TY - JOUR
T1 - The Geopolitics of Public Memory
T2 - The Challenge and Promise of Transnational Comfort Women Activism
AU - Nadesan, Majia
AU - Kim, Linda
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Organization for Research on Women and Communication.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - Japan conscripted a disputed number of “comfort women” to sexually service their soldiers in occupied territories during World War II. In the aftermath of war, this apparatus was ignored by international diplomacy, and few survivors related their experiences as sex slaves. However, during the early 1990s, sexual crimes against women achieved international attention, emboldened by and emboldening silence breakers whose personal experiences were both affirmed and negated by competing global stakeholders. Activists seeking recognition of and reparations for crimes against survivors of Japan’s comfort women system have since deployed memorials to contest Japan’s position that comfort women were sex workers. These memorials materially instantiate the conflicted interpretations of the scope and severity of Japan’s war crimes, whose undecidability signifies ruptures in the contemporary symbolic order of the United States, Japan, and South Korea alliance. This project examines how online audiences construct the meanings of the highly contested 2017 San Francisco memorial.
AB - Japan conscripted a disputed number of “comfort women” to sexually service their soldiers in occupied territories during World War II. In the aftermath of war, this apparatus was ignored by international diplomacy, and few survivors related their experiences as sex slaves. However, during the early 1990s, sexual crimes against women achieved international attention, emboldened by and emboldening silence breakers whose personal experiences were both affirmed and negated by competing global stakeholders. Activists seeking recognition of and reparations for crimes against survivors of Japan’s comfort women system have since deployed memorials to contest Japan’s position that comfort women were sex workers. These memorials materially instantiate the conflicted interpretations of the scope and severity of Japan’s war crimes, whose undecidability signifies ruptures in the contemporary symbolic order of the United States, Japan, and South Korea alliance. This project examines how online audiences construct the meanings of the highly contested 2017 San Francisco memorial.
KW - Comfort women
KW - contested experience
KW - memorials
KW - narratives and geopolitics
KW - public memory
KW - social media audiences
KW - statues
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85115303004&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85115303004&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/07491409.2021.1954119
DO - 10.1080/07491409.2021.1954119
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85115303004
SN - 0749-1409
VL - 45
SP - 123
EP - 142
JO - Women's Studies in Communication
JF - Women's Studies in Communication
IS - 2
ER -