Your Daily Dose of Kick-Ass Women of Color

“We witnesses of history are still alive.”

Lee Yong-Su, one of 46 living Korean survivors of sex slavery by the Japanese during WWII, confronts a foreign Korean minister who brokered a “settlement” made between Japan and Korea on December 28th regarding reparations for the women. 

Among the agreements between the two countries, Japan is now required to set up a fund of 1bn yen ($8.3m, £5.6m) for the 46 surviving former so-called “comfort women”, and South Korea is to remove a statue of a girl that activists erected as a “peace monument” outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul in 2011. The agreement, which has not yet been ratified, is welcome news for the US, which has urged its two east Asian allies to settle their differences over second world war history and show a united front in the face of an increasingly assertive China and a nuclear-armed North Korea. (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015…)

However, Lee Yong-Su, who appears in the video above, told reporters that “the agreement does not reflect the views of former comfort women” as no actual Korean survivors of WWII sex slavery were consulted throughout the negotiations. In the video, Yong-Su asks the minister why neither she nor the other surviving women were consulted on the deal and demands why they, the subject of this negotiation, have been continuously ignored for decades.

“Why are you trying to kill us twice?”

Through her use of menstrual blood in her show Isilumo siyaluma (Period Pains, 2006-2011) in Cape Town, Muholi sought to tell the story of black lesbians in South Africa and represent “curative rape.”  She wrote of the project in a press release for the exhibit:

 Isilumo siyaluma is a Zulu expression that can be loosely translated as “period pains/ periods pain”. Additionally, there is an added meaning in the translation that there is something secretive in and about this blood/“period in time.”

At one level, my project deals with my own menstrual blood, with that secretive, feminine time of the month that has been reduced within Western patriarchal culture as dirty.

On a deeper level then, my menstrual blood is used as a vehicle and medium to begin to express and bridge the pain and loss I feel as I hear and become witness to the pain of ‘curative rapes’ that many of the girls and women in my black lesbian community bleed from their vaginas and their minds.

Between March – May 2011, three (3) young black lesbians under the age of 25 were brutally murdered in various townships [….] As we continue to live and survive in troubled times as black lesbians in South Africa and within the continent, where rampant hate crimes and brutal killings of same sex loving women is rife, this ongoing project is an activist/artist’s radical response to that violence.

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