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Conjuring "Comfort Women": Mediated Affiliations and Disciplined Subjects in Korean/American Transnationality
- Journal of Asian American Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 6, Number 1, February 2003
- pp. 25-55
- 10.1353/jaas.2003.0027
- Article
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The matter of Korean "comfort women" poses multiple problems — of nomination, of identification, of representation, and of knowledge-production. This essay considers the possible implications of the various efforts by Korean/Americans to recall and represent Korean "comfort women" in literature, film/video, visual arts, and scholarship. Rather than attributing a shared ethnic and/or gender identity as the secure origin or compelling cause of their representational impulse, it argues that these efforts dispel the wishful trajectory in which a more intimate identification with the Korean "comfort women" leads to better representations of the "comfort women," which in turn secures greater justice for these women.