일본군 ‘위안부’ 운동 다시 보기— 문화적 트라우마 극복과 공감된 청중의 확산

초록

This paper is to sheds light on the history of Korean Women’s Movement of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery through an examination of activism of the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. Based on my field research and participant observation as an insider-outsider of the movement, I explore how activists spread the issues of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery into the transnational space and what the roles of activists have been in the process of constructing audience. Particularly, I adopt Jeffrey Alexander’s concepts of “cultural trauma” and “carrier group” to argue that the growth of Korean feminism and women’s movement assisted the Korean Council to successfully built relationships between victims of postcolonial trauma and ordinary people, through the Wednesday Demonstration, the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum, the Peace Statue (called ‘Sonyeo-sang’), and Butterfly Fund. Throughout the activist process over the past four decades, people inside and outside Korea confronted and deconstructed their own traumatic experiences in and beyond postcolonial contexts. The suffering of others also helped other victim survivors of the Japanese Military Sexual Slavery to do the same. As ‘we’ have changed into empathetic audience, so have the socio-cultural unjust condition to block the women’s voices transformed, and finally victims’ experiences could be heard. Such women’s activism tells us that it is ‘we’ instead of the victims, who should take responsibility to resolve the unfinished issues.

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