Politics of Representation: Americanization of Korean Comfort Women and Camptown Sex Worker Discourses

Abstract

Politics of Representation: Americanization of Korean Comfort Women and Camptown Sex Worker Discourses examines the phenomenon of Americanization process of literary representations dealing with Korean comfort women and camptown sex workers. Examining various Asian/American writers` interviews and scholarly articles, the paper interrogates continuous publication of these discourses in relation to US Eurocentrism and Orientalism which have produced fascinated Western gaze toward the oppression of Asian women in general. Started with mostly Korean American female writers` works on comfort women, representational efforts on Korean comfort women and also US military camptown sex workers have been expanded to American writers with different ethnic and gender identities. The paper examines the fallacy found in the repetitive ethical claims appeared in the interviews of those American writers, who highlight political objectives of such narratives. Instead, the paper urges for a critical intervention on the part of Asian/American scholars to frame a new mode of discussion that enables to first fully recognize Korean comfort women and camptown sex workers as a cherished American topic and then to provide tools for critical readings of those discourses on the topic.

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