Andrea J. Horbinski (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ahorbinski) wrote2011-11-02 10:07 am
ahorbinski) wrote2011-11-02 10:07 am
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Book review: The Comfort Women
Bibliographic Data: Soh, C. Sarah. The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Main Argument: Soh's main argument is that "the personal tragedies of Korean comfort women arose, in part, from the institutionalized everyday gender violence tolerated in patriarchal homes and enacted in the public sphere (including the battlefront) steeped in what I call 'masculinist sexual culture' in colonial Korea and imperial Japan." Additionally, "the majority of Korean comfort women survivors were not mobilzed as cheongsindae." (3) In other words, the comfort women system cannot be properly understood outside of the structural gender violence prevalent in both Korea and Japan which allowed it to flourish as a transformation and extension of prewar sexual practices.
Historiographical Engagement: As a work of anthropology, Soh's engagement with the historiography of the prewar period in Korea and Japan is minimal. However, she delves deeply into the postwar historiography of the comfort women system for her arguments, as well as activist accounts and interviews with comfort women survivors, none of which she conducted herself. Instead, Soh mostly interviews activists and historians.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Soh reviews the social and cultural structures of oppression that enabled the wide spread of the comfort women system in the Japanese empire before and during the war, noting that "the way in which they [South Korea activists and their supporters] have framed the story of comfort women as exclusively a Japanese war crimes issue has diverted attention from the sociocultural and historical roots of women's victimization in Korea" (1-2, emphasis original).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples In this chapter Soh reviews the four ideologies which she diagnoses to have structured the bifurcated terms of the current debate over the comfort women system: ethnic nationalist, feminist human rights activism, "masculinist sexism" and fascistic paternalism. Advocates "decontextualized, transnational version" of the story has emerged as paradigmatic, though this narrative is not unproblematic from the standpoint of historical fact. NB: Soh quotes Amazon.com reviews (!) to make some of her points about the transnational discourse of the comfort women.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Far from being uniformly victims of kidnapping or outright coercion, many comfort women survivors were of working-class (as well as middle-class) backgrounds who left home in an attempt to escape abusive circumstances or to better their lot in life. As lower-class Korean women in the Japanese empire, they typically faced social oppression along multiple axes, usually gender, class, race, and geopolitical.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Reviewing the different kinds of "comfort stations" involved in the comfort women system and the different kinds of sexual labor that took place there, Soh finds that the comfort women system encompassed both the more familiar "forced military prostitution" and sexual slavery and militarily authorized licensed prostitution in which comfort women were remunerated, sometimes quite lucratively, for their sexual labor.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples Reviewing the testimonies of those individual comfort women survivors who have come forward shows that not all of them have uniformly negative memories of their experiences, a fact which has been utterly buried in the so-called "history war" over wartime memory between Japan and Korea.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples The private memories of Korean comfort women survivors' experiences as comfort women provide what Soh characterizes as "counternarratives" to the paradigmatic narrative of the unrelenting misery of wartime sexual slavery. Flattening the diversity of the comfort women experience, according to Soh, does the personal survivors and the complexities of human interactions, even in gendered power structures, a historical and moral disservice.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples The postwar systems of women's sexual labor around U.S. military installations in particular in both Korea and Japan confirm the structural nature of the gendered oppression that led to the entrenchment of the comfort women system. Furthermore, the way in which Korean comfort women survivors were marginalized and excluded as sexually "defiled" and excluded from the normative category of "women" until the 1990s and the refusal to reckon with the involvement of Korean men in the recruitment of Korean girls and women to and the running of comfort stations.
Epilogue: Argument, Sources, Examples Noting the historical conjunction of structural power and customary gender violence that produced the comfort women system, Soh has attempted to produce an entire rather than a "good-enough" truth, one that addresses the entirety of a system that "operated insidiously through the less obvious mechanisms of class and 'race' exploitation in combination with the institutional legacies of public sex under colonial capitalism and imperial Japan's war of aggression" (236-37). Soh goes on to indict the preponderance of power held by the mass media and by the nationalist educational curriculum in postliberation Korea, arguing that all Koreans--historians, activists, and the general populace--must acknowledge their own complicity in the comfort women system and its decedents, and that this may produce not only a genuine reconciliation between Japan and Korea and a collaborative commitment to combat violence against women, whether in peace or in war.
Critical assessment: On the whole, this is a strong, necessary book, one that presents what I do think is an important revision to the common understanding of the comfort women system by situating it in a patriarchal culture common to both sides of the Korea Strait and by connecting wartime military sexual violence with its decedents (prostitution as well as outright sexual violence) in the postwar period. For these reasons alone, Soh's book deserves to be read.
That said, Soh's treatment does feature persistent infelicities in framing which, while never rising to the level where they outweigh the value of Soh's arguments, do prevent a strong study from reaching true excellence. The first, as might be forgiven of an anthropologist writing a profoundly historicized study, is a series of bizarre gaps in Soh's background reading--I looked in vain for Cynthia Enloe's Bananas, Beaches, and Bases in the bibliography, or for almost any historical treatment of what Soh terms Korea's colonial modernity. The second, less obviously, is that this is a profoundly sex-negative book, which viewpoint Soh never quite states explicitly. Instead, she persistently frames her discussions so as to foreclose the possibility of women ever being desiring (sexual) subjects in their own right. Instead, in Soh's view, for women sex is always sexual labor, whether in marriage or in prostitution (and indeed, these seem to be the only venues in which women have sex).
For all that Soh discusses, rightly, structural violence and its role in propagating the comfort women system, she seems to be unwilling to discuss the role the structural violence of the Japanese imperial army, which is very well-documented, may have played in the comfort women system. For instance, the fact that imperial soldiers were not granted leave, ever, would seem to deserve more than a single mention in passing in explaining the widespread nature of the comfort women system.
There are other niggling errors, such as Soh's misunderstanding of the nature of war crimes--it's fine to argue for a different conception of war crimes, but to do so you need to contrast your definition explicitly with the one that is agreed upon in international law. She also gets the English name of my home institution in Japan, Doshisha University, wrong, which is the sort of thing that unfortunately leads readers to question your accuracy in general. It's also odd to read her relate her experiences being harangued by many of the South Korean activists with whom she used to work: the subaltern can indeed speak, and it's surprising that Soh doesn't seem to realize how many grenades she's lobbing into the discourse by calling out both sides of the debate.
Indeed, I'm told that Soh burned every bridge she had to write this book, which is part of the reason I wish it were an unqualified success, but regardless, this is a strong and important study that deserves to be the standard work on the subject.
Further reading: Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History
Meta notes: This book sits oddly in the Chicago Press "Worlds of Desire" series, which focuses on "sexuality, gender, and culture"--none of the other books in the series appear to take on comparable subject matter.
Main Argument: Soh's main argument is that "the personal tragedies of Korean comfort women arose, in part, from the institutionalized everyday gender violence tolerated in patriarchal homes and enacted in the public sphere (including the battlefront) steeped in what I call 'masculinist sexual culture' in colonial Korea and imperial Japan." Additionally, "the majority of Korean comfort women survivors were not mobilzed as cheongsindae." (3) In other words, the comfort women system cannot be properly understood outside of the structural gender violence prevalent in both Korea and Japan which allowed it to flourish as a transformation and extension of prewar sexual practices.
Historiographical Engagement: As a work of anthropology, Soh's engagement with the historiography of the prewar period in Korea and Japan is minimal. However, she delves deeply into the postwar historiography of the comfort women system for her arguments, as well as activist accounts and interviews with comfort women survivors, none of which she conducted herself. Instead, Soh mostly interviews activists and historians.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Soh reviews the social and cultural structures of oppression that enabled the wide spread of the comfort women system in the Japanese empire before and during the war, noting that "the way in which they [South Korea activists and their supporters] have framed the story of comfort women as exclusively a Japanese war crimes issue has diverted attention from the sociocultural and historical roots of women's victimization in Korea" (1-2, emphasis original).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples In this chapter Soh reviews the four ideologies which she diagnoses to have structured the bifurcated terms of the current debate over the comfort women system: ethnic nationalist, feminist human rights activism, "masculinist sexism" and fascistic paternalism. Advocates "decontextualized, transnational version" of the story has emerged as paradigmatic, though this narrative is not unproblematic from the standpoint of historical fact. NB: Soh quotes Amazon.com reviews (!) to make some of her points about the transnational discourse of the comfort women.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Far from being uniformly victims of kidnapping or outright coercion, many comfort women survivors were of working-class (as well as middle-class) backgrounds who left home in an attempt to escape abusive circumstances or to better their lot in life. As lower-class Korean women in the Japanese empire, they typically faced social oppression along multiple axes, usually gender, class, race, and geopolitical.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Reviewing the different kinds of "comfort stations" involved in the comfort women system and the different kinds of sexual labor that took place there, Soh finds that the comfort women system encompassed both the more familiar "forced military prostitution" and sexual slavery and militarily authorized licensed prostitution in which comfort women were remunerated, sometimes quite lucratively, for their sexual labor.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples Reviewing the testimonies of those individual comfort women survivors who have come forward shows that not all of them have uniformly negative memories of their experiences, a fact which has been utterly buried in the so-called "history war" over wartime memory between Japan and Korea.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples The private memories of Korean comfort women survivors' experiences as comfort women provide what Soh characterizes as "counternarratives" to the paradigmatic narrative of the unrelenting misery of wartime sexual slavery. Flattening the diversity of the comfort women experience, according to Soh, does the personal survivors and the complexities of human interactions, even in gendered power structures, a historical and moral disservice.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples The postwar systems of women's sexual labor around U.S. military installations in particular in both Korea and Japan confirm the structural nature of the gendered oppression that led to the entrenchment of the comfort women system. Furthermore, the way in which Korean comfort women survivors were marginalized and excluded as sexually "defiled" and excluded from the normative category of "women" until the 1990s and the refusal to reckon with the involvement of Korean men in the recruitment of Korean girls and women to and the running of comfort stations.
Epilogue: Argument, Sources, Examples Noting the historical conjunction of structural power and customary gender violence that produced the comfort women system, Soh has attempted to produce an entire rather than a "good-enough" truth, one that addresses the entirety of a system that "operated insidiously through the less obvious mechanisms of class and 'race' exploitation in combination with the institutional legacies of public sex under colonial capitalism and imperial Japan's war of aggression" (236-37). Soh goes on to indict the preponderance of power held by the mass media and by the nationalist educational curriculum in postliberation Korea, arguing that all Koreans--historians, activists, and the general populace--must acknowledge their own complicity in the comfort women system and its decedents, and that this may produce not only a genuine reconciliation between Japan and Korea and a collaborative commitment to combat violence against women, whether in peace or in war.
Critical assessment: On the whole, this is a strong, necessary book, one that presents what I do think is an important revision to the common understanding of the comfort women system by situating it in a patriarchal culture common to both sides of the Korea Strait and by connecting wartime military sexual violence with its decedents (prostitution as well as outright sexual violence) in the postwar period. For these reasons alone, Soh's book deserves to be read.
That said, Soh's treatment does feature persistent infelicities in framing which, while never rising to the level where they outweigh the value of Soh's arguments, do prevent a strong study from reaching true excellence. The first, as might be forgiven of an anthropologist writing a profoundly historicized study, is a series of bizarre gaps in Soh's background reading--I looked in vain for Cynthia Enloe's Bananas, Beaches, and Bases in the bibliography, or for almost any historical treatment of what Soh terms Korea's colonial modernity. The second, less obviously, is that this is a profoundly sex-negative book, which viewpoint Soh never quite states explicitly. Instead, she persistently frames her discussions so as to foreclose the possibility of women ever being desiring (sexual) subjects in their own right. Instead, in Soh's view, for women sex is always sexual labor, whether in marriage or in prostitution (and indeed, these seem to be the only venues in which women have sex).
For all that Soh discusses, rightly, structural violence and its role in propagating the comfort women system, she seems to be unwilling to discuss the role the structural violence of the Japanese imperial army, which is very well-documented, may have played in the comfort women system. For instance, the fact that imperial soldiers were not granted leave, ever, would seem to deserve more than a single mention in passing in explaining the widespread nature of the comfort women system.
There are other niggling errors, such as Soh's misunderstanding of the nature of war crimes--it's fine to argue for a different conception of war crimes, but to do so you need to contrast your definition explicitly with the one that is agreed upon in international law. She also gets the English name of my home institution in Japan, Doshisha University, wrong, which is the sort of thing that unfortunately leads readers to question your accuracy in general. It's also odd to read her relate her experiences being harangued by many of the South Korean activists with whom she used to work: the subaltern can indeed speak, and it's surprising that Soh doesn't seem to realize how many grenades she's lobbing into the discourse by calling out both sides of the debate.
Indeed, I'm told that Soh burned every bridge she had to write this book, which is part of the reason I wish it were an unqualified success, but regardless, this is a strong and important study that deserves to be the standard work on the subject.
Further reading: Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History
Meta notes: This book sits oddly in the Chicago Press "Worlds of Desire" series, which focuses on "sexuality, gender, and culture"--none of the other books in the series appear to take on comparable subject matter.