Facing "Comfort Women": Representations and Reckonings

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Presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU, Performance Studies @ NYU, Department of East Asian Studies at New York University, Nodutdol for Korean Community Development, and Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program in the NYU Department of Social & Cultural Analysis.

This panel brings in conversation scholars and writers thinking through the representations and circulation of images of so-called “comfort women,” the over 200,000 mostly Korean girls and women forced into sexual labor by the Japanese Imperial Army before and during World War II. In Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance, and Transpacific Redress (University of Michigan Press, 2018), Elizabeth Son (Northwestern University) examines the early 1990s performance practices—protests, tribunals, theater, and memorial-building projects—of “comfort women” and their supporters, investigating the relationship between redress, performance, and the law. Emily Jungmin Yoon’s (University of Chicago) poetry collection A Cruelty Special to Our Species (HarperCollins, 2018) demonstrates this history’s enduring impact in the diaspora by raising questions about collective memory and inherited trauma. Laura Hyun Yi Kang’s (University of California, Irvine) Traffic in Asian Women (Duke University Press, 2020) examines the prolific representation and circulation of “Asian women” through the convergence of new communication technologies, governance regimes, and political-economic shifts at the end of the twentieth century. Karen Shimakawa (NYU Performance Studies) moderates.


The NYU Silver Center, Jurow Hall & Silverstein Lounge is on the first floor and is accessible for wheelchair users via the 31 Washington Place entrance. Restrooms (which are gender-segregated) are accessible via elevator. If you have any access needs, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu.