To honor the memory of the late Kazuko Takemura, a feminist famous for her activism as well as introducing theorists such as Judith Butler to Japan, WAN is posting a series of eulogies delivered by her fellow activists and scholars both from Japan and overseas.
Tribute to Kazuko
By: Minoo Moallem
Professor
Gender and Women’s Studies Department
UC Berkeley
How did the rose
Ever open its heart
And give to this world
All its beauty?
It felt the encouragement of light
Against its being,
Otherwise, we all remain
Too frightened
“From Hafiz Classic Poetry”
My first
encounter with Kazuko was when she arrived to Berkeley as a visiting scholar in
2008. It did not take long before I started to appreciate Kazuko’s intellectual
presence in the department and enjoy many conversations with her first as a
scholar and eventually as a friend. I was in my first year of chairship at
Berkeley struggling with the same issues most chairs encounter in US academia,
where neoliberalism, individualism, privatization lead the way against a
collective sense of purpose, communication and direction based on an ethic of
collaboration and collegiality despite differences and disagreements. Kazuko
very quickly understood some of my daily challenges and became a supportive
presence by reminding me on a number of occasions that my efforts and work to foster
and sustain a gender, women and sexuality department was worth a great deal.
On a few
occasions, we shared our experiences with regard to the challenges and obstacles
of leadership positions for women and the significance of gender, class, race
and immigration in relation to the invisible work of care in an institutional
context. It was perhaps these
conversations that encouraged her to invite me to be a speaker in a conference
she was helping to organize on leadership issues. While the conference did not
take place because of the devastating earthquake in Japan, she inspired me to
write a draft of a paper on “Women, leadership and the politics of care” reflecting
upon more than seven and a half years of working towards the building and
chairing of gender, women and sexuality studies departments in the US.
Our
intellectual conversations went beyond collegiality and everyday academic life
when I learned that she was working on issues that had interested me for a long
period of time including war, violence, racism, nationalism, imperialism and
militarism. We both loved theory yet were deeply concerned about the political
implications of what was happening in a number of locations including Japan,
Iran, and the US. I was eager to learn from her about Japan, and she used every
opportunity to ask me about Iran, Iranian diaspora and the US. Both of us
enjoyed theory and theorizing beyond our cultural, social and historical
context, both of us were horrified by the spectacularization of violence in a
transnational context and both of us thought that feminist scholarship needed
to be more engaged with issues of militarism and violence of our everyday life.
Reflecting upon the horror of Abu Gharib, she asked, “Why are we stunned by
these photos? Does violence practiced by women invalidate feminist claims
against the brutality of patriarchy? What impetus drove women soldiers to
perpetrate such acts? Did sexual desire occasion this act? Or just desire,
independent of sexual difference? Or, was desire itself engaged in this
abuse? If not, what else was
there?”[1]
In an effort
to respond to these questions, Kazuko suggested the concept of “lethal
biopolitics” stretching the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics to expose “an
agency for ‘better life’ to social or furthermore physical death of its own.”[2]
A profound thought on her part that involved an interrogation of desire,
passion, and death linking everyday acts of violence with the killing machine
of war and militarism.
We both
thought of militarization of everyday life as the most pressing issue to be
tackled by feminist scholars especially with the expansion of new media and
cyberspace. I admired her efforts to bring cultural and literary studies into
conversation with policy studies by interrogating the literary representations
of beauty, eroticism and death as an insinuating way for the militarization of
Japan. Her linking of militarization with the policies for a small government
and the desire for shrinking the welfare state was brilliant not only in
linking the lethal biopolitics with modes of governmentality and subjection in
Japan, and in the formation of what she called ”japanism”, but also extremely
significant for an understanding of the politics of death in liberal
democracies. She argued for an understanding of the relationship between the
internal aesthetics as it is mutated into external violence and perpetrated in
actual world politics.
I miss
Kazuko, her smile, her intellectual passion, her words of care and support, her
spirited season greetings, her commitment to feminist postcolonial studies, her
political sensibilities and wisdom. Our paths crossed for a very short period
of time but I will keep endearing memories of the long lasting effect of this
encounter.
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