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Volume 11, Issue 1 (2026)Read More

Featured Content

Journal Article
1 February 2025

A Reconstruction of Gender: Implications of Social Construct and Gender Structure Theories

Bethany Rozario Steinhagen
The relationship between gender and social construction has long been discussed in feminist and gender studies scholarship. However, the current discussion on gender has run up against a blockage of misapplication of social construct theory. To untangle this blockage, my analysis applies the philosophy of social construction as explained by Ian Hacking in his 1999 book The Social Construction of What? and the framework of gender as a social structure as put forth by feminist sociologist Barbara Risman since the early 2000s. I apply these frameworks to elucidate better the logical implications that follow from a social construct thesis about gender. I clarify what it means to make a social construct thesis about gender in terms of the non-inherentness of gender associations and explain what it might entail for future discussion in the field of Women’s and Gender Studies.
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Journal Article
1 June 2022

Testimony, Violence, and Silence: An Examination of Agamben and His Critics

Yagmur Uygarkizi
This paper investigates the difficulties faced by survivors of atrocities in testifying. I work on the case of female victims of domestic torture as reported by Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald. The starting point is Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz with his discussion on Primo Levi’s paradox and the testis/superstes/auctor distinction. I build on his nuances while arguing that he has not looked enough into power dynamics that render one speechless. “Unspeakable violence” refers simultaneously to incapacity and not being allowed to speak. Pain renders the victim speechless; perpetrators distort language and speak over survivors. Victims are often not allowed to speak at all. The inaudible also largely determines what can be said: potential listeners’ incomprehension and disbelief can make testimony impossible. Overall, internal psychological reasons and political structural reasons hinder the testimony of atrocity. I, therefore, investigate the figure of the superstes or survivor who is in limbo between selves, languages, worlds, and time zones.
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Current Articles

Journal Article1 January 2026

Hosts, scouts, and female indentured sexual servitude in contemporary Japan

Caroline Norma, Seiya Morita
This article sweeps away glossy abstractions obscuring the indenturing of women in sexual servitude in Japan. These abstractions were generated by anthropologists writing in English in the first two decades of the 21st century who inverted the relationship between perpetrator and victim to suggest that female customers exploited hosts. To overturn this view and expose the ‘gendered reality that [i]s really going on’ in Japan, this article differently explains from a feminist perspective how present-day host and scout businesses indenture Japanese women in sexual servitude. This role is one of both procuring victims as well as keeping young women trapped in prostitution through debt. It suggests Japan’s sex industry relies on these actors to secure domestically trafficked victims, different from counterparts in other wealthy countries who populate their brothels with overseas foreign trafficked women. Glossy abstractions obscuring these mechanics of Japan’s sex industry impede full comprehension of recent developments in which Japanese women are now sex-trafficked abroad, and foreign men travel to Japan as inbound sex tourists. The article contrasts ‘glossy abstractions that make [Japan] seem not male-dominated’ with the avalanche of Japanese- and English-language journalistic evidence emerging since the 1990s showing the sexual indenturing of women and girls.