Gendering Resistance and Remaking Place: Artin Japanese American Concentration Camps

Abstract

Paying close attention to how sexual difference structured craft activities and how this process shaped identities, “Gendering Resistance and Remaking Place” attempts to join the aesthetic with the political by suggesting that art created in Japanese American concentration camps allowed internees to re-territorialize the camps and become anchored in hostile and unfamiliar settings. Fighting against being de-territorialized from places, internees now employed portable spaces such as crafts to engage in a re-territorialization process. For internees incarcerated in complex places of oppression, art evolved into a space of resistance.