Author: Christine Choi, Department of Communication, University of Pittsburgh - ORCID

Abstract: »This dissertation examines how contemporary visual and digital media represent the traumatic public memories of Korean “comfort women”. These women—who were subjected to sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II, and later by U.S. military systems in postwar South Korea—stand at the center of transnational struggles over history, memory, and justice. While traditional portrayals of their stories often relied on voyeuristic depictions of explicit brutality, contemporary media forms have introduced more nuanced representational strategies.
Bridging communication, memory, and feminist media studies, I propose “multimodalpostmemory han” (MMPMH) as a Korean diasporic, feminist framework for analyzing how trauma circulates across textual, visual, auditory, and compositional modalities. Building on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” and Seo-young Chu’s theory of “postmemory han,” which draws on han, a Korean affective condition encompassing resentment, anger, and grief, MMPMH functions is a theoretical approach for tracing how multimodal media engage trauma’s affective, temporal, spatial, and ethical dimensions through embodied and sensory modes of witnessing. In doing so, it examines how such works illuminate the representational politics and tensions between legibility and opacity in mediating the women’s traumatic memories for Korean, diasporic Korean, and transnational English-speaking audiences.
Through close reading, this project investigates three case studies by Korean diasporic women artists: Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s graphic novel Grass, Gina Kim’s virtual reality film trilogy, Bloodless, Tearless, and Comfortless, and Sujin Kim’s experimental animation short film Unforgotten. Each case study translates the comfort women’s traumatic memories into multisensory experiences that offer alternative modes of witnessing, redress, and ethical relation. The final chapter introduces an application of my mixed-method approach, the “co-creative iterative writing process,” which combines methods of close textual analysis, autoethnography, poetry, oral history, and dialogic performance, to reimagine scholarly writing as a recursive, feminist, and collaborative act of memory. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates how multimodal media are wielded as feminist memory tools to reconfigure the traumatic public memories of comfort women into transnational sites of creative and collective redress.« (Source: Thesis)

Contents:

	Acknowledgements (p. x)
	1.0 Introduction (p. 1)
		1.1 The History, Activism, and Scholarship of Japanese Military Comfort Women (p. 7)
		1.2 Policing, Exploitation, and Colonial Legacies in U.S. Military Camptowns in S. Korea (p. 20)
		1.3 Review of Literature (p. 23)
		1.4 Methods Section (p. 39)
		1.5 Chapter Overview (p. 49)
	2.0 Trauma at the Border of Representation: Tracing Forms of Redress in Grass (p. 53)
		2.1 Introduction (p. 53)
		2.2 Key Terms and Theories in Comics Studies (p. 62)
		2.3 Historical Threads of the Korean Manhwa Industry (p. 70)
		2.4 Biography, Translation, and Evolution of a Graphic Novel (p. 73)
		2.5 Grass’s Representational Approaches (p. 79)
		2.6 Navigating Opacity and Legibility through Comics Techniques (p. 80)
		2.7 Authorial Self-Insertion and the Ethics of Listening (p. 93)
		2.8 Conclusion (p. 107)
	3.0 Dialectics of Identification and Disidentification in Bloodless, Tearless, and Comfortless (p. 110)
		3.1 Introduction (p. 110)
		3.2 Making of the Trilogy: Understanding the VR Trilogy’s Artist, Cultural Contexts, and Reception (p. 125)
		3.3 Dialectic Modes of Viewer Self-Identification and Disidentification (p. 133)
			3.3.1 First-Person Sensory Immersion, Abjection, and Blurring of the Self/Other (p. 133)
				3.3.1.1 Postmemory Han and Strangely Familiar, Intimate Objects (p. 141)
				3.3.1.2 Resisting Voyeuristic Consumption: Complicated Distances for Transnational Audiences (p. 147)
			3.3.2 Place Illusion and Auditory-Visual Mismatch (p. 152)
			3.3.3 Social Presence, the Right to Look, and Immersive Witnessing (p. 159)
		3.4 Conclusion (p. 166)
	4.0 Mediating Trauma Through Experimental Animation: Abstracted Forms and Embodied Witnessing in Unforgotten (p. 169)
		4.1 Introduction (p. 169)
		4.2 Key Terms, Characteristics, and Historical Context of Animation (p. 176)
		4.3 Biography, Reception, and Iterations of an Animation (p. 180)
		4.4 Representational Methods in Unforgotten (p. 189)
			4.4.1 Comfort Women as Nonrealistic, Alternative Bodies (p. 190)
				4.4.1.1 The Push and Pull of Unforgotten’s Animation (p. 191)
				4.4.1.2 Expressive Neutrality and “Lifeness” in Unforgotten (p. 196)
				4.4.1.3 Nakedness or Nudity? The Difficulty of Sharing Stories of Trauma (p. 199)
				4.4.1.4 The Complicated Relationship Between the Representation (p. 203)
			4.4.2 Comfort Women as the Physical Land (p. 207)
				4.4.2.1 Violence, Life and Death in Unforgotten (p. 210)
				4.4.2.2 Mapping Trauma Through Bodies and Land (p. 216)
		4.5 Conclusion (p. 220)
	5.0 Coda (p. 224)
	Bibliography (p. 236)

Wikipedia: History of Asia: History of Japan / Shōwa era | History of Asia: History of Korea / Korea under Japanese rule | Comics: Keum Suk Gendry-Kim / Grass (graphic novel) | Film: South Korean films / Gina Kim (filmmaker) | Prostitution: Forced prostitution / Comfort women | Sex and the law: Wartime sexual violence / Sexual violence in World War II | War: Pacific War / Japanese war crimes