CJS Thursday Lecture Series | Care as Labor, Care as Ethics: Feminism and the Documentaries of Kamanaka Hitomi

This talk introduces two post-Fukushima films by Kamanaka Hitomi (1958-): "Living Through Internal Radiation" (2012), and "Little Voices of Fukushima" (2015). In interviews, Kamanaka explains that the aim of both was to increase radiation literacy by conveying the truth fully and accurately. Yet regardless of high radiation readings, she emphasizes that neither her films, nor the community discussion spaces she cultivates in trademark local screening events, will ever judge exposed people for evacuating or not. How do we resolve the contradiction? This talk expands the insights of a biopolitical reading with an eco-materialist focus on affective labor and nuclear carework.

Margherita Long teaches Japanese literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Irvine. Her talk today is from an in-process book manuscript titled "On Being Worthy of the Event: Thinking Care, Affect and Origin after Fukushima".