ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Traffic in Asian Women Laura Hyun Yi Kang demonstrates that the figure of "Asian women" functions as an analytic with which to understand the emergence, decline, and permutation of U.S. power/knowledge at the nexus of capitalism, state power, global governance, and knowledge production throughout the twentieth century. Kang analyzes the establishment, suppression, forgetting, and illegibility of the Japanese military "comfort system" (1932–1945) within that broader geohistorical arc. Although many have upheld the "comfort women" case as exemplary of both the past violation and the contemporary empowerment of Asian women, Kang argues that it has profoundly destabilized the imaginary unity and conceptual demarcation of the category. Kang traces how "Asian women" have been alternately distinguished and effaced as subjects of the traffic in women, sexual slavery, and violence against women. She also explores how specific modes of redress and justice were determined by several overlapping geopolitical and economic changes ranging from U.S.-guided movements of capital across Asia and the end of the Cold War to the emergence of new media technologies that facilitated the global circulation of "comfort women" stories.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Laura Hyun Yi Kang is a Professor in the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Irvine and author of Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women, also published by Duke University Press.

REVIEWS

“Deeply thought-provoking and powerfully written, Traffic in Asian Women is an eminently illuminating examination of the contradictory figuration of ‘Asian Women.’ Laura Hyun Yi Kang offers a singular model of critically erudite, deeply engaged scholarship.”

-- Lisa Yoneyama, author of Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes

“Traffic in Asian Women is a meticulously researched, thoroughly compelling, and persistently incisive study. It is a book full of brilliance, one that shows us how to conduct outward facing, politically engaged research in ways that enact intersectional thinking, not only in research but as a way of relating to the world.”

-- Kandice Chuh, author of The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man”

“This is a mode of feminist writing that rejects faith in the twinned powers of exposure and expertise…. Kang’s deft history skips a stone across regimes of visibility and governance, alighting on their connective systems instead of laying claim to the subjects inside.”

-- Zoë Hu Baffler

“Through its detailed historiography, [Traffic in Asian Women] documents how multiple political, legal, and ethical frameworks have ultimately proved inadequate to fully acknowledge violence against Asian women throughout the twentieth century and beyond.”

-- Kodai Abe Journal of Asian American Studies

“Traffic in Asian Women is a generative text for scholars of the comfort system and its legacies, Asian Studies, transnational American and Asian American Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies, among others.... Kang demonstrates the value of continuously learning from those possessing intimate knowledge about experiences of racial and gendered violence and living their effects.”

-- Nicolyn Woodcock American Studies

“While written for practitioners of U.S. women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, American studies, and Asian American studies, [Traffic in Asian Women] 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.”

-- Alexa Ploss Affilia

“Although Traffic in Asian Women is ostensibly a reconsideration of history, . . . Kang's main interest is in the present and future—in shifting the efforts of those who claim to be feminists and/or human rights activists toward a wider sphere of current injustices. . . . Kang's is a powerful polemic.”

-- Margaret D. Stetz History Teacher

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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