AHA Session 61
Saturday, January 4, 2025: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
Murray Hill East (New York Hilton, Second Floor)
Chair:
Samantha de Vera, University of California, Irvine
Papers:
Comment:
Wendy Matsumura, University of California, San Diego
Session Abstract
The presenters in this panel will explore women’s activism and struggles during upheavals and wars, in which the US was directly and indirectly involved. Transnational in scope, this panel looks at how women navigated the spatial politics of empire and repressive regimes. How have different groups of women asserted themselves into the forefront of social, political, and economic transformations? How do historians investigate their stories, which are often documented in piecemeal or even repressed? As panelists explore how women deployed different ideas about gender to make liberatory demands and to shape historical memory, this panel highlights the implications of their labors in today’s social movements. Of special focus among the presentations is the historical subjects’ feminist critiques, articulations and understandings of their positionalities within politically and socially fraught environments. Invariably yet in diverse ways, these women perceived their place within a global struggle against US imperialism and capitalist exploitation, which constantly threatened and negated women’s rights and subsequently delimited the ideological bounds of their existence. Spanning throughout the twentieth century and across the globe, this panel will include discussions about widows of the Philippine-American War; women survivors of the Jeju Island Uprising in Korea; African American internationalists and feminists; and El Salvador’s COMADRES, a group of mothers and family members of incarcerated or missing political prisoners from the Civil War. This panel will demonstrate different approaches to history as presenters analyze their topics through the lens of gender, sexuality, queer, and ethnic studies. Presenters will also highlight how women openly and covertly resisted the impacts of imperial ventures and state projects on their intimate worlds and lived experiences, thereby embodying the argument that the personal is political.
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