Dis/locating Comfort Women Statues: Reflections on Colonialism and Implications for Global Art Education Critical Multicultural Art Education

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss how comfort women statues can promote non-Western cultural mobilization and globalization as well as pedagogical implications. “Comfort women” is a euphemism for the girls and women who were forced into sexual servitude by the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) during WWII. By using Chandra Mohanty’s concept of the contextual understanding of cultures and Uma Narayan’s feminist methodology to dislocate cultures, I dis/locate comfort women statues in Atlanta, GA and San Francisco, CA as the grounds for a critical approach to global art education. I then suggest ways in which global art education can embody dis/located statues as renditions of counterhegemonic globalization.