The Korean Women's Movement of Japanese Military "Comfort Women": Navigating between Nationalism and Feminism

초록

The purpose of this study is to explore the multifaceted aspects of the Korean women’s movement of Japanese military “comfort women” from a postcolonial feminist perspective. Based on ethnographic research, over ten years of participant observation as an insider-outsider of the movement, and in-depth interviews, this paper analyzes the ways in which the movement’s activism and its dominant principles shifted within the context of an expanding political space brought on by ongoing negotiations and/or conflict with legacies of Imperial Japan and androcentric nationalism. From the outset, the “comfort women” movement questioned the colonial legacies and androcentric nationalism that doubly oppress colonized women. It has problematized the way in which the elision of “I” represented in repetitive national narratives, actually insists that subaltern “comfort women” cannot speak for themselves. I argue that the most important movement contribution is to lead “comfort women” to speaking out, which exposes the impossibility of nationalism without competitive performativity. Therefore, what we need to do, rather than insisting that the movement is a simple “nationalist one,” is to take responsibility to produce a new space that can offer insight about our past in the present with a transformative recognition of “comfort women.”

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