Multiple Encounters and Reconstructed Identities

This paper explores multiple encounters between activist-survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery (“comfort women” or halmonis, meaning “elderly women” or “grannies” in Korean) and solidarity activists. I mainly focus on the stories of two foundational figures in the ongoing justice campaign for the survivors, both of whom faced that forceful military act (between 1932 and 1945) as teenage girls in colonized Korea, although in dramatically different ways: Yun Chung-ok, a leading scholar and activist who, having managed to escape the fate of many other peers, first spoke out about Japanese military sexual slavery, and Kim Bok-dong, a survivor and human rights activist. This paper will address the multiple encounters and dialogues of memories to resituate subjects, which led to overcoming personal trauma and reaching out to others and continues to drive the redress movement. Drawing on oral history interviews, feminist ethnography, and various documented resources including survivors’ testimonies, which have been archived for around twenty years as part of my own scholar-activist work, I juxtapose these women’s lives to show how a community of responsibility has been formed to decolonize androcentric history. The women involved in the movement for the resolution of the Japanese military sexual slavery issue reinterpreted their experiences as having been formed by imperialism, colonialism, and patriarchy. While caring for and healing with one another, they suggested the possibility of a new subject formation. Through mutually constructed identities, activist-survivors broke away from social stigma and became agents who led transformation of a postcolonial society

Colonialism · Comfort women · Patriarchy · Political science · Redress · Sociology · Solidarity · Gender Studies · Japanese History and Culture · Korean Peninsula Historical and Political Studies · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies