From imperial gifts to sex slaves: theorizing symbolic representations of the 'comfort women'

Abstract

Since 1992, owing largely to the activism of Korean and Japanese women leaders, ex-comfort women and legal experts, a precedent-setting international debate has raged at the United National with regard to defining the 'comfort women' issue as a war crime and gross violation of women's human rights. The UN debate has radically shifted the paradigm for representing the comfort women, from prostitutes to sex slaves. This paper examines the multiple, competing symbolic representations of comfort women by theorizing the ideologies of three principal parties implicated in the debate as 'patriarchal fascism', 'masculinist sexism' and 'feminist humanitarianism'. As a historical reality, the comfort women issue is complex, interpenetrating the dimensions of gender, social class, ethnicity and state power. This paper argues that the categorical representations of comfort women as either prostitutes or sex slaves are only partial truths deriving from narrative frames that not only reveal the ideological stances of the opposing camps but also serve their partisan interests in the global post-Cold War politics of women's rights as human rights.

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