"Tell Us More Grandmother!": Korean "Comfort Women" Re/constructing and Re/presenting the "Truth" and Memory of Survival through Narratives

Abstract

This work explores the narratives of the military sexual slavery, or “Comfort Women” survivors in South Korea. Between 1910 and 1945, Japan colonized Korea to expand to the other nations, with a dream of establishing the “Asian Empire.” During the process, they coerced or obtained “consent” to volunteer from rural poor women for this systemic rape camp. The focus of the paper is on the survivors’ narratives while the women were silent for half a century. They decided to “come out” and be an active participants in the movement that was mobilized in the early 1990s. The piece explores the issues of feminism, nationalism/patriotism, Koreanness, self-hood, agency and their mutual influences within the politics of narrative, and how the victims/survivors have been placed within the social contexts domestically and globally.