The comfort women
Subtitle: sexual violence and postcolonial memory in Korea and Japan
By: C. Sarah Soh.
Series: Worlds of desire; American gay
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Chicago
Language: eng
Number of pages: 352
ISBN-13: 9780226767765; 9780226767772
Subjects: Comfort women -- Korea -- History; World War, 1939-1945 -- Women -- Korea; Service, Compulsory non-military -- Japan; World War, 1939-1945 -- Atrocities -- Japan
Description: From the Publisher: In an era marked by atrocities perpetrated on a grand scale, the tragedy of the so-called comfort women-mostly Korean women forced into prostitution by the Japanese army-endures as one of the darkest events of World War II. These women have usually been labeled victims of a war crime, a simplistic view that makes it easy to pin blame on the policies of imperial Japan and therefore easier to consign the episode to a war-torn past. In this revelatory study, C. Sarah Soh provocatively disputes this master narrative. Soh reveals that the forces of Japanese colonialism and Korean patriarchy together shaped the fate of Korean comfort women-a double bind made strikingly apparent in the cases of women cast into sexual slavery after fleeing abuse at home. Other victims were press-ganged into prostitution, sometimes with the help of Korean procurers. Drawing on historical research and interviews with survivors, Soh tells the stories of these women from girlhood through their subjugation and beyond to their efforts to overcome the traumas of their past. Finally, Soh examines the array of factors-from South Korean nationalist politics to the aims of the international women's human rights movement-that have contributed to the incomplete view of the tragedy that still dominates today.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Gender, Class, Sexuality, and Labor under Japanese Colonialism and Imperialist War; title: Part I. Gender and Structural Violence; title: 1.  From Multiple Symbolic Representations to the Paradigmatic Story; title: 2. Korean Survivors¿ Testimonial Narratives; title: 3. Japan¿s Military Comfort System as History - Part II. Public Sex and Women¿s Labor; title: 4. Postwar/Postcolonial Memories of the Comfort Women; title: 5. Private Memories of Public Sex; title: 6. Public Sex and the State.