Geographical and Graphical Movements: Human Trafficking in Stanford Graphic Novel Project's From Busan to San Francisco and Mark Kalesniko's Mail Order Bride

The growing popularity of contemporary graphic narratives that focus on women and trauma suggests an increasing acceptance and support of discussions on gendered violence. From Busan to San Francisco (2012), a collective graphic narrative produced by twenty-one students at Stanford’s Graphic Novel Project, and Mail Order Bride (2001) by Canadian writer Mark Kalesniko both perform similar acts of revisiting traumatic events.  These graphic narratives narrate the stories of young women from South Korea who are trafficked as sex workers and mail-order brides to US and Canada respectively.  Both graphic narratives shed light on the industry of human trafficking.  The formal and stylistic movements found within the comic architecture of From Busan to San Francisco and Mail Order Bride interrogate the ways in which the visual and textual narrative can represent the emotional landscape of trauma and displacement through comics language.  Engaging in a visual and textual critique of the global economy that trades in feminine identities, these graphic narratives interrogate the mobility and visibility of those who are trafficked.  In these works, transnationalism is artistically embedded in consumptive practices of reading and seeing that reinforce or challenge Orientalist cultural assumptions about the Asian female body.  Geographical movements of protagonists from South Korea to US and Canada as well as graphical movements of panel arrangements provide a form of ethical optics that allow us to reconsider narratives of trauma and commodification.