Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics

Lynn Fujiwara, Shireen Roshanravan, Piya Chatterjee, Lynn Fujiwara, Shireen Roshanravan

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780295744377
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics brings together groundbreaking essays that speak to the relationship between Asian American feminisms, feminist of color work, and transnational feminist scholarship. This collection, featuring work by both senior and rising scholars, considers topics including the politics of visibility, histories of Asian American participation in women of color political formations, accountability for Asian American "settler complicities" and cross-racial solidarities, and Asian American community-based strategies against state violence as shaped by and tied to women of color feminisms. Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics provides a deep conceptual intervention into the theoretical underpinnings of Asian American studies; ethnic studies; women's, gender, and sexual studies; as well as cultural studies in general.

PART ONE

RE-MEMBERING OUR PRESENT

Asian American Genealogies in the Emergence of Women of Color Formations

CHAPTER 1

INTERSECTIONALITY AND INCOMMENSURABILITY

Third World Feminism and Asian Decolonization

GRACE KYUNGWON HONG

This chapter examines activist engagements with Asian American communities along with the importance of the figure of the Asian woman freedom fighter in the New York chapter of the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA). TWWA, an organization formed in 1971, brought together Black, Puerto Rican, and Asian women in socialist anti-imperialist solidarity projects. Through readings of the TWWA periodical Triple Jeopardy, an interview with TWWA member Christine Choy, and analyses of archival materials from TWWA organizational records, I trace the role and representation of Asian women in this early Third World women’s organization so as to reflect on the possibilities and limits of leftist Third World solidarity politics. Triple Jeopardy expressed a deeply internationalist Third World solidarity that highlighted US imperialism and connected it to state violence in the United States. While the group often mobilized a logic of commensuration in which the Third World was imagined as connected via imperialism, a logic advanced by their investment in the figure of the Asian woman freedom fighter in the pages of Triple Jeopardy, an analysis of the role of Asian American women in the organization reveals an ethos of multiplicity, heterogeneity, and juxtaposition that challenges us to recognize the alternative, relational analytic of comparison also produced by this organization. In so doing, they mobilized a variety of analyses and critiques so as to challenge the various mechanisms of capitalism and imperialism. TWWA connected a Black radical internationalist tradition with a feminist analysis, a potent combination that enabled them to produce a complex and contradictory definition of solidarity based on both a narrative of unity and one that took seriously the differences, inequalities, and hierarchies between and within racialized groups and anti-imperialist histories. Examining TWWA in this way suggests that feminist organizations provided new and different analytics of comparison, and also provides an analytic to apprehend latent or unrecognized analytics of incommensurability as inherent to Third Worldist internationalist politics as a whole.

At the heart of these analytics and tactics is the idea of founding movements on rather than in spite of difference, an idea that many have observed is foundational to US Women of Color feminism. Women of Color feminists’ theorizations of what Kimberlé Crenshaw has termed “intersectionality” are profoundly relational and comparative, connecting power relations on seemingly disparate scales and registers (Crenshaw 1989). That is, the complexities of race, gender, and sexuality meant the persistence of hierarchies of power within racial groups, even within antiracist, decolonizing movements. As such, intersectionality meant challenging the ideas that communities are brought together by commonality and that identification is the only or even the primary basis for collectivity. Intersectional feminist practice engaged the affective and interpersonal relations within movements, relations where power relations are both replicated and contested. Women of Color activists, writers, and artists have developed an analytic of difference that became the foundation for their relationships within movements. They have addressed the ways languages of struggle did not, and still do not, translate across geographical contexts and historical trajectories, but asserted that solidarity and coalition could still be based on, rather than built in spite of, these incommensurabilities.

TWWA began through discussions in the New York chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), through the efforts of co-founder Frances Beal. A lifelong activist and icon of Black and Third World feminism, Beal is perhaps best known for her foundational essay “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” which was originally published as a pamphlet in 1969, and then included in Toni Cade’s groundbreaking anthology The Black Woman as well as Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood Is Powerful, both published in 1970 (Beal 1970a, 1970b). During the period in which she worked with SNCC and established TWWA, Beal worked at the National Council for Negro Women. She later moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and worked as a journalist and associate editor of The Black Scholar (Beal 2005, preface). Beal recounts that the politicized space of SNCC allowed Black women to begin to theorize their concerns as structural rather than individual (Beal 2005, 35). At the same time, she recounts, some male members of SNCC started to gravitate toward the Nation of Islam and started “talking abortion was genocide” (Beal 2005, 36). Having almost died herself because of an illegal abortion that she underwent at the age of seventeen and profoundly affected by other Black women who had likewise suffered, Beal pushed back, along with others, and in 1968, SNCC voted to create a Black Women’s Liberation Committee to investigate “the conditions under which black women function” (Beal 2005, 27, 37).

By 1970, a number of women who had no affiliation to SNCC had joined them, and they became an independent organization, changing their name to the Black Women’s Alliance. Beal recounts that they focused on reproductive rights, connecting abortion rights to sterilization abuse, which seriously affected Puerto Rican women (Beal 2005, 37). As such, their efforts around reproductive justice were not simply confined to abortion, unlike mainstream white feminist reproductive rights discourses; instead, they were actually one of the earliest feminist organizations to address sterilization abuse against Women of Color. In 1971, perhaps inspired by this focus, a group of Puerto Rican women approached them, asking to join, and they became the Third World Women’s Alliance.

In 1971, one of the New York TWWA members, Cheryl Perry (then Cheryl Johnson), moved to the Bay Area and started a chapter there (Burnham 2005, 19). In the early 1980s, the Bay Area chapter transformed into the Alliance against Women’s Oppression (AAWO), allowed white women to join, and focused on women’s reproductive rights, women’s health, and welfare (Burnham 2005, 24).1 AAWO dissolved in 1989, and member Linda Burnham, whom Johnson had recruited to TWWA, went on to found the Women of Color Resource Center in 1990 (Burnham 2005, 30). The archival record for the New York and Bay Area chapters is uneven, with documentary evidence from the New York chapter consisting mainly of issues of its periodical, Triple Jeopardy. More of the Bay Area chapter’s organizational records survived because they were archived at the Women of Color Resource Center until it closed in 2011; the records were then donated to the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College.

As Judy Wu observes in her essay in this volume, the role of Asian and Asian American women in Women of Color feminist politics has been underexamined in the scholarship. We see this tendency in the small but significant literature on TWWA, which has mainly been situated as a Black feminist organization. Historian Stephen Ward rightly points out the important ways in which TWWA originated as a Black Power organization (Ward 2006). Emerging out of SNCC, which by the late 1960s had dropped the Nonviolent part of its name in favor of National, TWWA’s stated concerns overlapped with those of SNCC, including a critique of state violence, both domestically and internationally, a commitment to self-determination, and a willingness to entertain militant imagery and principles, if not as actual tactics. For example, the first issue begins with a discussion of watershed events for Black radical movements: the violent suppression of the Attica prison riot in September of 1971 and the murder of Black Panther political prisoner George Jackson two weeks prior to the Attica prison riot (“Now Attica!!” 1971, 2; “Murder at San Quentin” 1971, 3). While this is certainly true, TWWA demonstrates the capaciousness of Black feminist organizations; they could be both Black feminist and Third World feminist organizations at the same time, because of their radical re-envisioning of Blackness. Advancing the internationalist aspect of Black Power movements, TWWA connected US state violence against domestic populations with imperialist violence all over the world. Further, the organization offered a distinctly Third World feminist analysis, highlighting both the gendered nature of imperialistic ventures and Third World women’s importance to anticolonial struggles.

While the small numbers of Asian American women in the era before the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act meant that Asian representation in the organization was limited, Asian and Asian American women were integral to the organization. In the pages of Triple Jeopardy, the New York chapter of TWWA imagined itself as part of a worldwide struggle against imperialism in which Asian anticolonial struggles played a significant role. The Bay Area chapter engaged in a number of activist projects in Asian American communities, including working with United Farm Workers (UFW) and Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP) to help build a facility for retired farmworkers, and participating in an antiwar demonstration organized by the Union of Vietnamese in the United States on Ho Chi Minh’s birthday, among many other efforts.2

Triple Jeopardy’s overall internationalist focus was impressively wide-ranging and comprehensive. During its four-year run, the journal featured stories about women’s revolutionary struggles in Puerto Rico, Vietnam, China, North Korea, the Sudan, Ecuador, Mexico, Palestine, Chile, Oman, and many others. According to Beal, connecting US imperialism and militarism abroad with racialized and gendered exploitation and violence domestically was a priority for TWWA; she credits that position to SNCC and the civil rights movement more broadly: “So the very fact that SNCC was breaking through on the international issue, was, I think, a very important contribution that SNCC made to the people’s movement as a whole.… So I think that was one of the big contributions that the civil rights movement of the ’60s eventually made to our understanding of the link between international affairs and domestic affairs” (Beal 2005, 40).

The idealization of Third World women engaged in anticolonial struggles is present everywhere in Triple Jeopardy. The anticolonial struggles of women in Asia—in particular, Vietnam, China, and to a lesser extent, North Korea—were prominently featured in issues of Triple Jeopardy and were an important part of TWWA’s transnational and cross-racial solidarity politics. Indeed, the cover to the inaugural issue of Triple Jeopardy featured an illustration of three women of color, featuring front and center a woman in a qipao-style dress holding a rifle, an image that could reference both Chinese and Vietnamese revolutionary soldiers. Throughout its run, Triple Jeopardy frequently depicted Chinese and Vietnamese women, in particular emphasizing their importance to socialist anticolonial revolutions.

The image of revolutionary Asian women often served as inspiration for US-based feminists, a part of a larger turn toward Asia as an alternative model for radicalism. As Robin Kelley and Betsy Esch observe in their essay “Black Like Mao,” for the radical Black movements of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, the idea of a socialist republic established not by European proletariats, as Marx had declared, but by racialized, formerly colonized, agrarian peoples was immensely inspiring (Kelley and Esch 1999). They write that W. E. B. DuBois’s 1959 trip to China convinced him that “China will lead the underdeveloped nations toward socialism,” a view shared by many Black radical organizations and individuals (Kelley and Esch 1999, 8). In Radicals on the Road, Judy Wu documents a tendency toward what she calls “radical orientalism” among US-based leftist activists (Wu 2013). The perceptions of US leftists like Bob Browne, Eldridge Cleaver, Elaine Brown, Alex Hing, and Pat Sumi, among others, “were refracted through idealized projections of the decolonizing Third World,” in particular their romanticization of Vietnamese, Chinese, and North Korean societies that they met in their travels to Asia (Wu 2013, 4). Wu notes that this form of orientalism subverted the hierarchies manifested in classical orientalism as defined by Edward Said, in that US leftists “idealized the East and denigrated the West.” Yet, in so doing, radical orientalism maintained the notion of a separation between the two (Wu 2013, 5).

US- and Canada-based feminists were not impervious to radical orientalism. Wu describes the historic Indochinese Women’s Conferences (IWC) organized by North American feminists, which brought a delegation of women from North and South Vietnam and Laos to Vancouver and Toronto in April of 1971. While the differing political orientations of the main North American feminist groups organizing the conference led to disagreements and the formation of factions, Wu finds that the North American women were unanimous in their admiration for the Southeast Asian women delegates: “The political leadership of Indochinese women inspired an array of American sisters to combat American militarism and imperialism.… The idealization of Southeast Asian women, which was expressed broadly among the North American attendees and not just among Asian Americans, reflects a radical orientalist sensibility” (Wu 2013, 258–59). As Wu notes in her piece in this volume, “The political heroism of women in socialist Asia played a central role in creating Third World feminism in the United States.”

The case of TWWA supports Wu’s contention. Indeed, TWWA was one of two Third World organizations that the mainly white organizers invited to help organize the IWC. The TWWA did not send representatives to the major planning meeting held in Budapest but did eventually participate in the IWC by organizing with other Third World women (Wu 2013, 224–25). While TWWA’s participation in the conference was limited, we can see many of the hallmarks of radical orientalism i...