Please join us to learn about the research from Bonnie Maldonado & Marina Nascimento.

Bonnie Samantha Maldonado Asencio  is a Doctoral Candidate and Benjamin Franklin and William Fontaine Fellow of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds graduate certificates in Latin American and Latinx Studies and College and University Teaching. Bonnie earned her BA in American Studies and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Colby College as a Posse Scholar. Her dissertation interrogates how food and taste illuminate Blackness, consumption, power, gender, sexuality, and transnational identity in and beyond the Dominican Republic. Specifically, how Black Dominican people use food –– as object, embodied practice, and source of knowledge –– to create homes, ethical return home, and transnational and transtemporal care networks. 
 
Bonnie Samantha is the recipient of numerous grants including the Sachs Program for Arts and Innovation Grant, the Penn Global Dissertation Grant, and the School of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Research Grant. These grants supported the completion of her fieldwork research and the co-creation of the Rematriation Immersion with land steward, community organizer, racial equity facilitator, Ysanet Batista Vargas.  Her work is published in Transforming Anthropology with forthcoming publications in Food Stories: Navigating the Academy with Cultural Lessons from the Kitchen and Gather.
 
Bonnie will be presenting on "comiendo boca", which in colloquial Dominican Spanish means minding the business that is not yours. Directly translated, comiendo boca literally means eating the mouth. As a Black Studies scholar using anthropological research methods to study food, foodmaking practices, foodways, consumption, and power in the Dominican Republic, I offer comiendo boca as a method to gather data through participant observation and living daily life. This has looked like listening to the time of day food trucks pass by my parent’s home and listening to what is being sold or going food shopping at the market. These moments illuminate the attention required to listen to how Dominicans acquire and prepare food, a listening that does not always happen in the kitchen and can illuminate food access, gender roles, local economic structures, and dispersal of knowledge of food making practices. However, as a Black Dominican woman scholar, comiendo boca invites conversation and speculation from folks curious about my presence in the field, noted in my experiences in market spaces interacting with vendors. In the market my body becomes a landscape to be interpreted and consumed as I participate in a choreography with vendors and other shoppers that identify me as literal and fictive kin, a person surveilling, a customer, or sexualized subject. In this paper, I offer comiendo boca as a method can destabilize what we think we know or aim to complete as scholars through speculation, ambiguity, and an openness to outcome, existing as a Black Dominican scholar in the field means consumption expands beyond food and information, and unfortunately, to “racialized-sexualized-gendered violence ” (Berry, 2017, p. 538.)
 
-----

Subtle Hands: Women, Sexology, and the Genealogy of Female Same-Sex Love Discourse in East Asia (1910s–1930s)

This paper examines how female same-sex love became a vital theme in early twentieth-century East Asia through the circulation of sexological ideas and their reinterpretation by women translators and writers. In Japan, public discussion of women’s romantic attachments intensified after the sensationalized double suicide of two schoolgirls in 1911, which sexologists read through imported theories of sexual deviance. Thinkers such as Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter, whose works were translated into Japanese during the 1910s, became central to this debate. Crucially, these translations were mediated by feminists who reshaped their meaning to address same-sex love among female students.

While Carpenter’s writings rejected the pathologization of homosexuality, his focus on male relationships left girls’ friendships undervalued. Translator Yamakawa Kikue revised these passages, softening his criticism and emphasizing the value of women’s emotional bonds. Writer Yoshiya Nobuko later cited Carpenter to justify same-sex affection among schoolgirls, transforming his ideas into spiritual, pedagogical, and moral dimensions of girlhood.

This feminist reinterpretation, though not shared by all Japanese sexologists, was the version that circulated through East Asia. Through magazines, novels, and essays, women’s readings of Ellis and Carpenter spread to colonial Korea and Republican China, where debates about tongsŏng yŏnae and tongxing’ai reflected similar ideals, romantic and affective bonds between girls, idealized as pure and formative. By tracing the translingual movement from Japan’s dōseiai to Korea’s tongsŏng yŏnae and China’s tongxing’ai, this paper shows how women’s translation and literary creation forged a shared East Asian vocabulary of intimacy that redefined modern girlhood.

Marina Nascimento researches how prewar Japanese girls’ magazines shaped racialized and gendered discourses, constructed visions of colonial modernity, and produced idealized images of female imperial subjects. She is particularly interested in the transnational circulation of these magazines across Japan’s empire and diaspora. Marina holds a BA and MA in Japanese Language, Literature, and Culture from the University of São Paulo (Brazil) and an MA in Innovative Japanese Studies from Tohoku University (Japan).