Narrative as a site of subject construction
The `Comfort Women' debate
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7100231 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Maki Kimura (The Open University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2008 |
| Volume | 9 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 5-24 |
| Publication date | 2008-03-04 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Feminist Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1464-7001 • E-ISSN: 1741-2773 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/1464700108086360 |
| OpenAlex | W2166383435 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 10 |
| References cited | 21 |
The ordeal of `Comfort Women' who were sexually enslaved by the Japanese Imperial Military during the Second World War became widely known in the 1990s through these women's accounts of their experience. Instead of considering their narratives as historical data which reflect the `true' historical past, this article locates them within a broader framework of thinking of narratives. Drawing on the understanding of narrative as a key to the self and the subject which has been developed in narrative research, as well as Judith Butler on interpellation and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on subaltern agency, this article argues that the `Comfort Women's' testimonies should not be read one-dimensionally in the light of `truth' and `falsity', but should rather be considered as the site of their subject-formation. Their narratives are where agency concurrently emerges, and `Comfort Women' are thus not powerless victims but are active participants in their creation of their own narratives and their own selves
Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Comfort women · Epistemology · Falsity · Literature · Narrative · Narrative inquiry · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Storytelling · Subaltern · Subject (documents · Subjectification · Trial by ordeal · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Law · Philosophy
The Paradox of Vernacularization
Absent the Silently Invisible
Airing Egypt's Dirty Laundry
Exploiting humiliation
Rethinking 'Rape as a Weapon of War
Echoes of victimhood
Militarising national security through criminalisation of conscientious objectors to conscription in South Korea
Museum Activism Against Military Sexual Slavery
Reproachable Victims'? Representations and Self-representations of Russian Women Involved in Transnational Prostitution
Accounting for silence
The self we live by
Subalternity and Representation
Documents of Life 2
Narrative Psychology, Trauma and the Study of Self/Identity
The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science
Telling Sexual Stories
Bodies that Matter
Reading Narratives
What is the subject
Formulating narrative psychology
Cultural Autobiography, Testimonial, and Asian American Transnational Feminist Coalition in the "Comfort Women of World War II" Conference
No secrets
Breaking Out Again
Silence, subaltern speech and the intellectual in South Korea
A Critique of Postcolonial Reason
Bodies That Matter
The Psychic Life of Power
| Unique citing works | 10 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,59 |
| Citation span | 2009 - 2025 (17) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 9 |