“Extreme pressure”: gendered negotiations of violence and vulnerability in Japanese antiracism movements

ABSTRACT

Situated in the emergence of hate speech and anti-racism counter protest in Japan, this article poses two questions: why do activists enact exclusions while attempting to fight against social inequality, and how do interpretations of gender shape activists’ understandings of anti-racism? This article explores three findings: activists conceptualize the risk of being targets of hate speech and abuse as both gendered and racialized; anti-racist activists interpret anti-racism as a practice of redirecting vulnerabilities – a practice that is, itself, gendered; and anti-racist activist communities struggle with ambivalence around masculinity and other “gender problems.” Although gender functions as a key lens through which anti-racism is conceptualized, movements devoid of an intersectional feminist analysis encounter exacerbated difficulties in resolving internal problems such as sexual harassment. This article focuses on the theme of vulnerability, which is enmeshed with the vocabulary of gender. Through analyzing vulnerability, this article offers an ethnographic account to explain why the reproduction of inequalities persist, even within social justice movements that aim to promote equality.

KEYWORDS:

• Japan
• social movements
• anti-racism
• hate speech
• gender

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard University for providing resources and support in the writing of this article. Thank you also to Sharmila Rudrappa, Ben Carrington, and Daniel Mauro for feedback on earlier versions of this piece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Vivian Shaw is a College Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Connell and Messerschmidt 2005.

2 Collins 2017; Gemignani and Hernandez-Albujar 2015.

3 Levy, Latendresse, and Carle-Marsan 2017; Einwohner, Hollander, and Olson 2000; Ferree and Roth 1998; Taylor 1999.

4 Verloo 2013; Levy, Latendresse, and Carle-Marsan 2017; Reger 2002; Taylor 1999; Ferree and Roth 1998.

5 Taylor 1999, 5.

6 Crenshaw 1989.

7 Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013; Ferree 2009.

8 Kawai 2015; see also Yamashiro 2013.

9 Shigematsu 2012.

10 Crenshaw 1989; Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013; Chun, Lipsitz, and Shin 2013.

11 Chun, Lipsitz, and Shin 2013, 918.

12 McAdam 1986; Loveman 1998; Bruni 2013.

13 Brown et al. 2017.

14 Messner 2007, 475.

15 Wetherell and Edley 1999; Young 2003.

16 Hollander 2001, 84.

17 Herd and Meyer 2002; Desai 2016; Murphy 2009.

18 Rudrappa 2004.

19 I do not have the space in this article to examine the racial formation of Zainichi Koreans and other minorities living in Japan. In lieu of this discussion, I adopt the vocabulary of these activists and use the terms “racism” and “anti-racism” to discuss systemic discrimination in Japan against groups constructed as “non-Japanese.”

20 This number is an estimate by Nozawa, an activist and Japanese language instructor.

21 Messner 2007.

22 Phillips 2014; Shigematsu 2012.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Mitsubishi Caterpillar Forklift America Inc., the Kobe College Corporation Japan Education Exchange, and The Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.