LASA/EANLAS: Rethinking Trans-Pacific Ties: Asia and Latin America

Transcendence of Duality and Subsequent Insertion of Nikkei Women Into Current Feminist Discourse

• In Event: Portraits of Asian migrants in Latin America

Abstract

Adopting Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of a borderland, this work examines an ideological divide which dichotomizes two countries as unable to coexist in spite of Japanese immigrants and their descendants' physical presence in Brazil’s geography. Historically, Japanese-Brazilian (Nikkei) women have not only been considered to be non-Brazilian by an ideology promoted by Brazilian elites in the national identity project, but have also been seen as inferior in a patriarchal society. Nikkei women in Brazil have been excluded from national identity discourses, overly sexualized and fetishized in the media, and have consequentially been silenced in feminist discourse by the very stereotypes and ideologies that have been imposed upon them since the first arrival of Japanese Immigrants to Brazil. This is seen in the social spaces that Nikkei women occupy in the modern Brazilian context with intersecting forces of sexism, racism, and ethnocentrism. Thus, they must fight for space within a feminist discourse that reproduces coloniality in that it does not give agency to their voices. This work aims to explore the ways in which western hegemonic culture was imposed upon Nikkei women, and how this contributed to the oppression of the Nikkei woman in Brazilian feminist context. The transcendence of a duality between ‘Brazilian’ and ‘Japanese’, as well as a a space of possibility created by insertion into current feminist context in Brazil by utilizing the space between two identities in the form of feminist blogs and cultural production by Nikkei women is the focus of this work.

Author

• Jamie M Sauerbier, Tulane