Traffic in Asian women

Author / Creator

Kang, Laura Hyun Yi, author

Available as

Online

Summary

"TRAFFIC IN ASIAN WOMEN positions "Asian women" as an analytic through which to understand dominant international discourses of female injury and empowerment in the 1990s. Laura Kang's book starts ...

"TRAFFIC IN ASIAN WOMEN positions "Asian women" as an analytic through which to understand dominant international discourses of female injury and empowerment in the 1990s. Laura Kang's book starts from a question: why the sudden interest in the Japanese military "comfort system"-a project that forced 200,000 women into systematic rape-almost 50 years after the end of the Second World War? And, following from that question, what about the positionality of the survivors-specifically their Asianness-helped to garner that attention? In her attempt to answer these questions, Kang reveals how the emergence of the comfort women onto the world stage was the result of many overlapping global and technological changes: South Korea's transition to a democratic nation in the late 1980s; the close of the Cold War and the ability for international attention, specifically in the form of the United Nations, to focus on what had previously been deemed less important topics; the rise of human rights discourses and the call to document abuses; and the emergence of mass media technologies, which allowed for testimonies of survivors to be widely shared. In particular, Kang's analysis centers on how the comfort women became the epitomic example in three discourses of female sexual violence that circulated throughout the 1990s: traffic in women, sexual slavery, and violence against women. At the same time, Kang's book reveals how the spectacularity of "Asian women" in these discourses not only served to inhibit their full visibility, but also undermined any coherent understanding of what constituted "Asian women" as a group. Chapter 1 details the various ways that "Asian women" were made visible in global governance, NGO work, media coverage, and academic scholarship in the 1990s. Chapters 2-5 each focus on one of the three discourses-traffic in women, sexual slavery, and violence against women-and how "Asian women," and the comfort women especially, were deployed in these discourses. In the final three chapters, 6-8, Kang examines three modes of justice foregrounded in the 1990s: monetary compensation, disclosure of truth, and memorialization"--Provided by publisher.

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