ICU Center for Gender Studies marks its first anniversary this April, having grown to a large membership with twenty faculty members and thirty students involved. Our center space has also grown to be functional place for students and members to get together. Our activities for the last year have been various. We organized many lectures and casual lunchtime meetings with splendid lecturers invited from inside and outside the university. Our first international workshop was held 25-27 November 2004 on Human Security and Gender in Asia, and saw lively and reciprocal discussions by researchers and activists from 10 Asian countries. Though, the definition of security may differ according to one's cultural and historical background, we agreed upon the mutual understanding that women's security have been overshadowed by the concept of national security and its emphasis on military power. We are glad that we have created an intimate network among gender researchers regardless of language and nationality. This experience will prove valuable for CGS. In June 2005, CGS is going to attend the women's conference, WW05, in Seoul, and to host a panel discussion on the possibility of cooperation between academia and activists.
01. From CGS: April 2005 Archives
The First International Workshop by CGS is approaching on 25th Nov. Thirteen researchers are to convene from nine regions and nations which are Bangladesh, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia Philippine and Thailand and discuss on the theme "Human Security and Gender in Asia" for three days. The proceedings of this workshop will be published on the web and booklet at the beginning of March.
ICU Division of International Studies : Tanaka, Kazuko
The CGS Book Club was started in April this year as an initiative of the newly-established CGS. It is a reading group run by students which is open to anyone interested in gender and sexuality. So far, our members have included professors, undergraduates, and graduate students from different disciplines. Our debates are always lively and the atmosphere is fun and laid back. This term we have 20 members and we're reading Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. Come and join us!
CGS Staff : Asakura, Chikaho
The Interdisciplinary Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies provides a model curriculum for students who wish to create an interdisciplinary major that focuses on issues of gender and sexuality. Human experience is inextricably linked with sex and gender. We enter the world with the biologically defined sex of our bodies and then over the course of our lives become gendered social actors. In doing so, we encounter and engage the wide array of socio-cultural ideas, values and practices that define gender, with its associated ideas regarding masculinity, femininity, and other gender identities. In recent decades scholarly research in multiple disciplines has explored the profound ways in gender and sexuality are constructed and defined in social life and also influence and inform social action. This research has demonstrated not only the centrality of sex, gender, and sexuality in social life, but also their critical linkages to such basic everyday issues as access to education, language use, and political participation, or such large scale theoretical issues as inequality, class, power, and nature versus nurture debates.
What does Okinawa remind you of? It may be the sea so blue and so clear, Shuri Castele, a characteristically Okinawan market, or even an old-fashioned family, warm and somehow nostalgic, which is now getting harder to find in contemporary society. So may it be U.S. military bases, or clubs nearby.
Ms. Claudia Derichs delivered a lecture titled "Comparative studies of female politicians in Asia" on May 12th at International Christian University.
Ms. Derichs is an assistant professor of University of Duisburg in Germany and is a member of a research project "Dynasties and Female Political Top Leaders in Asia". This project investigates twelve female political leaders from ten Asian countries and started in 2003 in Germany planed to be finished in 2005. In the lecture, Ms. Derichs explained the project.
On the seventh of May, 2004, CGS held a lecture titled "Marriage, Family and Gender" in commemoration of its opening. The lecturer was Fukushima Mizuho, who worked for the cases of sexual harassment and domestic violence as a lawyer. Now she vigorously wrestles with the passing of the registration that allows married women to have the choice of keeping their own maiden names. She also exert and effort for abolishing the discrimination for love children. "as my hobby, reasons for life and practical benefits, I will act out", being a member of the House of Councilors and the Social Democratic Party head, Ms. Fukushima clams.