Literature, Sexual Violence and Trauma in East Asia

The intersection of literature, sexual violence and trauma is the topic that led me to an academic career. My early work in the field examined the literary representation of war rape during the second Sino-Japanese War.

 

My current research project studies the pivotal role of literature in anti-sexual violence movements in East Asia in the past decades, which many have called the East Asian #MeToo.  Three literary texts are widely considered foundational to this recent wave of social movements in multiple countries in East Asia: the South Korean novel Kim Jiyoung Born in 1982 (Namju Cho, 2016), the Taiwanese autobiographical novel Fang Si-chi’s First Love Paradise (Yihan Lin, 2017), and the Japanese autobiography Black Box (Shiori Itō, 2017). In this research project, I examine how literary authors contemplate the relationship between literary tradition and toxic masculinity in the contemporary context and invent new ways of writing literature that constantly engage with transmedia intertextuality, as well as how intra-regional translation and online discussion of these texts augment their social impact and help generate new forms of social criticism. More broadly, this project revisits the perennial question of “why/how literature matters” from a comparative, regional perspective. Through the lens of gender justice, I explore how literature resides in society in new life forms in the media and digital era. 

 

This research project is still in an early stage.

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