Embodied Reckonings examines the political and cultural aspects of contemporary performances that have grappled with the history of the “comfort women,” the Japanese military’s euphemism for the sexual enslavement of girls and young women—mostly Korean—in the years before and during World War II. Long silent, in the early 1990s these women and their supporters initiated varied performance practices—protests, tribunals, theater, and memorial-building projects—to demand justice for those affected by state-sponsored acts of violence. The book provides a critical framework for understanding how actions designed to bring about redress can move from the political and legal aspects of this concept to its cultural and social possibilities.
Based on extensive archival and ethnographic research, the study argues for the central role of performance in how Korean survivors, activists, and artists have redressed the histories—and erasures—of this sexual violence. Merging cultural studies and performance theory with a transnational, feminist analysis, the book illuminates the actions of ordinary people, thus offering ways of reconceptualizing legal and political understandings of redress that tend to concentrate on institutionalized forms of state-based remediation.
“The case studies are rich, provocative, and described with vivid detail. The book adds important geographical and cultural breadth to theater and performance studies, especially performance studies of law, violence, transitional justice, and human rights.”
—Catherine Cole, Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition
“A deeply engaging and consistently insightful consideration of cultural practices that aim to bring justice to the survivors of wartime Japanese military sex slavery. The book makes multiple important interventions in the investigation of the relationships among activism, law, performance, theatricality and restorative justice.”
—Lisa Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes
“Elizabeth Son painstakingly follows the voices of survivors silenced by the violent forces of history, honoring their lived experiences and building connective tissues around them to illustrate the performative iterations of history and memory in the broad networks of dramatic texts, memorials, street demonstrations, stage work, and legal dramas. What emerges as a result is a powerful testimony, which has been often forced to silence and oblivion.”
—Suk-Young Kim, DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship Along the Korean Border
