Abstract
In her book, Traffic in Asian Women, Laura Hyun Yi Kang demonstrates the “comfort women” problematic as exposing and challenging the political and epistemological enclosures of “Asian women,” through an historical examination of the effacement and redress of the Japanese military's “comfort system.” Kang employs a detailed historiography evidencing both the “silence” around the “comfort system” and the heralded breaking of that silence as functions of enduring racist and imperialist power/knowledge regimes that distanced “Asian women” from both humanity and women. While the book proves various existing frameworks insufficient in acknowledging the full extent of violence against Asian women, the figure of “Asian women” functions as an analytic through which the sexist, racist, and imperialist constraints ingrained in feminist and humanitarian discourses are unveiled.
A robust genealogy of the comfort women problematic demonstrates the author's meticulous research and intimate knowledge. While illustrating the entangled international contexts surrounding this issue, such a barrage of historical detail may leave those relatively unfamiliar with the topic adrift at certain points. However, Kang poses various questions for consideration which help reorient the reader to each chapter's primary focus. Notably, while numerous questions and critiques are put forth, the primary intentions of the work are not to fill a gap or correct an error, but “explain the politics of our lack of knowledge” (p. 24).
In the seven chapters following, Kang contests and reframes the uses of “Asian women” as a bounded unit of knowledge to “a critical prompt for mapping varying configurations of power, knowledge, and justice” (p. 16), offering a thorough examination of how “‘Asian women’ were made visible but also incoherent and inconsequential” (p. 16) across the discourses of activists, governmental officers, and academics. Calling into question the epistemological limits and subsequent consequences of apprehending a generalized group as a bounded unit amenable to academic study and expertise, Kang proceeds to trace the transfiguration of “Asian women” in the composition and permutation of three categories of female vulnerability: “Traffic in women,” “sexual slavery,” and “violence against women.” She illuminates the Asianization of female oppression and injury as “part of a broader formalization and professionalization of knowledge production” (p. 41) by and within universities, NGOs, and prominent international entities. Kang prompts us to question our own position as scholars and activists by highlighting how the “epistemological and methodological boundaries of these differently enabled and constrained modes of knowledge production were effaced through a generic yet highly programmatic invocation of ‘expertise’” (p. 41). She concludes with further critical analysis of the ways in which the bounds of human and women's rights discourses and political economy influenced three different modes of international justice and redress: monetary compensation, truth disclosure, and memorialization.
For the field of social work, one of the book's most valuable aspects is the stimulation of a broader critical questioning of our own positions as scholars and activists concerned with issues of female oppression and harm within an applied science's discipline. Traffic in Asian Women calls to our attention the duality of the “outraged spectacle” of female injury and vulnerability as giving rise to new power/knowledge regimes while also “occluding a much broader analysis of gendered violence, racial inequality, knowledge suppression, and labor exploitation” (p. 38). In examining the “comfort women” problematic, Kang highlights how an over-focus on sexual violence obstructs and marginalizes other violations and inequities that constitute and engender violence against women. As scholars and activists working within an applied scientific discipline that heavily emphasizes intersectionality, we may proclaim the indivisibility and interconnectedness of the various dimensions of women's rights. Nonetheless, Kang challenges us to consider whether we are in fact working towards systemic reform of the broader social, political, and economic conditions that engender violence, or if we at times settle for a form of “governance feminism” (p. 129) in which we assume that official recognition and denunciation of a specific problem is an effective means of amelioration. Such reflections are critical, as we are aptly reminded that, “Both indivisibility and interconnectedness are easier to proclaim than to analyze, explicate, and unravel” (p. 132).
Traffic in Asian Women highlights the interdisciplinarity inherent to social work. While written for practitioners of U.S. women's gender, and sexuality studies, American studies, and Asian American studies (p. 35), this book is likely to appeal to social work scholars and policymakers interested in questions of intersectionality, critical race and ethnic studies, cultural production, human rights, transnational feminism, and social movement. Students with limited experience reading scholarly or historiographical writing may find the text challenging, given Kang's advanced writing style. Additionally, those unfamiliar with the comfort system may find this book a difficult place to begin. Nonetheless, this detailed historiography offers a unique form of research not often found within social work literature, one that demonstrates the complex and enduring influences on and of epistemological power. Kang's critical analysis of the composition and effacement of “Asian women” prompts us to consider the depths of our own non-knowing and challenges us to critically analyze not only what we do and do not know, but why, and reflect on what our own “expertise” has potentially eclipsed. As we are prompted to begin considering the politics and repercussions of our own lack of knowledge, Kang reminds us that, “In lieu of tidy conclusions or righteous pronouncements, we must proceed with this ineffable condition of a responsibility to read, probe, and wonder without the guarantees of the wishful and willful telos of identification-knowledge-justice” (p. 50).
