Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-2025
Abstract
Human rights scholar Wendy Kozol has posed a series of challenging questions regarding women’s human rights: “How are experiences of suffering represented? By whom? In what venues? And for which audiences?” This article seeks to address Kozol’s inquiry regarding representations of sexual violence and context by considering the Comfort Women Wanted installation at the Museum of Sex in New York City. The curators of this exhibit, partly sponsored by the Sex Workers Project, seem to have framed this art display within the conflicting feminist debates on sexual slavery and sex work, thus conflating “comfort women” survivors with sex workers within a patriarchal system. Yet one key concern is that the Japanese government and right-wing ethnonationalist groups have weaponized the voluntary sex worker narrative to dismiss the plight of the “comfort women” and deny them official recognition and redress. Against this backdrop, this analysis explores the limits of “awareness,” suggesting that such framing of “comfort women” art in the Museum of Sex may eclipse and confound the sociopolitical battles the global “comfort women” redress movement has made thus far and unwittingly feed into historical revisionist views.
Comments
Reinares, Laura Barberán, and Eunah Lee. "In the Name of Awareness: Audience, Venue, and the Politics of Witnessing Human Rights Violations." Meridians 24.2 (2025): 331-356. https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-11864089