The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (review)

TL;DR: In this paper, Soh takes on a difficult task of re-reading the history of "comfort women" against the "paradigmatic narrative" of Korean female victimization and Japanese masculine violence.

Abstract: In this thought-provoking book, Sarah Soh takes on a difficult task of re-reading the history of ‘‘comfort women’’ against the ‘‘paradigmatic narrative’’ of Korean female victimization and Japanese masculine violence. Tracing the comfort women debates in the past two decades, she identifies the two strands of discourses—‘‘feminist humanitarianism’’ and ‘‘Korean ethnic nationalism’’—that have driven much of the domestic and international redress movements and defined the contour and content of the debates among historians, politicians, and feminist and nationalist activists in Korea and Japan. The paradigmatic narrative tells stories of poor young women who were forcibly abducted and violently thrust into sexual enslavement to Japanese soldiers. As powerful as the paradigmatic narrative of sexual slavery has been, Soh argues, Korean women’s experiences and memories of Japanese colonial rule are far more complex and diverse and thus require nuanced and multifaceted analysis with careful attention to heterogeneous voices and perspectives among the women. Culling information from her own interviews with former comfort women as well as Japanese and Korean publications since the 1970s, Soh presents diverse tales of comfort women and their memories. The picture