The "comfort women" are women and girls who were held in sexual servitude to the Japanese imperial armed forces during the 1930s and 1940s. This is an unresolved historical legacy for the Japanese government and the region of East Asia. It has reverberated across the world, reaching North America and Europe. Yet its intransigence is enduring and calls for historical justice are expanding. This roundtable includes a multidisciplinary and regionally diverse group of scholars introducing innovative approaches or materials to this field of study. The common thread that ties our roundtable together (in addition to the topic of the "comfort women") is the intersection of gender, identity, the state, and colonialism, across East Asia and beyond. Hao unearths how the Chinese public understands comfort women history on the basis of social media posts and how this interacts with collective memory of colonialism and social norms regarding gender. Tsukamoto reveals that militarism and nationalism work hand in hand to mercilessly exploit women and to silence their voices of trauma as a strategy of statecraft in Japan. Kang focuses on Taiwanese indigenous survivors and how early sexual trauma in the context of structural oppression influenced their life trajectories and their interaction with the comfort women movement. Mladenova explores how the comfort women movement came to Germany and how this civil society activism interacts with government imperatives. Eriksson examines how contestations over the comfort women issue are articulated in representations of former comfort women as 'sex slaves' and 'prostitutes' respectively, in the international arena. Mary M. McCarthy, a scholar of the historical legacy of the comfort women for Japanese foreign policy and the role of transnatio ...
TFDC 2.15 MSA Conference Newcastle 2023 conference@memorystudiesassociation.org
The "comfort women" are women and girls who were held in sexual servitude to the Japanese imperial armed forces during the 1930s and 1940s. This is an unresolved historical legacy for the Japanese government and the region of East Asia. It has reverberated across the world, reaching North America and Europe. Yet its intransigence is enduring and calls for historical justice are expanding. This roundtable includes a multidisciplinary and regionally diverse group of scholars introducing innovative approaches or materials to this field of study. The common thread that ties our roundtable together (in addition to the topic of the "comfort women") is the intersection of gender, identity, the state, and colonialism, across East Asia and beyond. Hao unearths how the Chinese public understands comfort women history on the basis of social media posts and how this interacts with collective memory of colonialism and social norms regarding gender. Tsukamoto reveals that militarism and nationalism work hand in hand to mercilessly exploit women and to silence their voices of trauma as a strategy of statecraft in Japan. Kang focuses on Taiwanese indigenous survivors and how early sexual trauma in the context of structural oppression influenced their life trajectories and their interaction with the comfort women movement. Mladenova explores how the comfort women movement came to Germany and how this civil society activism interacts with government imperatives. Eriksson examines how contestations over the comfort women issue are articulated in representations of former comfort women as 'sex slaves' and 'prostitutes' respectively, in the international arena. Mary M. McCarthy, a scholar of the historical legacy of the comfort women for Japanese foreign policy and the role of transnational actors in the comfort women movement, will serve as the roundtable chair. After brief presentations on each speaker's research, we will engage with each other on common threads, the current state of this field of study, and the unique contributions that each author is making towards advancing our knowledge.
