Coalition building and mobilization

Diaspora politics, coalition building, and the gender rights movement have come together to bring about the unexpected: the public memorialization in the United States of “comfort women,” young women from across Asia forced to provide sexual services to the Japanese Imperial Army during the 1930s and 1940s. In this article, we explore how local politics in the United States became the site of competing narratives over the comfort women, and debates over erecting memorials or statues in honor of these women on public land. Our analysis builds on the existing literature on the role of diaspora in international and local politics but also adds the important dimension of changing gender norms. Through case studies, we explore the dynamics behind the success or failure of the siting of a monument and the important role of activists and local politicians in mobilizing support throughout the process. Using a qualitative approach based on fieldwork and interviews, we highlight the size and trends of the ethnic Korean population, the relative strengths of supporting and opposing coalitions, and the use of the strategy of universalism in determining whether or not the goal of siting a memorial in honor of the comfort women is achieved

Comfort women · Diaspora · Grassroots · Honor · Memorialization · Narrative · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Public Administration

• Negotiating the (Im)Possibility of Contested Memory

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• MeToo in Japan and South Korea

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• Japanese revisionists’ meddling backfires

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• Politicising the Manhwa Representations of the Comfort Women

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• Memorials’ politics

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• Introduction

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• Creating a Collective Memory of the Comfort Women in the USA

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• The U.S. Empire Remembers Violence Against Asian Women

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• Land of Unfinished Monuments”

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• The Comfort Women Controversy

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• Violence and trauma as constitutive elements in Korean American racial identity formation

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• Activists beyond borders

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• The Role of Arab American Advocacy Groups in Shaping American Foreign Policy

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