Workshop: Gender, Sexuality, Okinawa

This workshop will focus on what approaches to gender and sexuality can tell us about Okinawa and what approaches to Okinawa can tell us about gender and sexuality. As a colonized and occupied space, Okinawa existed and continues to exist at a nodal point between the Japanese and American Empires. The specifically gendered and sexualized relations between Okinawans, Japanese, and Americans have profound impacts on everyday life and political possibilities for people living in Okinawa. As modes of connection, identification, and expression, gender and sexuality have a lot to tell us about the ways that the people in these spaces interact and what links can be made between Okinawa and other spaces.

This workshop will bring together scholars working on Okinawa from multiple disciplines, including literature, anthropology, history, and drawing from transnational, postcolonial, indigenous, feminist and queer approaches. Presenters will talk about their own work, engage with one another's work through questions and discussion, and discuss the future of scholarship on Okinawa.

This workshop is open to all, and participation from the wider community, both inside and outside academia, is very welcome.

Potential subjects of discussion include sexual violence, women's participation in protest movements, the intimate and the everyday, interracial relationships and children, queer futurity and protest, militarization, bodies and pleasures, and indigenous practices.