Theses Doctoral

Exposed Life Runs Free: Gender, Labor, and Speculation in TEPCO’s Fukushima Nuclear Disaster

Fukui, Tomoki

This dissertation examines how logics of financial securitization and heteropatriarchy have shaped the production of surplus populations in reconstruction policies from the TEPCO Fukushima nuclear disaster in post-2011 Japan. Through multi-sited fieldwork with nuclear subcontractors, labor organizers, anti-irradiation mothers, and state-recognized nuclear evacuees, it elucidates nuclear reconstruction and remediation efforts more broadly as projects that resecure financial and affective investments in nuclear imperialism and colonialism through the disciplining of communities exposed to radioactive fallout.

Each chapter examines nuclear reconstruction through the partial construction of archetypes of positions within the geography of nuclear reconstruction. Through this method, an analysis emerges of how reconstruction policies and their justification through risk communication discourses of “harmful rumor” reproduce the conditions of the nuclear industry in Japan, disciplining the irradiated through a racialized domesticity imposed by American imperialism, the reproduction of an eco-eugenic heteropatriarchal organization of value, and through systems of labor brokerage inherited from Japanese colonial production.

The form of the dissertation and its inclusion of autoethnographic reflections argues for a feminist transgender mode of anthropology that centers the fragmentation of anthropology, the ethnographer’s body, and classical constructions of “the field.” Through the use of poetry, translation, archives from workplace struggle, work from local historians and economists, American Studies, Anthropology, and Japanese Studies, it aims to normalize a way of doing anthropology that is characterized by the splitting of the voice, disruption, and ethnographic refusal.

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More About This Work

Academic Units
Anthropology
Thesis Advisors
Ivy, Marilyn J.
Degree
Ph.D., Columbia University
Published Here
December 13, 2023