Across these texts, psychic instability, spectral persistence, and bodily malfunction do not simply index marginalization; rather, they reorganize the conditions under which agency, relationality, and knowledge can be critically articulated. By foregrounding dream time, recursive haunting, and glitch as distinct yet interconnected temporal logics, the panel situates East Asian literature within broader debates in disability studies, feminist hauntology, indigenous studies, and posthuman ethics. In doing so, it reframes emancipation not as teleological liberation but as a process that emerges through temporal disruption, contradiction, and relational negotiation.
Building on and extending key scholarly conversations—including Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening, Skott and Nyhlén’s feminist hauntological framework in “Speaking with Spectres,” and Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto”—the panel argues that emancipatory potential does not arise from the seamless integration of theoretical paradigms but from their productive friction. Rather than synthesizing indigenous epistemologies, feminist hauntology, and posthuman theory into a unified model, the session foregrounds the tensions, limits, and cultural specificities that emerge when these frameworks intersect. The panel thus shifts feminist inquiry from coherence to contradiction, from resolution to relationality, and from progressive narratives of liberation to ongoing processes of negotiation across difference.
The panel’s transregional design is central to this intervention. By placing Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese texts in dialogue, it traces how madness, spectrality, and nonnormative embodiment circulate across distinct historical and cultural contexts while resisting homogenization. Moving beyond comparative models based on equivalence, the session emphasizes how localized epistemologies—such as Japanese indigenous oral traditions, Korean shamanistic cosmologies, and Taiwanese speculative reworkings of myth—reconfigure and challenge global theoretical frameworks. The session is organized around a clear conceptual progression: its three papers move across temporal registers of past, present, and future, demonstrating how unruly temporalities operate as a method for rethinking emancipation across different historical horizons.
The first paper examines the work of Tsushima Yūko, focusing on her engagement with indigeneity, disability, and “dream time.” Reading Golden Dream Song (2010) alongside Favored Child (1978), it situates Tsushima’s writing within and against indigenous epistemologies while engaging Robinson’s critique of “hungry listening.” The paper argues that Tsushima develops a feminist semiotics of temporality that resists “real time,” understood as capitalist, patriarchal, and individualizing.
The second paper turns to Bora Chung’s Midnight Timetable (2023), analyzing its deployment of horror and feminist hauntology. Building on Skott and Nyhlén’s framework while testing its limits, it argues that Chung’s stories enact a mode of “speaking with ghosts” rooted in Korean oral traditions and shamanistic cosmology (musok). By foregrounding unresolved violence and institutional mediation, the collection proposes an ethics of “tending,” in which haunting is negotiated through ongoing relational practices in the present.
The third paper examines Taiwanese speculative fiction by Liu Chih-yü and Lin Hsin-hui, focusing on posthuman embodiment and incompatible intimacy. Engaging Donna Haraway’s critique of goddess narratives, the paper shows how mythic immortality and artificial life expose the violence embedded in heteropatriarchal kinship and technologized domesticity. Bodily dysfunction—amenorrhea, mechanical failure, and dissolution—becomes a site of critique that unsettles gender hierarchies and reimagines feminist futurity.
The session will consist of three 15-minute papers, followed by a brief response and at least 15 minutes of open discussion to encourage audience engagement and collective dialogue. The panel brings together scholars at different career stages and institutional contexts, working across Japanese, Korean, and Sinophone literary traditions. This combination reflects a diversity of regional expertise, methodological approaches, and scholarly perspectives, enabling a nuanced and comparative exploration of feminist literary production in East Asia.
Together, these papers demonstrate how unruly temporalities function as intersecting modes of temporal disruption that challenge dominant epistemologies. The panel argues that East Asian women’s literature not only reflects feminist concerns but actively theorizes new modes of emancipatory thought, offering a model for reading across difference that foregrounds friction, relationality, and temporal complexity as conditions for imagining alternative futures.