Reconstructing Asian Women’s Studies through Tricontinentalism and the Red-Green-Purple Paradigm

Abstract

This paper proposes “tricontinentalism” and the “Red-Green-Purple” paradigm as part of the theoretical terrain of Asian Women’s Studies, while examining the problems of Asian Women’s Studies such as one-nation-centeredness, East-Asianism, Asian-centeredness and the confusion of postcolonial feminism with transnational feminism. Doing so will, first, require a reflection on Asia from a bottom-up perspective of the South, which gives more attention to the marginal Asian countries and their sub-regions. Then it is necessary to revive dialogue between the formerly colonized three continents of Asia, Africa, and Latin America within the context of “tricontinentalism.” Making visible diverse postcolonial locations will push us to place the complicated and multifaceted connections and interactions between the sub-regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America at the center of our analysis. This sub-regional tricontinentalism can be based in postcolonial feminism redeployed with the “Red-Green-Purple” paradigm. This will advance intersectional subjectivities constituted by the class-race-gender/sexuality axis toward an alliance of the labor-ecology-sexuality movement. Asian Women’s Studies, reconstructed through such theoretical frameworks, aims to highlight the oppositional agencies of gendered subalterns in Asia (linked with Africa and/or Latin America) to deflect and resist the cruel and unrelenting demands of global patriarchal capitalism.