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.