|
Agency and Complicity in a Politics of LocationJoe Parker. Feminists working within a politics of location may find agency through a consideration of the instability and heterogeneity of categories of difference. The politics of constructing this agency within the limits of categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship also lead to questions of always already present complicity. I explore the politics of agency and complicity as a white straight male of economic privilege as a means of interrupting essentialist and deterministic constructions and performances of difference. I take up these questions in examining the specific politics of constructing the Other of Japan within the context of the end of modernity and its mythology of progress and development, exploring what Gayatri Spivak terms the "prohibited margin" of the object of knowledge. Localized racializations and sexualizations, gender and class formations, citizenship and the role of the academy come under interrogation in shaping a politics of location that allows for both the force of history and a feminist Foucauldian politics of agency and power/knowledge.
Presenters Joe Parker
(United States)
Associate Professor International and Intercultural Studies Pitzer College Ph.D. East Asian Languages and Civilizations, 1989, Harvard University; thesis published with SUNY Press; publications in Journal of Japanese Studies & Turning Wheel; research interests in postcolonial studies, feminist theory, whiteness/masculinity, politics of the academy.
Keywords
Person as Subject
(30 min. Conference Paper,
English)
|