While much scholarship has examined the “comfort women” redress movement from political and legal perspectives, few scholarly works have examined its cultural and aesthetic aspects.Footnote 1 As the first book to analyze this movement from a “performance-oriented lens” (pp. 19–20), Elizabeth Son's Embodied Reckonings critically fills in this lacuna by examining “the interplay between political activism and artistic expression” (p. 16). Son draws upon a diverse range of sources, including textual sources such as tribunal documents, newspapers, and performance texts, as well as under-utilized nontextual sources such as interviews, theatre, first-hand accounts of street demonstrations, and memorials. Showcasing the project's interdisciplinary nature, Embodied Reckonings brings together methodologies from Asian American, performance, and feminist studies.
The first two of four chapters examine how survivors and their supporters utilize “performative strategies to advocate for official reparative measures” (p. 22), while the last two chapters scrutinize the representation of survivors through stage productions and memorials. By focusing on the “Wednesday Demonstrations”—weekly protests in Seoul against Japanese wartime sexual slavery ongoing since 1992—chapter 1 analyzes how participants use sonic techniques and physical strategies to create “somatic disruptions” (p. 48) that help them achieve visibility and raise consciousness. Ultimately, Son argues, protesting bodies have transformed survivors’ private injury into public grievance.
Chapter 2 focuses on a watershed moment in the “comfort women” movement: the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan's Military Sexual Slavery, which took place in Tokyo in 2000. Examining the central role that survivors’ scarred bodies, gestures, tears, and the like played in tribunal testimonies, Son offers a nuanced analysis of “the embodied, performed elements of the testimony” (p. 85). These performed elements, Son argues, uncover “the limits of a text-centered analysis of law and legal practices” (p. 68).
Moving from “the actual survivor to the survivor in representation onstage” (p. 103), chapter 3 closely analyzes four theatrical works surrounding the issue of “comfort women.” Categorized under the concept of “redress theatre” (p. 104), these works not only deal with the postwar experiences of survivors, which include repressed memory, shame, and social exclusion, but also connect Japanese sexual slavery with gender-based violence in today's world. Given the international nature of the production teams, these works also contribute to the making of a transpacific cultural memory of Japanese wartime sexual slavery.
Chapter 4 discusses memorial building by Koreans and Korean Americans to examine “the relationship between memorial objects and performance” (p. 149). Focusing on three key sites of “comfort women” memorials in South Korea and the United States, Son provides a nuanced analysis of the affective bond people come to develop with these memorials. The performance of care is especially evident in the case of the Statue of Peace in Seoul: a bronze statue of an adolescent girl representing Korean “comfort women.” Through visitors’ affective engagement with the statue, such as putting scarfs on her and patting her shoulders, they come to develop a deeper sympathy for survivors and “become part of communities of remembrance” (p. 175) of this traumatic history.
Embodied Reckonings makes three major contributions to existing scholarship. First, moving away from the national paradigm in studies on “comfort women,” it adopts a transnational Asian-American perspective. Focusing on Korean and Korean American subjects, Son details the process through which participants come to develop a “transpacific affinity with the cause of ‘comfort women’” (p. 111).
Moreover, Embodied Reckonings offers a critical intervention through its nuanced analysis of the interplay between performance and redress. Son excellently shows how performances by survivors and their supporters not only are for redress but also should be understood as redress themselves. Son holds that “redressive acts” in everyday life not only displace the nation-state as the sole arbiter of redress but also reveal the cultural and social meanings of redress as opposed to the “predominantly legal and political understandings of redress” (p. 22).Footnote 2
Another contribution is its critique of “the centrality of logos-centric expressions of the pain of the ‘comfort women’ survivors” (p. 14). Building on Chungmoo Choi's argument that “women's corporeal experience lies at the core of the comfort women issue,” Son skillfully demonstrates the embodied facets of redress.Footnote 3 Conceptualizing the body as “an expressive instrument” (p. 19), Son pays close attention to survivors’ nonverbal and affective ways of reckoning with the traumatic past.
If the book presents any difficulties for readers, it is its unclear definition and use of the term “performance.” While “performance” is mostly defined as “embodied practices” (p. 3) or “embodied forms of expression” (p. xix) that operate at a theoretical level, it also refers to the presentation of a particular play or a certain type of music, such as theatrical works in chapter 3 or pungmul performances in chapter 1. For readers who are less familiar with performance studies, a more detailed explanation of how Son theorizes “performance” would be greatly appreciated for the sake of clarity.
In conclusion, Embodied Reckonings constitutes a new wave of scholarship that explores the cultural and aesthetic dimension of the “comfort women” redress movement. It is also invaluable to scholars of performance studies, Asian American studies, and transpacific studies. Furthermore, it deserves the attention of those interested in the relationship between political activism and artistic expression more broadly.
