Nationalism and Gender: Revised Edition

What changes when women become recognized as members of the nation, and what might that recognition ask them to support? Chizuko Ueno’s Nationalism and Gender refuses to equate inclusion with emancipation. Its inquiry concerns women’s incorporation into the nation-state, the memory of war and the politics surrounding survivors of the Japanese military’s system of sexual slavery, conventionally called “comfort women.” The national community that promises protection can also assign gendered duties and mobilize women for its own projects.

The record selects the expanded Japanese edition published by Iwanami in 2012, ISBN 9784006002718. It expands and revisits the book first published in 1998. The distinction matters intellectually as well as bibliographically: in her new-edition afterword, Ueno revisits the concepts through which the original argument was organized. Revision becomes an occasion to interrogate feminist language itself.

Two ways of joining a national project

Ueno changes her earlier distinction between participation and separation to integration and separation. Her reason is that a gender-separate route can also be a form of participation. Women may enter institutions on terms modelled on men, or contribute through roles defined as specifically feminine. Both can incorporate women into the nation. Calling only the first participation would obscure what the second helps the state accomplish.

The distinction changes the question asked of apparent progress. Admission to a previously male activity may redistribute opportunity, but it does not determine whether the activity is just. Recognition of a feminine contribution may acknowledge labour while fixing the duty to perform it. These are different arrangements, and the book does not require treating every institutional gain as worthless. It asks what sort of political membership is being expanded, under whose objectives, and with what room for refusal.

Gendered belonging also affects how violence against women becomes publicly meaningful. A nation may remember injured women as evidence of an injury to itself, leaving their own claims subordinate to national honour. A feminist account must be able to oppose historical violence without handing survivors back to a competition over whose nation deserves vindication. This is a reading question raised by the book’s conjunction of nationalism and testimony, rather than a formula that settles all survivors’ positions.

Testimony, history and disagreement

In the 2012 afterword, Ueno explains why disputes over survivor testimony challenged the accumulated practices of women’s history and oral history. The issue is not simply adding another source to a history already owned by authorized historians. Listening to accounts shaped by memory and retelling also contests who can narrate the past and which experiences become historical questions. Variation in narration is not a warrant for dismissing the person who speaks.

That methodological challenge does not make factual inquiry optional. A critical reading has to distinguish acknowledging testimony, investigating historical evidence and making a present political claim. Reducing all three to either unquestioning belief or suspicious rejection reproduces the forced alternatives that the text tries to unsettle. It is possible to examine the conditions of speaking without treating survivors as symbols whose words are useful only when they serve a movement’s established argument.

The afterword’s discussion of the Asian Women’s Fund brings conflict inside feminist politics. Ueno describes disputes about responsibility, redress and possible action, and criticizes divisions that turned positions on the fund into tests of loyalty. These assessments belong to her intervention in a contested history; they are not a neutral verdict on every participant or survivor. The account asks what happens when the demand for justice also makes disagreement within a movement difficult to voice.

The temporal frame must remain clear. The expanded edition speaks from 2012 about struggles that had unfolded through preceding decades. Its descriptions of political actors and the possibilities available then cannot simply be repeated as a report on the present. Nor can one author’s account erase different priorities among survivors, countries, generations and organizations. The book’s value lies partly in keeping the tension between a claim to solidarity and the disagreements through which solidarity has to be made.

Read with Ueno’s Patriarchy and Capitalism, national membership can be related to the organization of family and labour. Misogyny offers another route into gender hierarchy, while Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures opens a wider comparative discussion. These connections help ask whether equality means obtaining an authorized place in an existing order or gaining the capacity to question the order’s purposes.