Yuna Watanabe (渡邊 結南) is a PhD student in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and a Fulbright Scholar from Japan. Her research interests lie at the intersections of feminist theory, craft and textile practices, gendered labor, memory, identity, and community formation. Building on her undergraduate research on knitting and gender in Japan, she is interested in how textile practices can serve as sites where gendered and racialized histories are negotiated, cultural knowledge is transmitted, and alternative forms of belonging and connection are created. Her current research interests bring transnational, decolonial, and critical race perspectives to the study of craft, particularly textile practices of women with diasporic backgrounds. She hopes to contribute to feminist scholarship that makes women’s creative labor and cultural inheritance more visible, while connecting academic research with communities.

Publications:

• Watanabe, Yuna. “Overcoming Inferiority through the Past-Orientalisation and the Present-Occidentalisation.” Plurality, vol.2, 2025, pp.66-72. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2218/plurality.10625