Chelsea Szendi Schieder
I am a historian of contemporary Japan, focusing on social movements and gendered politics - turning toward understanding how these intersect with labor movements and ecological concerns in the energy sector (1950-1980). I earned my Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures and History at Columbia University in 2014. I write about protest, women, violence, and Japan for academic and general audiences.
I’m currently completing my first book, entitled “Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left” (under contract, Duke University Press). In it, I trace how shifting definitions of politics and violence associated with the postwar student movement (1957-1972) in Japan mapped onto changes in popular representations of the female student activist to illuminate how both male and female activists and observers understood radical politics negotiated activism in newly coeducational higher education institutions. I argue that the "female student," as a middle-class political subjectivity defined not only by ideologies of gender but also of age, at many critical moments defined the relationship of the Japanese New Left to the state and society, establishing what was politically possible for youth activism in the period.
My second book project will consider how shifts in energy policy in postwar Japan, from coal to oil in the 1960s-1970s influenced social movements. I want to trace how gendered dynamics in established labor movements and in "new" social movements (environmental, consumer) could make demands on industry (and how they could not) as the very structure of labor in the energy sector shifted. How did ideas of progress figure into these struggles, and how does the idea of a discrete national environment shape the outcomes of them?
My articles on women and activism have also appeared in Monthly Review, Dissent, and World Policy Journal.
In general, my research interests lie at the confluence of social movement history and gender studies, and include:
Social movements and violence; social movements and gender; modern education and theories of democratic access; women and radical politics; policing protest; environmental justice; ideas about progress.
I’m currently completing my first book, entitled “Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left” (under contract, Duke University Press). In it, I trace how shifting definitions of politics and violence associated with the postwar student movement (1957-1972) in Japan mapped onto changes in popular representations of the female student activist to illuminate how both male and female activists and observers understood radical politics negotiated activism in newly coeducational higher education institutions. I argue that the "female student," as a middle-class political subjectivity defined not only by ideologies of gender but also of age, at many critical moments defined the relationship of the Japanese New Left to the state and society, establishing what was politically possible for youth activism in the period.
My second book project will consider how shifts in energy policy in postwar Japan, from coal to oil in the 1960s-1970s influenced social movements. I want to trace how gendered dynamics in established labor movements and in "new" social movements (environmental, consumer) could make demands on industry (and how they could not) as the very structure of labor in the energy sector shifted. How did ideas of progress figure into these struggles, and how does the idea of a discrete national environment shape the outcomes of them?
My articles on women and activism have also appeared in Monthly Review, Dissent, and World Policy Journal.
In general, my research interests lie at the confluence of social movement history and gender studies, and include:
Social movements and violence; social movements and gender; modern education and theories of democratic access; women and radical politics; policing protest; environmental justice; ideas about progress.
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Papers by Chelsea Szendi Schieder
This chapter gives an overview of the history of gender and activism through a roughly chronological account of major social movements in modern Japanese history organized by the following themes: gendered understandings of political and activist subjects, tensions between radical leftist and and liberal women activists, the gendered implication of mothers’ activism, gendered marginalization and exclusion among activists, and transnational issues in women’s activism.
Teach311 is launching the Teach COVID-19 project to trace how this current pandemic is unfolding around the world. These installments are my first "Notes from Tokyo":
Part 1 (March 24):
https://www.teach311.org/2020/03/30/teach-covid-19-notes-from-tokyo-1/
Part 2 (March 24):
https://www.teach311.org/2020/03/30/teach-covid-19-notes-from-tokyo-2/
Part 3 (March 25):
https://www.teach311.org/2020/03/30/teach-covid-19-notes-from-tokyo-3/
We invited Andrea Peto (Central European University) to give a keynote to frame our discussions. The result was an event in which many scholars met each other in person for the first time, and discussants shared stories about the longer history of gender studies as a discipline and a political project in Japan, discussions about its current issues and internal conflicts, and also reflections on the increasingly precarious nature of university work in Japan and elsewhere that presents another threat to gender studies as an intellectual endeavor.
Our discussants included Adachi Mariko (professor emeritus, Ochanomizu Women’s University), Sonja Dale (independent scholar), Okano Yayo (professor, Doshisha University), Shimizu Akiko (professor, University of Tokyo), Grace En-Yi Ting (Assistant Professor, The University of Hong Kong), James Welker (professor, Kanagawa University) and myself (associate professor, Aoyama Gakuin University). Prof. Ikoma served as chair.
Here I discuss how the Matsuo Keiko archive developed in a postwar culture that mistrusted centralized authority and emphasized local knowledge and histories. I consider how the personal archive of Matsuo Keiko's materials developed in this context by considering how the wider culture influenced Matsuo to save her materials and archivists to create the institutional infrastructure to preserve her materials. For this to take place, both Matsuo and archivists needed to understand Matsuo as a historical actor. I argue that Matsuo Keiko's experiences of a wartime to postwar transition persuaded her to think of herself as a historical actor, and encouraged her to participate in activism and to preserve her version of events. The development of a formal archive of Matsuo Keiko's collected documents and objects also illuminates many of the networks between labor and environmental activism in postwar Japan, and also how smaller regional libraries were thinking about their role in preserving local histories.
California (UC) exchange students studying abroad in Tokyo
in 1969. This minor event illustrates the overlapping
motivations and interpretations of student protests in both
the US and Japan in the late 1960s. I examine how participants
in this specific and limited case negotiated their activism
within a larger geopolitical context of US power in Japan to
draw attention to the fine-grained textures that can constitute
transnational alliances and test the limits of more abstract
concepts, such as rights of speech and expression.
Full text here:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/WTnnjqEuZ7YS5nIn4Jdi/full
Access full text here:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/k2tzzQVfWjGcDKZ324IW/full
This chapter gives an overview of the history of gender and activism through a roughly chronological account of major social movements in modern Japanese history organized by the following themes: gendered understandings of political and activist subjects, tensions between radical leftist and and liberal women activists, the gendered implication of mothers’ activism, gendered marginalization and exclusion among activists, and transnational issues in women’s activism.
Teach311 is launching the Teach COVID-19 project to trace how this current pandemic is unfolding around the world. These installments are my first "Notes from Tokyo":
Part 1 (March 24):
https://www.teach311.org/2020/03/30/teach-covid-19-notes-from-tokyo-1/
Part 2 (March 24):
https://www.teach311.org/2020/03/30/teach-covid-19-notes-from-tokyo-2/
Part 3 (March 25):
https://www.teach311.org/2020/03/30/teach-covid-19-notes-from-tokyo-3/
We invited Andrea Peto (Central European University) to give a keynote to frame our discussions. The result was an event in which many scholars met each other in person for the first time, and discussants shared stories about the longer history of gender studies as a discipline and a political project in Japan, discussions about its current issues and internal conflicts, and also reflections on the increasingly precarious nature of university work in Japan and elsewhere that presents another threat to gender studies as an intellectual endeavor.
Our discussants included Adachi Mariko (professor emeritus, Ochanomizu Women’s University), Sonja Dale (independent scholar), Okano Yayo (professor, Doshisha University), Shimizu Akiko (professor, University of Tokyo), Grace En-Yi Ting (Assistant Professor, The University of Hong Kong), James Welker (professor, Kanagawa University) and myself (associate professor, Aoyama Gakuin University). Prof. Ikoma served as chair.
Here I discuss how the Matsuo Keiko archive developed in a postwar culture that mistrusted centralized authority and emphasized local knowledge and histories. I consider how the personal archive of Matsuo Keiko's materials developed in this context by considering how the wider culture influenced Matsuo to save her materials and archivists to create the institutional infrastructure to preserve her materials. For this to take place, both Matsuo and archivists needed to understand Matsuo as a historical actor. I argue that Matsuo Keiko's experiences of a wartime to postwar transition persuaded her to think of herself as a historical actor, and encouraged her to participate in activism and to preserve her version of events. The development of a formal archive of Matsuo Keiko's collected documents and objects also illuminates many of the networks between labor and environmental activism in postwar Japan, and also how smaller regional libraries were thinking about their role in preserving local histories.
California (UC) exchange students studying abroad in Tokyo
in 1969. This minor event illustrates the overlapping
motivations and interpretations of student protests in both
the US and Japan in the late 1960s. I examine how participants
in this specific and limited case negotiated their activism
within a larger geopolitical context of US power in Japan to
draw attention to the fine-grained textures that can constitute
transnational alliances and test the limits of more abstract
concepts, such as rights of speech and expression.
Full text here:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/WTnnjqEuZ7YS5nIn4Jdi/full
Access full text here:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/k2tzzQVfWjGcDKZ324IW/full
キーワード：
process (方法)
General Assembly (GA) (総合住民討論集会)
consensus (合意)
facilitator (進行係)
autonomy (自律性)
empower (権限／権力を与える)
prefigurative politics (予示的政治)
direct democracy (直接民主主義)
mutual aid (相互扶助)
horizontality (水平性)
Here I considered that latter source of violence: the national police, and the relationship between policing and protest -- specifically that undertaken by radical student activists -- in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which was a particularly dynamic moment for urban street protest, and the source of a new kind of policing that sought control not only of the streets, but also of that elusive category: public opinion.
I examine the terms of these debates on the social role of female students, through which public intellectuals struggled to define the ideal Japanese democratic subject that was supposed to supersede the imperial subject. My title echoes a well-circulated argument that interpreted young women's very presence in universities as an act of violence against Japanese society; I argue that in the high-growth era in Japan, gender difference became important in social and political discourse at the precise moment that other differences with potential for conflict – i.e. class and ethnicity – were elided in favor of a myth of a classless, homogenous nation of Japanese citizen-subjects. “Women” became the key particularity, and young women the symbol for a host of anxieties about massification and democratization in higher education, even as new economic imperatives drove its expansion. This history illuminates how idealistic legislation that guarantees equality between the sexes meets resistance in social institutions, and explores how ideologies of age intersect with ideologies of gender. This study also offers a background for the mixed social reception of female student activism in the campus based protest movement of the late 1960s in Japan.
To tease out this transition in popular activism in the Japanese case, I focus on the issue of gender in the student movement of the late 1960s in Japan. As tertiary education became a mass phenomenon, more women were active in student life at even the most prestigious and traditionally male institutions. Female students also emerged in several critical roles as activists, although their uneasy relationship with their male colleagues and society in general fed into the more narrowly focused women’s lib movement of the 1970s. Throughout the rise and fall of the student movement, the mass media pounced upon female student activists, portraying them by turns as martyrs, manipulators, and femme fatales. As the movement disintegrated, the faces of extremist violence in postwar Japan were often female, another trend with global echoes.
In this presentation, I will introduce materials that show the importance of female participation in the Japanese student movement. This is not to imply that the student movement began to formulate a real response to the issues confronting women in Japanese society. Nor to suggest that these elite students had anything more than an inchoate analysis of how the modes of production and reproduction in their society really operated. The student barricades were no utopia; they were not insulated from the sexism and other prejudices of Japanese society. But they also allowed many young men and women a space in which they could imagine alternative forms of existing and relating, both to each other and to the world. The barricades also offered those outside the movement a space upon which to project social hopes and fears. In many ways, the barricades represented a last try for utopia, the fleeting successes and shocking failures of which haunt contemporary Japan.
This image of the “femme fatale” was a common representation of female leaders in the Japanese New Left by the early 1970s. Whereas the first student to die in the mass demonstrations of 1960s – a female student at elite Tokyo University – was considered a martyr, women leaders in the campus occupations of the late 1960s were dubbed “Gewalt Rosas” (violent Rosa Luxemburg types). This foreclosure of a more generous interpretation of political women accompanied the self-destruction of both the Japanese left and the women’s liberation movement in Japan. Also, as late capital emerged the sole victor of the political turmoil of the 1960s, the literal landscape of the sublime – the mountainous retreats key to guerrilla tactics – disappeared under the homogenizing internal colonization of mature capitalism. The result is a lingering unease and search for authenticity that still resonates in Japanese society at large, as evidenced in even mainstream and anti-radical films on the United Red Army.
In considering how gender and violence figured in the formation and dissolution of the New Left in Japan, I trace three phases of the postwar Japanese student movement. The first (1957–1960) was one of idealism, witnessing the emergence of the New Left in 1957 and, within only a few years, some of its largest public demonstrations. Young women became new political actors in the postwar period, their enfranchisement commonly represented as a break from and a bulwark against "male" wartime violence. The participation of females in the student movement after its split from the Old Left of the Japan Communist Party in 1957 served to legitimize the anger of the New Left by appealing to the hegemonic ideal of young women's political purity. Chapter one introduces the postwar context in which female students represented, in both works of fiction and reportage, new ideals for citizen participation and agency. The 1960 death of activist Kanba Michiko at the frontline of a climactic protest against renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo) won an extraordinary amount of public sympathy for the student movement as a whole in the early 1960s. Kanba stepped into a narrative, forged in the mass media, of young women as victims of violence. However, when considered as an individual, Kanba is far more complicated and even aggressively radical. Chapter two traces the processes by which Kanba Michiko became an icon of New Left sacrifice and the fragility of postwar democracy. It introduces Kanba's own writings to underscore the ironic discrepancy between her public significance and her personal relationship to radical politics
. A phase of backlash (1960–1967) followed the explosive rise of Japan's New Left. During the early and mid-1960s, both leftists and conservatives engaged in a series of seemingly disparate debates about the political place of women, countering ideals of female purity and political utility. In the wake of the 1959–1960 mass demonstrations opposing Anpo and the death of Kanba Michiko, government policies focused on national economic growth sought to quiet the recent tempest of street activism. Chapter three introduces some key tabloid debates that suggested female presence in social institutions such as universities held the potential to "ruin the nation." The powerful influence of these frequently sarcastic but damaging debates, echoed in government policies re-linking young women to domestic labor, confirmed mass media's importance in interpreting the social role of the female student. Although the student movement imagined itself as immune to the logic of the state and the mass media, the practices of the late-1960s campus-based student movement, examined in chapter four, illustrate how larger societal assumptions about gender roles undergirded the gendered hierarchy of labor that emerged in the barricades. I frame these practices as a kind of backlash in light of the theoretical importance of the writings of Tokoro Mitsuko to the organizational ideals of the late-1960s student movement. Tokoro, a student activist of Kanba Michiko's generation, proposed to bring nonviolent and nurturing feminine values to the student movement as a whole. Although Tokoro's ideas of a non-hierarchical leftist organization influenced the student movement of the late 1960s, opening up a moment of potential liberation for female student activists from the strict gender codes solidifying in Japan's increasingly rationalized economy and society, the dichotomy of "violence" versus "nurturing" created a new hierarchy in the campus-based student movement of 1968–1969.
The final phase (1969–1972) of the student New Left was dominated by two imaginary rather than real female figures, and is best emblematized by the notion of “Gewalt." I use the German term for violence, Gewalt, because of its peculiar resonances within the student movement of the late 1960s. Japanese students employed a transliteration—gebaruto—to distinguish their "counter-violence" from the violence employed by the state. However, the mass media soon picked up on the term and reversed its polarities in order to disparage the students' actions. It was in this late-1960s moment that women, once considered particularly vulnerable to violence, became deeply associated with active incitement to violence. In the case of Japan's New Left , the imaginary embodiment of the rationalized liberal social order and the target of the radical student movement's anger was not "the Man," but "Mama." The conservative order that stepped in after the Anpo demonstrations to organize social life around national economic strength linked women with motherhood and the household, and knitted each household in turn to the Japanese nation. Chapter five explores how student activists' rejection of "Mama" led to an embrace of a particularly masculinist ideal of violence, aligning the student left in many ways with the logic of the far right. Chapter six explores how the mass media, on the other hand, coded female student activism in particular as both terrifying and titillating through its imaginary construction of the "Gewalt Rosa" (Violent Rosa). By 1970, public sympathy, which had sided with the student movement when its members seemed like victims of state violence, faded in the wake of increasingly violent poses and tactics on the part of the New Left. Demonstrating the shifting meaning of the politics of protest, by the end of the 1960s, few Japanese would have entertained the idea that female students were politically innocent, much less peaceful by nature.
Throughout these three phases, violence may have changed in form, but it provided a common means of pursuing political goals as well as evaluating their significance. The social meaning created by the relationship between female students and violence and disseminated through the mass media critically influenced public reception of student activism. When, in 1972, the mass media revealed a leftist group's bloody internal purge, it marked the definitive "death" of the New Left. The female leader of the group, Nagata Hiroko, stepped all too conveniently into existing media formulations of the "Gewalt Rosa", leading to a general disavowal of the student movement among feminists in the 1970s.
http://meijiu-behindthenews.blogspot.jp/
Book blurb:
Chelsea Szendi Schieder recounts the crucial stories of Japanese women's participation in these protest movements led by the New Left through the early 1970s. Women were involved in contentious politics to an unprecedented degree, but they and their concerns were frequently marginalized in the movement and the mass media, and the movement at large is often memorialized as male and masculine. Drawing on stories of individual women, Schieder outlines how the media and other activists portrayed these women as icons of vulnerability and victims of violence, making women central to discourses about legitimate forms of postwar political expression. Schieder disentangles the gendered patterns that obscured radical women's voices to construct a feminist genealogy of the Japanese New Left, demonstrating that student activism in 1960s Japan cannot be understood without considering the experiences and representations of these women.