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.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...
