Feminist Geography, Toxicity/Radiation, Social Reproduction, Political Economy
Regions
Asia; East Asia; Japan
Biography
Tomoki Fukui is a mixed-race agenderflux Nikkei person researching the political economy of bodily banishment and radiation exposure in the TEPCO Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Their work examines how the political economy of Japanese nuclear development is being reproduced through neoliberal nuclear reconstruction from the TEPCO disaster in three ways: the reproduction of coastal Fukushima's status as an internal colony of the Japanese energy industry; the absorption of Japanese and racialized surplus labor populations into nuclear reconstruction; and the reproduction of a theory of discrimination predicated on the heteropatriarchal erasure of radiation-exposed women. By tracing the experiences of evacuees, anti-irradiation activists, nuclear subcontractors, and labor organizers within the geography of nuclear reconstruction, in conversation with local poetry, oral history, and authoethnographic reflection on the implications of trans embodiment in nuclear spaces, Tomoki illuminates the complexities of how people both fail and are recaptured by nuclear reproduction.
Tomoki is also actively interested in anticolonial knowledge production about Japan, queer Japanese politics, and the emerging discipline of Critical Nikkei Studies.
Education
Columbia University, MA in Anthropology, 2014
University of Michigan, BA in Anthropology, minor in Community Action and Social Change, 2012
Tomoki Fukui, “Gendered Ruptures: The Politics of Datsuhibaku Maternalist Feminist Organizing, Kokutai, and Hentai in the TEPCO Nuclear Disaster.” Platypus: The CASTAC Blog, February 10, 2022.
Tomoki Fukui and Teresa Montoya. “For Standing Rock: A Moving Dialogue.” In Standing With Standing Rock. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019, pp.261-280.
