Karen L. Thornber is Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, as well as Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University. She is a cultural historian and scholar of Asian literature and media who works primarily in the fields of environmental humanities; medical and health humanities; gender justice, environmental justice, climate justice, and other forms of justice; and transculturation (e.g., translation studies, world literature, comparative literature).
Professor Thornber conducts research in more than a dozen Asian and European languages, modern and classical. She is the author of six scholarly books, 80 scholarly articles/chapters, several (co)edited volumes, and Japanese literature translations. Her 2024 book, Gender Justice and Contemporary Asian Literatures, was the focus of a roundtable at the Modern Language Association annual meeting earlier this month. Below she shares thoughts on her work, her commitment to social justice, and the power of storytelling with Fairbank Center Executive Director Dorinda Elliott.
Your book, Gender Justice and Contemporary Asian Literatures, is such a deeply human work, which examines literature about gender issues, from workplace inequity in Pakistan to the lives of sex workers in Cambodia, and exploitative social norms from Korea to Vietnam. What was your motivation in writing this book? What are the main themes?
Gender Justice illuminates how diverse writers from across East, South, and Southeast Asia and their diasporas in Asia and globally have engaged over the past 50 years with struggles for and denials of different types of gender justice amid pandemics of gender inequity and gender-based violence. The seven chapters explore narratives and stories on Confronting Tyrannies of Social Norms within and Beyond Families; Struggling for Equity in Male-Dominated Professions; Humanizing Migrant Reproductive Workers; Capitulating to and Fighting against Reproductive Violence; Prosecuting Cultures of Shame, Silence, Rape, and Murder; Perpetuating and Interrupting Cycles of Family Violence; Intersecting Responsibilities for Intimate-Partner Violence.
Gender inequity and gender-based violence are the world’s most persistent and pervasive pandemics. Instigated by intimate partners, family members, friends, neighbors, acquaintances, teachers, employers, colleagues, strangers, law enforcement, the military, governments, and societies more broadly, gender inequity and gender-based violence are structural, systemic, and endemic.
Gender inequity and gender-based violence are also intersectional: ethnic, racial, Indigenous, religious, sexual, gender, and other minorities are at greatest risk, as are individuals and communities already disadvantaged by their education; occupation; class or caste; migration, immigration, or refugee status (including climate and war refugees); age; ability or disability; mental or physical health; location (urban versus rural); or other factors.
I focus on women in the book, given that women are the largest group of people treated inequitably because of their gender. However, as I note in the introduction, per capita, queer individuals in Asia and its diasporas generally confront even greater inequity and violence than their cisgender and straight female counterparts. I therefore plan to analyze narratives that prioritize Asian and Asian diaspora LGBTQIA+ experiences of gender justice in a future volume.
“As long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in issues of justice, broadly conceived, and in bringing to the fore the insights literature and other arts from different parts of the world provide on our largest global challenges.“
In many communities, women are subjected to physical, sexual, psychological, social, economic, and other forms of harm from before birth until after death. The World Bank’s 2019 report Gender-Based Violence reveals that even before the responses to COVID-19 that intensified gender inequity and gender-based violence in many parts of the world, one in three women globally — more than 1 billion people — had experienced physical violence, sexual violence, or both because of their gender. Still greater numbers of women have been subjected to economic, emotional, mental, and other forms of bias, mistreatment, and abuse that constitute what Jessica Nordell terms “soul violence,” assaults on an individual’s choices, possibilities, and sense of self. These assaults have tremendous consequences to health and wellbeing, including pernicious stigmatization and social isolation, which make individuals even more vulnerable.
Women are obviously still subjugated in so many ways in Asia. At the same time, do you see progress? Are women standing up and pushing for more equity?
Yes! Women are increasingly speaking up, including via narratives, publishing literature, memoirs, films, documentaries, etc. based on their experiences and/or the experiences of those they know. A terrific example is Itō Shiori, from Japan. Itō is a journalist, documentary filmmaker, and feminist activist. In her memoir Black Box (2021 [2017], The Feminist Press at CUNY), she contextualizes her 2015 rape by esteemed journalist Yamaguchi Noriyuki and her tenacious pursuit of justice within Japan’s broader rape culture. Black Box Diaries (2024), her acclaimed documentary film, is grounded in the memoir Black Box but goes even further in revealing the multiple traumas to which she was subjected.
Although most women aren’t as public as Itō about the violence to which they’ve been subjected, many are taking considerable risk sharing their stories and pushing for change.
Though we certainly face tremendous gender challenges here in the US, too, we probably started fighting for our rights earlier than women in Asia. Do they look to the U.S. at all?
Certainly, as well as to western Europe. However, given some of the things happening in the U.S. today, particularly as concerns reproductive freedom, the U.S. and other parts of the world, who once seemed to be “ahead” in tackling gender challenges, are also seen as cautionary tales.
There’s also quite a bit of looking to one another – and solidarity among different parts of Asia.
Your work more often than not focuses on social justice, from climate change and sustainability to migration and race. Can you share a little about that? How and why are you drawn to these subjects?
As long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in issues of justice, broadly conceived, and in bringing to the fore the insights literature and other arts from different parts of the world provide on our largest global challenges. I come from a family of scientists (my parents are both Caltech physics Ph.D.’s, and my sister is a marine ecologist, the new Dean of the School for the Environment at UMass Boston). Given this background, combined with a passion for reading and learning about different cultures — both of which I’ve had since childhood — I’m eager to understand the world from multiple perspectives. It’s been said many times before, but I’ll say it again: Science and engineering alone cannot solve our climate crisis, much less health crises more broadly; gender justice will not be achieved only by gathering statistics, and so forth. Humanistic perspectives are vital in our quest to remediate the globe’s most pernicious problems.
You look at all these issues through literature. What role does literature play in social development? Does literature have a certain power that brings these issues to life beyond, say, the headlines in a newspaper?
Justice is often discussed in the abstract, or as a matter of law, political history, protest movements, enfranchisement, and similar phenomena. Yet at its core, justice involves individuals and their experiences — experiences most directly accessed through stories. As Jacqueline Rose contends, literature shares experiences of violence “in ways that defy both the discourse of politicians and the defenses of thought” and “takes us deep into parts of the world crying out unambiguously for justice.” In so doing, literature can create different worlds, those where survivors and victims alike retain dignity and make and remake traditions; perpetrators are held accountable; and systems are transformed.
To be sure, for centuries, literatures from around the globe have reinforced heteronormative gender expectations and gender hierarchies, propagated prejudices and stigmas, and justified brutality. But many writers have challenged aesthetic and social expectations, relentlessly breaking silences, demanding accountability, and calling explicitly or implicitly for justice.
Highlighting individual voices and experiences, many long disregarded, while exposing the ubiquity and ferocity of gender inequity and gender-based violence, the stories literature tells have long revealed the devastating short- and long-term physical, psychological, social, and economic impacts of gender injustice on individuals, families, and communities. Stories not only vividly depict the intensity of personal suffering but also create counternarratives, humanizing those facing injustice and those fighting for justice, spotlighting their dignity and agency amid broader familial, economic, social, cultural, and historical dynamics.
Stories underscore the need to recognize and overhaul all forms of gender injustice. They are some of the loudest and most persistent voices in revealing the urgency of, and the possibilities for, change. As such, they can help reduce and ultimately eradicate the inequities and the violence that so pervade our societies.
Furthermore, literature can reinforce and even reveal to readers who have experienced similar violence that they are not alone and not to blame and confirm that what they are experiencing or have experienced is indefensible. Narratives likewise help readers put their own experiences and traumas into broader perspective.
Teaching stories on gender inequity and gender-based violence has impressed on me their broad affective and emotional impact on readers, everyone from high school and college students to middle-aged professionals to retirees. At the same time, as Vietnamese writer Viet Thanh Nguyen has passionately argued, “Literature does not change the world until people get out of their chairs, go out into the world, and do something to transform the conditions of which literature speaks.”
Literatures from East, South, and Southeast Asia, and their myriad global diasporas, regularly speak to the multiple and diverse forms of gender inequity and gender-based violence experienced by women and gender and sexual minorities from before birth until after death. Yet scholarship on literature and gender-based violence remains largely concentrated on narratives from the U.S., western Europe, and Canada. And the vast body of nonliterary scholarship on gender inequity and gender-based violence, feminisms, and women in Asia and its diasporas tends to center either on a particular region (i.e., East, South, or Southeast Asia) or, much more frequently, a particular nation. Transcultural study of Asian literatures is still in its youth. For their part, Asian studies and Asian diaspora studies, including Asian American studies, remain unnecessarily separated, frequently housed in different academic departments, book lists, and scholarly organizations. Gender Justice seeks to replace these tendencies with broader understandings of gender justice, Asia and its diasporas, and Asian and Asian diaspora literatures.
“Stories underscore the need to recognize and overhaul all forms of gender injustice.”
Is there a particular piece of Asian literature that moved you more than any other?
There are far too many favorites from Asia to name here! A work of Asian literature that profoundly impacted me the first time I read it, and that continues to impact me to this day, is Japanese poet Tōge Sankichi’s Poems of the Atomic Bomb. I first began working on this anthology thirty years ago, while a junior at Princeton; it became the topic of my senior thesis. I later published an English-language translation of this anthology, which won a translation prize from the University of Chicago. Portions of this translation have appeared in a range of media. I was also invited to read from this anthology to then Empress Michiko of Japan, in 2015 in Tokyo, on the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs.
Tōge’s work is exceptional not only in speaking to the horrors of the atomic aftermath and to making the case for a world without nuclear weapons but also in using art to restore dignity to the survivors of the bombings, who were and remain highly stigmatized in Japanese society.
I have to say that your CV is mind-boggling — starting with the Phi Beta Kappa at Princeton and the Harvard Ph.D., and then four prize-winning books and numerous co-edited volumes, working in a dozen languages… not to mention serving on some 40 committees during your time at Harvard and leading the Asia Center and now the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. I’m exhausted just reading through it!
And I know for a fact that you are very generous with your time, regularly offering professional and academic advice to our Fairbank Center Graduate Student Associates. How do you prioritize your work and get it all done?
I definitely don’t get as much sleep as I should. And, I’m very good at making lists, and in color coding items on lists by urgency, to make sure most things get done when they should. In all seriousness, one strategy that’s worked well for me, and works for many others, is to dedicate a fixed period for every item on your to-do list. This is especially important to making progress on larger projects (e.g., the dissertation, articles, books), where it’s vital to set aside a block of time on as many days as you can to focus on your writing and nothing else (i.e., no email, no text, no phone, no internet surfing, etc.). But this strategy also works for smaller projects. In other words, being clear with yourself that for the next 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or the next hour, you will finish a particular task. Projects tend to fill the space you give them, and spending more time on something doesn’t necessarily strengthen the results.
I also should add that, in addition to my four published transnational academic books, I’ve served as (co)editor for several scholarly volumes, and have an additional two single-authored monographs under contract with major presses: a book on the mental health impacts of the climate crisis and one on the future of literary criticism.
What aspect of your work motivates and excites you most?
Working with undergraduate and graduate students and mentoring non-ladder as well as tenure-track and recently tenured colleagues!
I’m also very much excited by developing new fields, not only in Chinese, Sinophone, Japanese, Korean, and Asian humanities, but also in the medical/health humanities and the environmental humanities. I’m fortunate that my books have had a very tangible impact on multiple fields and have enabled the next generation to take these fields in new and exciting directions. Notably, two of my former Ph.D. students – Miya Xie (tenured Associate Professor at Dartmouth) and Satoru Hashimoto (Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University) just won major book prizes from the Modern Languages Association for their transnational East Asia scholarship. Right now, I’m particularly excited by my work reorganizing the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. Given rapid changes in our students, technology, and society, and what many have called a loneliness crisis or disconnection crisis, this is a transitional moment for teaching and learning not only at the Bok Center, but also at Harvard, in the United States, and in higher education more broadly, and it’s vital that Harvard be at the forefront.
Do you have advice for students of Asia who might be hoping to follow in your footsteps?
The academic job market is so discouraging these days. And many departments and institutions aren’t as flexible as they might be in encouraging new fields. However, great scholarship does tend to get acknowledged (even though sometimes this takes awhile). I’ve been very fortunate in that nearly all of my students who have wanted an academic job and been flexible regarding location and type of institution, have been successful in obtaining an academic job, if not immediately out of the Ph.D. program, then within a few years. However, the key word here is flexible with location and type of institution – often one’s first position is not one’s first choice. But the first position post-Ph.D. can open up doors. So again, be open to possibilities.
Also, take good advantage of your graduate school years, when you’ll very likely have far more time for your research and your own work more broadly than as a professor. And finally, while an academic career can be very rewarding, many other types of careers are just as rewarding and meaningful. One type of career is not necessarily better than another. It’s always wise to think broadly.