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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the Statue of a Girl of Peace as a material site where heritage, memory, and power intersect. It examines how commemorative forms stabilise narratives of suffering while shaping moral claims and public meaning across local and diasporic contexts.

Paper long abstract

This proposal examines the heritage of comfort women—victims of sexual slavery by the Imperial Army of Japan during the Asia–Pacific War—through the Statue of a Girl of Peace as a material site where memory, authority, and public meaning are actively produced across national and diasporic contexts. While widely framed as an emblem of justice and remembrance, the statue also operates as a mechanism through which particular narratives of suffering are stabilised, circulated, and institutionalised.

Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research conducted in Seoul, Toronto, and Berlin, this study investigates how the statue and its replicas are situated within activist, institutional, and community settings, and how survivor testimonies, political agendas, and moral claims converge around these monuments. Through visual documentation and semiotic analysis, I trace how lived experiences are translated into authorised forms of heritage, often privileging singular narratives of victimhood while marginalising more complex or ambivalent memories.

By attending to the statues’ spatial placement and embodied encounters, the proposed paper conceptualises heritage-making as a performative process that produces recognition while simultaneously narrowing interpretive possibilities. I argue that the Statue of of a Girl of Peace exemplifies how commemorative materialities can function both as sites of resistance and as instruments of symbolic governance, reinforcing polarised public discourse and foreclosing alternative engagements with the past.

The paper reflects on the role of critical heritage studies in examining heritage-making as a relational process and the involvement of diverse actors in shaping commemorative practices across local, and diasporic contexts.