The Comfort Women

Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan

C. Sarah Soh

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Hardback

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English

University of Chicago Press
15 February 2009

Social & cultural history; Ethical issues: prostitution & sex industry; Gender studies: women

Series: Worlds of Desire

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.

By: C. Sarah Soh
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 24mm, Width: 16mm, Spine: 3mm
Weight: 709g
ISBN: 9780226767765
ISBN 10: 0226767760
Series: Worlds of Desire
Pages: 384
Publication Date: 15 February 2009
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Professional & Vocational , A / AS level , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

C. Sarah Soh is professor of anthropology at San Francisco State University and the author of Women in Korean Politics.

Reviews for The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan

A courageous, judicious, and well-written book that refuses to yield to knee-jerk responses or politically correct narratives, but rather insists on setting the comfort women within broader historical and cultural contexts. Sympathetic and sensitive, C. Sarah Soh nevertheless challenges both feminist and ethnic nationalist paradigms in an astonishing display of objectivity. - Gail Lee Bernstein, author of Isami's House: Three Centuries of a Japanese Family