Symposium: MeToo in Asia (Part 1)

Description

Organized by the Centre for the Study of Korea and co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology, the Asian Institute’s Global Taiwan Program, the Centre for South Asian Studies, the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies, University of Toronto, and WIND Toronto Korean Feminist Collective.  

PART 1  Introduction & Opening Remarks: 9:00am-9:05am  Panel 1: MeToo in East Asia: 9:05am-10:35am  Chang-Ling Huang: Why Asia’s Most Gender Equal Country Has No MeToo Movement?: The Case of Taiwan Hae Yeon Choo: From Madwomen to Whistleblowers: MeToo in South Korea as an Institutional Critique  Di Wang: #MiTu: The social and political costs of becoming an anti-sexual harassment activist in China  Chair: Jesook Song Discussant: Vanita Reddy  Panel 2: MeToo in South Asia: 10:50am-12:00pm  Chaitanya Lakkimsetti: Stripping Away at Respectability: #MeToo India and the Politics of Dignity  Ayesha Khurshid: Na Tuttiya Ve: Spiritual Activism and the #MeToo Movement in Pakistan   Chair: Mahua Sarkar Discussant: Brenda Cossman.

Paticipants’ Bios:  HAE YEON CHOO is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Decentering Citizenship: Gender, Labor, and Migrant Rights in South Korea (Stanford University Press, 2016). Her research on gender, intersectionality, citizenship, and urban sociology has appeared in Gender & Society, Sociological Theory, positions: asia critique, Urban Studies, and Feminist Formations. Her current book project examines social activism in contemporary South Korea as sites of emergent critical social theory and new political imagination. She has translated Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider and Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought into Korean.  

BRENDA COSSMAN is Professor of Law and Goodman-Schipper Chair at the University of Toronto. She was Director of U of T’s Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies from 2009-2018. Professor Cossman’s teaching and scholarly interests include family law, law and gender, and law and sexuality. Her book The New Sex Wars: Sexual Harm in the Age of #MeToo is published by NYU Press in 2021. Her publications include Sexual Citizens: The Legal and Cultural Regulation of Sex and Belonging (Stanford University Press, 2007), the co-authored Bad Attitudes on Trial: Pornography, Feminism and the Butler Decision (University of Toronto Press) and Censorship and the Arts (published by the Ontario Association of Art Galleries).   

CHANG-LING HUANG is a professor of political science at the National Taiwan University. Her research interests are quota politics and women’s political representation. She participates in Taiwan’s feminist movement and was once the president of the Awakening Foundation, the earliest established feminist organization in post-war Taiwan.   

AYESHA KHURSHID is an Associate Professor of Gender and Education at Florida State University. Her ethnographic research focuses on gender, culture, and education in Muslim communities, and examines how gendered subjectivities are produced and contested through education in these contexts. Her current research projects explore the lived experiences of women in a rural community of Pakistan and in a Mayan Muslim community in Chiapas, Mexico.   

CHAITANYA LAKKIMSETTI is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Texas A&M University with a faculty affiliation in Women’s and Gender Studies. She is the author of Legalizing Sex: Sexual Minorities, AIDS, and Citizenship in India (NYU Press, 2020). Her work at the intersections of sexuality, law, and social movements also appears in Feminist Formations, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Sexualities, positions: asia critique, and Qualitative Sociology. She is also the co-curator of the dossier “#MeToo and Transnational Gender Justice” for the journal Feminist Formations (2021). Her current work “Sex, Death, and the Law” explores the impact of carceral state agendas on discourses around rape and sexual violence in India.  

VANITA REDDY is associate professor of English at Texas A&M University with a faculty affiliation in women’s and gender studies. Her research examines practices of cultural identity, belonging, and political community within the South Asian American and the global South Asian diaspora. She has published widely on beauty and fashion cultures in diasporic communities, and is the author of Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture (Temple University Press, 2016). She is also the coeditor of a special issue of the journal The Feminist and Scholar Online, “Queer and Feminist Afro-Asian Formations” (2018), and has just completed co-editing (with Chaitanya Lakkimsetti) a dossier on the transnational Metoo movement for the journal Feminist Formations (Winter 2021). She is currently writing a book about comparative South Asian diasporas from a feminist and queer perspective, tentatively titled Global Intimacies.  

MAHUA SARKAR is a professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Before joining the faculty at the University of Toronto in 2021, she was Professor of Sociology, and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Binghamton University, New York. A historical sociologist by training, Professor Sarkar’s research and teaching is interdisciplinary and spans a range of topics including contemporary guest-work regimes with particular focus on Bangladeshi male migrants; gestational surrogacy as a new form of racialized and gendered labour; free and unfree/constrained work under global capitalism; religious nationalisms in South Asia; Muslim and Hindu identity formation and the gender question in late colonial Bengal; and epistemological debates underlying qualitative research methods. Her current writing project is an advanced monograph entitled Bidesh Kara (Going Abroad): Bangladeshi Contract Migrants and Contemporary Guest Work.  

JESOOK SONG is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on contemporary urban transformation and welfare issues, including homelessness, youth unemployment, single women’s housing, mental health in South Korea. She is author of South Koreans in the Debt Crisis: The Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society (Duke University Press, 2009) and Living on Your Own: Single Women, Rental Housing, and Post-Revolutionary Affect in Contemporary South Korea (SUNY Press, 2014), On the Margins of Urban South Korea: Core Location as Method and Praxis (University of Toronto Press 2019, co-edited with Laam Hae).   

DI WANG is a feminist researcher and advocate from China. She is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin−Madison, USA. Her ten years of experience as a women’s and LGBTQ rights advocate have informed her research, which has been published in Law & Social Inquiry, China Law and Society Review, Qualitative Inquiry, ChinaFile, lambda nordica, and elsewhere.