This article begins by mapping an oral history project on World War II Japanese war brides in which the objective boundaries between the insider and outsider relationships of the interviewer and her subjects not only collapse but give way to a more self-reflexive and collaborative project between the interviewer and her own war bride mother. The final result is one which raises questions about the limits of objectivity in conducting feminist research that is situated close to one's own home as well as the relationship of women's silences to speech.
“Beauty behind Barbed Wire” offers a gendered lesson in wartime looking at the vast photographic archive documenting Japanese American Nisei women in the World War II internment camps. Building on the author’s previously published scholarship on internment representations, this chapter focuses exclusively on the representation of race, class, and gender in the camp photographs and newspaper coverage of young women interned at Manzanar War Relocation Center in California. This chapter reveals the myriad ways that young Japanese American women were consumed with performing patriotism and citizenship in ways that were inextricably linked to the wartime maintenance of heteronormative standards of femininity, beauty, and domesticity in service to the nation.
“Filling in the Blank Spot in an Incomplete War Bride Archive” concludes this book by looking at Japanese war brides. The chapter privileges the family album as a unique archive for family history, memory, and representation. Family photographs offer a unique way to reimagine the place of war brides in Japanese/American history. Creef uses her war bride mother’s photograph album in order to fill in this blank spot in American history where the lives of these immigrant women—as wives, mothers, citizens, and witnesses of war—have been archived in personal photograph collections even as they remain well out of public sight. In imagining new narratives for elusive histories, Creef makes clear that the family album is a repository for desires and longings as well as a conduit for affective and political investments.
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