Setouchi Jakuchō (1922 - 2021) and Ishimure Michiko (1927 - 2018) use the Buddhist concept of nondualism in their novels and Noh plays as a key to a feminist and ecological approach to living. Using Karen Barad’s diffractive reading method, I read Ishimure through Jakuchō to engage with the Buddhist elements of Ishimure’s environmental activism. I similarly read Jakuchō through Ishimure to better understand her use of the environment in her feminist writings. I argue that in the works of both authors, rather than a focus on phenomena as something Other than human, phenomena are understood to be as part of the same in-group and able to achieve the same goal, which is to reach enlightenment and thus break out of the Buddhist karmic cycle of suffering. By treating nonhuman phenomena, including the environment, as spiritually equal to the human, the ego over the separated Other is diminished. Through arguing for a shared sentience among all things, Ishimure and Jakuchō encourage a reconceptualization of the relationship between the human and the non-human, while still maintaining the individual agency of the body.

This project asks how a feminist subject can exist in the world without either being annihiliated by its givens, or persisting in an obsessively reactive state. What would norms look like in a set of relations not build on singularity as exclusion? I posit that philosopher Luce Irigaray's concept of sexual difference joined to the concepts of speculation and the novum can provide a way out of this relentless binarization. My five chapters are experimental sites designed to explore and adapt this speculative model, using the relations of body to body, especially in mediatory and affiliated relations, to infer something about this difference. Each chapter is a speculative engagement with that text's struggle for control of feminine embodiment as it relates to linguistic access and agential futurity.

The chapters of my dissertation converge upon the woman's bodily mediation of communication and conveyance of information, as the ground of becoming from which difference can but does not always emerge. Reading these texts through the lenses of feminist theory provides a clear rendition of the stakes for women as the focal points for these technocentric exchanges. The concept of the feminine body as a medium appears in theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari, specifically in the becoming-girl as the becoming through which all others must pass. Feminist theorists and philosophers engage intensely with the becoming-girl, seeking other readings of and alternatives to the vanishing of the woman's body out of agential action into mediation. I analyze the face on the screen, the unseen translator, and the laboring fan in terms of that vanishing, even as the labor of these women remains visible but intangible. Luce Irigaray discusses this vanishing as symptomatic of a larger suppression and invisibility of women's bodies from within language and social discourse. Through centering on a theory of speculation as opening a way toward newness, I develop readings of my transnational texts to posit ways to avoid hysterical reactivity in favor of genuinely innovative feminist response.

My dissertation, “Entangled Ecologies of the Everyday: Gender, Labor, and Nature in Rural Proletarian Literature of Korea and Japan,” traces the co-evolution of laboring bodies, both human and more-than-human, with the land in mining-themed proletarian literature from the early twentieth century. The texts I analyze map the corporeal and ecological effects of mineral extraction on rural regions of the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese archipelago to produce what I call “rural proletarian literature.” I argue that these works engage in ecological storytelling because they situate the interrelations among laboring bodies, gender, and the material environment of mining zones at the heart of the story. These interrelations, which I refer to as “ecological entanglements,” generate a kinetic energy that propels the narrative forward; they reveal sites rife with both peril and promise for the sustainability of local ecosystems. Rural proletarian literature critiques colonial-capitalism as a system that extracts minerals at a rate that violently disrupts the rhythms of nutrient cycles. In order to highlight the lived effects of extractive labor, these texts immerse themselves in the sonic territory of the everyday and engage in storytelling as care work; these narratives delineate creative collaborations that emerge in interstitial spaces, resisting the (re)production of destructive cycles of accumulation. This project consists of four chapters, each examining stories about a mineral utilized in the material axis of empire: (NPK): Soil and Sericulture, (Cu): Copper Soundscapes, (Au): Speculative Rumors of Gold, and (N): Atmospheric Mining and the Soil Crisis. Each chapter takes a trans-local perspective, placing stories about particular geographical sites in conversation with one another. Rural proletarian stories capture how laboring bodies co-produce the environment around rich ore veins and, consequently, are productive for reconsidering our contemporaneous understanding of primitive accumulation in an age of perpetual ecological crises.