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This book examines roles of gender, race and nation in the geopolitics of Cold War East Asia on the Island of Okinawa.
List of contents
1. Rethinking gender and militarism in Cold War Okinawa; 2. Cultivating feminine affinity and affiliation with Americans: Cold War people-to-people encounters and women's club activities; 3. 'The world is our campus': domestic science and Cold War transnationalism between Michigan and Okinawa; 4. Building a bridge across the Pacific: domestic training and Cold War technical interchange between Okinawa and Hawaii; 5. Mobilizing homes, empowering women: Okinawan home economists and Cold War domestic education; 6. Cultivating feminine affinity and affiliation with the homeland: grassroots women's exchange between mainland Japan and Okinawa; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Mire Koikari is Associate Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Her research has focused on issues involving race, gender and empire, in particular the intertwined formation of American and Japanese feminisms against the backdrop of militarism and expansionism in Asia and the Pacific in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her teaching has focused on recasting the history of women and feminism in the transnational contexts of race, nation, military and empire, illuminating the varied and often surprising ways in which women, racial minorities, immigrants and colonized subjects negotiated with dominant dynamics of power. Her previous publications include Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and the Cold War in the US Occupation of Japan (2008), which examines the meanings and consequence of 'feminist reform' during the US occupation of mainland Japan. For her research on gender and militarism in Cold War Okinawa, which has culminated in the present volume, she has received a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Asia Program, and another from the Japan Foundation. She is currently working on her new project which analyzes the process of remasculinization and remilitarization of Japan following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disasters.
Summary
In this innovative and engaging examination of the role of gender, race and nation in the geopolitics of Cold War East Asia, Mire Koikari explores the complex relationship between militarism and domesticity, and the involvement of women as agents in American empire building on the island of Okinawa.
