
  human rights org. reported on violence in
  Kashmir. Showed pictures of women raped by state
  authorities. Sikh male audience responded
  positively.
• Grewal presented about women in Sikh community,
  nationalism and male-dominated nationalist
  movement. Sikh male audience did not respond
  warmly (because they wanted an us vs. them
  argument, demonizing the rapists.)

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Session 12 Gender and nationalism

• Grewals critique of the human rights
  presentation on Muslim women in Kashmir
• Visual presentation of raped women enabled a
  voyeuristic male spectatorship.
• Such a spectatorship constructs masculinity as
  being unrapable and of being protectors of the
  rapable female bodies (among the male
  audience).
• Such visuals are pervasive in discourses used
  in org. such as Amnesty International, presenting
  women and children as victims in distress.
• The first world (imperialist, militaristic,
  violent, exploitative) is rarely present in this
  visual evidence.
• The masculinities produced through such gaze
  depend on the heterosexual discourse of women as
  nation, as land, as property.

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Session 12 Gender and nationalism

• Nation, state, and gender
• Mother Ireland vs. Irish State

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Session 12 Gender and nationalism

• Nation, state, and gender
• Yu Gwansun (symbol of the nation) vs. Korean
  Provisional Government

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Session 12 Gender and nationalism

• Nation, state, and gender
• Grewals critique production of masculinity--in
  the name of the protection of Sikh women, as
  internatonal protectors and nationalist
  protectors at whose cost?
• Human Rights discourse is applied differently by
  all those who participate in it.
• Discourse of rape is acceptable to nationalist
  discourse only when the perpetrator is an
  outsider.
• It is important for homosexual patriarchy to
  ignore the rape of men as a common but unspoken
  occurrence in war and as a common method of
  torture. (Torture could include the rapes of men
  but there are never seen as rapes, nor the
  perpetrators believed to be inflicting same sex
  violence? heterosexual bias.)

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Session 12 Gender and nationalism

• Nation, state, and gender
• Comfort women Japanese military sex slaves
  during WWII
• Over 200,000 women and girls (as young as 12),
  mostly Korean, were forcefully recruited many of
  them died. A few are still alive and demanding a
  formal apology and reparation from the Japanese
  Government.

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Session 12 Gender and nationalism

• Nation, state, and gender

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Session 12 Gender and nationalism

• Nation, state, and gender
• Within every community that is able to voice its
  concerns about the violation of rights, there are
  those groups and individuals who are unable or
  unwilling to participate in open protest or who
  are unwittingly incorporated into it.
• Practices of grass-root groups should be viewed
  in the context of problematic power relations
  inscribed in their efforts. ? The discourse on
  human rights, pain and torture are so powerful
  that it can silence many other discourses of
  exploitation and oppression.

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Session 12 Gender and nationalism

• Nation, state, and gender
• The context of problematic power relations
• Men of the Sikh community in India and elsewhere
  are already seen as aberrantly hypermasculine by
  a dominant Hindu Nationalism.
• Many nationalisms share the discourse of
  protection of women.
• E.g. the English Gentlemen
• Early Korean American immigrants

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Session 12 Gender and nationalism

• Nation, state, and gender
• The context of problematic power relations
• Sikh men strereotype Beard, turban,
  traditional
• Indian governments repressive policy in Punjab
  labeling Sikh men terrorists
• Ethnocentrism among Indians (including educated
  elites) and racial harassment.

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Session 12 Gender and nationalism

• Nation, state, and gender
• Rethinking Human Rights Discourses
• Must look at the subject-constitution as well as
  the objects of violations
• Questioning power and representation
• Who is speaking for whom?
• What power-relations enable them to speak for
  Others?
• What is the nature of local or grass root
  claims?
• What kind of violence does the representation
  perform?
• What are the cultural contexts?
• What human rights goals are ignored?

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Session 12 Gender and nationalism

• Nation, state, and gender
• UN,US, NGOs
• UN World Conference on Human Rights in June 1993
  (after the death of US-USSR divide) provided new
  impetus HR became one of the few recourses for
  many exploited
• UNs role has been changing in recent years with
  Growing improtance of NGOs
• US ambivalent of the role of UN
• White supremacist sees UN as
• Dangerous new world order
• Vs.
• Cosmospolitan capitalist class
• who benefit from global
• capitalism.

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Session 12 Gender and nationalism

• Nation, state, and gender
• The focus of Organizations such as Amnesty
  International has been expanded from political
  rights to socioeconomic rights in global
  frameworkquestioning the belief in nation-states
  as being able to provide for all their citizens
  and promoting for the rights of refugees,
  displaced, or stateless. (this alarms the
  conservative UN supporters.)
• Neoimperialist policies of the First World
  manipulated UN for their own Interests
• UNIFEM, UNICEF etc has fewer resources/less power
  than the Security Council or IMF/World Bank
• CEDAW (Convention on the elimination of all forms
  of discrimination against women) dictates
  accountability methods, but states are not living
  up to the requirements.

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Session 12 Gender and nationalism

• Nation, state, and gender
• Human Rights in the US and the Gender Based
  Asylum offered a new opportunity for the First
  World to deploy imperialist discourses
• E.g. Hilary Clintons condemnation of
  sterilization of Chinese women, female
  infanticide, and abortion of female fetuses?
  reiteration of long established Western
  discourses about Chinese womens backwardedness
  and oppression.

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Session 12 Gender and nationalism

• Nation, state, and gender
• Human Rights Watch have condemned the abuse of
  womens rights in prisons in the US this neither
  created much change in the treatment of women in
  custody nor has it affected US policy of
  campaigning for human rights.

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Session 12 Gender and nationalism

• Nation, state, and gender
• Canadian feminists tried to change the male
  centered refugee laws and to include gender based
  asylum claims (for FGM, domestic violence, or
  rape). US and others also considering similar
  measures, to grant refugee status based on well
  founded fear of persecution.
• US cultural feminist agendas endorse including
  domestic violence and rape (following
  infanticide, genital mutilation, forced marriage,
  slavery, domestic violence, Islamic
  Fundamentalist Regimes)
• Binary of First/Third World civilized/barbaric,
  free/unfree, West/non-West, rescuer/unfortunate
  sisters

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Session 12 Gender and nationalism

• Nation, state, and gender
• Korean American feminist discourses do not
  diverge much from US cultural feminists.
• Many condemn Korean culture and Korean
  patriarchy.
• E.g.
• Elaine Kim Modern Korean women are comfort
  women.
• Helie Lee Korean women are enslaved to their
  husbands and children.
• Young In Song and Ailee Moon Korean American
  women are living between TWO cultures
  Patiarchal, traditonal, living hell Korea and
  liberated, modern America.

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Session 12 Gender and nationalism

• Study Questions
• Define STATE, NATION, NATION STATE.
• How are a state and a nation gendered?
• How do we problematize the uses of human rights
  discourses? (How do we know what are good ways
  and what are bad ways?)
• What are the problems Grewal sees in the
  deployment of HR discourses by US, UN, and
  International organization?