Emi Koyama

Emi Koyama came to campus last week to lecture and visit classes.

I really felt a connection with her because we both have gone through racism in the south. So, I really enjoyed meeting her and spending time to discuss all the different activist work she has done, from her time at a domestic violence center to her very own intersex initiative. Over coffee, I found out that she was knowledgeable and very well read on even more subjects such as economics, internet and the media. Like every other conversation at the U of C, we critiqued Steven Levitt’s book Freakonomics.

Even though in class we didn’t have enough time to get into more contested issues raised on Chalk, I felt that I learned a lot about the history of transracial adoption and also intersex issues in the US. Emi very aptly stressed that intersex is a lived experience. In that sense, more than anything else we got back to the issue of the emotional labor of self-identity that was raised earlier in the quarter by Tari Ito.

Here is Emi’s blog, which is very interesting: http://www.eminism.org

Happy Mother’s Day – don’t forget to call Mom

The boyfriend just alerted me to the Mother’s Day Proclamation, written by Julia Ward Howe in 1870. Note that the two first lines are incredibly similar to the first two lines of the Internationale (“Arise, the damned of the earth/Arise, prisoners of hunger”). It was written in 1870; and its call for peace comes directly from the bloody and violent experience of the Civil War. It is astonishing that Howe, an American woman writing in 1870 after the Civil War, could anticipate and share a common position with a Japanese woman (our recent visitor, Nakajima-san!), writing in 2007 in the context of the deployment of the SDF to Iraq. Howe’s call for an international council of women to deal with the question of peace seems directly to echo Nakajima’s own actions with the 15-woman appeal to the Japanese justice system over sending troops to Iraq.
Mother’s Day Proclamation (1870)

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:
“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.