Dr. Marcy Tanter
Dr. Marcy Tanter has been at educator at the secondary and post-secondary levels for more than 25 years. She has published and presented on Korean topics such as K-drama and popular culture, the Gwangju Uprising, and the "comfort women". She has received grants from the May 18 Foundation in Gwangju and from the Academy of Korean Studies to conduct research in Korea during the past few years. She was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Dongguk University in 2018.
Ranger College
Session
Throughout South Korea, there are close to 150 statues of “comfort women” and there are about 30 in other countries; some of the statues are modeled on actual wianbu (the term for “comfort women” in Korean), many are not, but all serve the same purposes: to educate the public about the history of the 'comfort women' system, to keep their fight for justice going, and to raise awareness about the current state of human trafficking. In the past two years, statues placed in Germany and Italy have been widely supported while also garnering vociferous protest: how government and citizenry react to the statues is both a local and global response which causes debate about raising the specter of events Japan denies and the victims suffered.
In this presentation, I will juxtapose wianbu testimony with images of some of the worldwide Sonyeosang to discuss how they function as narratives while they also function as calls for activism and justice for victims of sex trafficking in the present day Outside the framework of globalization, the statues are models of interconnection and interdiction that call into question the intentionality of how art designed as public memorial and activist protest can be regional and international at the same time. My presentation will explain why it is essential to keep the statues where they are and to continue to add more around the world, especially in the wake of more than 100 South Korean women suing the US military for forcing them to work as prostitutes near US bases in Korea for three decades.
research for this study was partly funded by a grant from the AKS