Conversation with Hyejin Shim about feminist politics in Korea and the Korean diaspora
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Hyejin Shim is a queer Korean bilingual anti-violence advocate and community organizer based in Oakland, California. She has a decade’s experience in local and national anti-violence work, and spent the past six years working with LGBTQ immigrant and refugee survivors at a San Francisco domestic violence shelter. Hyejin is a co-founder and member of the national advocacy project Survived and Punished, which supports criminalized and incarcerated survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking. With Survived and Punished, she organizes resources and develops advocacy strategies to end the criminalization of survival, especially for those survivors who are prosecuted, incarcerated, and threatened with deportation for engaging in self-defense or other survival acts deemed illegitimate by the law. She is also a member of the Korean American Coalition to End Domestic Abuse, and with KACEDA, authored the publication “With You: Queer & Trans Koreans Surviving Violence: a Community-based Research Report” (2018).
*Unfortunately, Stacy Suh who was originally scheduled to be part of this conversation will not be able to join us.*
Ju Hui Judy Han is a cultural geographer and Assistant Professor in Gender Studies at UCLA, where she teaches classes on gender and sexuality, Korean studies, (im)mobilities, and comics. Her research and publications concern conservative religious formations, queer activism, and protest cultures. Judy grew up in Seoul and has lived and worked in Los Angeles, Berkeley/Oakland, Vancouver, and Toronto.