GYOPO Learning Circle: Feminist Solidarities towards a Demilitarized Asia-Pacific

In October 2025, Korean women made history by suing the U.S. military for gender-based human rights abuses inflicted by U.S. forces stationed in Korea. The 117 Korean female plaintiffs filed a lawsuit seeking a formal apology from the U.S. military and financial compensation for the sex trafficking, sexual abuse, and human rights violations endured at U.S. military base camptowns and by U.S. soldiers.

Join GYOPO for an evening with Professor Jinah Kim and activist-educator Dr. Margo Okazawa-Rey to reflect on this recent lawsuit announcement, what this means for the gyopo community, and how this latest announcement sits within a longer arc of transnational feminist organizing towards a demilitarized Asia-Pacific. In particular, we will discuss how artistic practices and creative interventions have illuminated histories across generations, forged connections, and strengthened communities actively resisting militarism in Korea, Asia, and communities across Oceania.

This program is part the series GYOPO Learning Circle: Lessons from the Pacific, which explores how artistic and scholarly practices can illuminate new perspectives on the histories and continuing presence of the U.S. military in Asia and across the Pacific Ocean, especially since World War II, in U.S. states and territories such as Hawai’i, Guam, and American Samoa; the lasting effects, particularly the refugee crisis, of the U.S.–Vietnam war; the dispossession and pollution of landscapes due to toxic remnants of war and expansion of U.S. military activity across the Philippines, Marshall Islands, Okinawa, and South Korea, home to the largest overseas U.S. military base; as well as how the Pacific has been an active site of Indigenous resistance, where generations of peoples have led movements for demilitarization, sovereignty, and rematriation of lands and bodies of water. This Learning Circle series will provide a generative, discursive space for artists working in different mediums and scholars in different disciplines to exchange ideas, research methodologies, theoretical frameworks, and cultural worldviews, practices, and histories in the Pacific. It will highlight locally specific but interconnected struggles against imperialism, military violence, and ecological ruination in relation to the U.S.’s presence in the Pacific Arena, while imagining new potentialities for art and activism, embodiment, and decolonial futures.

This event is co-sponsored by Women Cross DMZ, Korea Peace Now! Grassroots Network, and Nodutdol.

Margo Okazawa-Rey

Margo Okazawa-Rey, Professor Emerita San Francisco State University, is an activist and educator working on issues of militarism, armed conflict, and violence against women examined intersectionally. She has long-standing activist commitments in South Korea and Palestine, working closely with Du Re Bang/My Sisters Place and Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling, respectively. She also is a founding member of the International Women’s Network against Militarism and Women for Genuine Security, serves on the International Board of PeaceWomen Across the Globe in Bern, Switzerland, and is President of the Board of Directors of Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID). Her recent publications include “Nation-izing” Coalition and Solidarity Politics for US Anti-militarist Feminists, Social Justice (2020); Gendered Lives: Intersectional Perspectives, Oxford University Press (2020); “No Freedom without Connections: Envisioning Sustainable Feminist Solidarities” (2018) in Feminist Freedom Warriors: Genealogies, Justice, Politics, and Hope, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Linda Carty (eds.). She was a founding member of the Combahee River Collective.

Jinah Kim

Jinah Kim is Professor of Communication and Media at the University of California, Merced. Born in Seoul, she moved to Queens, NY when she was eight years old. In addition to this pivotal event, her life trajectory changed forever when she participated in the strikes to establish Asian American and Latino Studies at Columbia University. Since then her interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching have centered transpacific feminist activism as it intersects with racial justice projects across sites of the US military empire. In the past few years, her work has focused on how everyday people, artists, and activists have organized to intervene in state regulation of memory surrounding histories of violence, in particular the history and ongoing impact of the Japanese Imperial and US military “Comfort Women” systems. She is the author of Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas, co-editor of Center to Center Relationalities: At the Nexus of Pacific Islands Studies and Trans-Pacific Studies and co-editor of the forthcoming Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Korea.

GYOPO Learning Circle: Feminist Solidarities towards a Demilitarized Asia-Pacific

with Margo Okazawa-Rey and Jinah Kim

Team Members