Speaker: Juwon Kim, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto

Abstract: »What does it mean to speak of “comfort women,” a euphemism for women forced into colonial military sexual slavery by the wartime Japanese empire, as a common noun for all subjects of institutionalized sexual slavery? While the “comfort women” issue gained national and global publicity through testimonies in the 1990s, this paper moves the locus of Cold War censorship from excision and redaction to dissolution of proper nouns into common nouns. I read Yi Manhŭi’s Seven Female POWs (1965), the first Korean film whose director was prosecuted for an alleged violation of the postwar Anti-communist Law. Despite the emphasis on North Korean communism in prosecutorial statements and scholarly interpretation, comparing the original and censored scripts reveals that the real target lay elsewhere: the policing of the sexuality of South Korean women, in particular of a camptown military prostitute character referred to as “comfort woman.” I trace the long and public afterlife of “comfort women” in the press throughout the Cold War years, during which the term continued to be in use as a common noun even while the referent proper was denied reparations and redress. Reflecting on the film alongside recent victories in legal pursuits of redress by camptown women and feminist activists, this paper reiterates that we attend more precisely to the operations of censorship to confront a far more ambivalent cultural landscape than has been suggested.« (Source: Online Program)

Wikipedia: History of Asia: History of Japan / Shōwa era | History of Asia: History of Korea / Korea under Japanese rule, History of South Korea | Film: Cinema of South Korea / Films about comfort women | Prostitution: Forced prostitution / Comfort women | Sex and the law: Wartime sexual violence / Wartime sexual violence in World War II | War: Pacific War / Japanese war crimes