Korean Comfort Women of World War II

“…Use curiosity to ask challenging questions about what appear as normal, everyday banalities in order to try and understand make visible’ the hidden gendering of the practice and theorizing of international relations” –Cynthia Enloe

In times of armed conflict, women are most susceptible to violence and silencing through the sexualization, dehumanization, and stigmatization of their identities. Janie Leatherman highlights this point when stating “gender based violence often intensifies and becomes more extreme in a crisis, even escalating into a tool of war “ (4). This is inevitable in a patriarchal society where hegemonic masculine values construct gender norms and gender expectations. Sexual violence during armed conflict does not develop in isolation from the society’s preexisting socioeconomic and culturally shaped gender relationships. Furthermore, the patriarchal nature of a society does not work alone in creating injustices, such as sexual violence, against women during and after armed conflict; there must be a “framework that embraces the realities, contradictions, and intersections of various global relations of power” (Kempadoo, 29). These intersections include the relationships between gender, race, class, cultural, and societal ideologies. In my paper, I take on Cynthia Enloe’s challenge of using an enquiring, gendered lens to explore the silencing of women during and after war by examining the case of the Korean ‘comfort women’ of World War II. I will analyze how the intersection of prevailing social determinants and ideologies have regulated and perpetuated the rationale and, thus, the invisibility of the Korean comfort women during and in the aftermath of World War II.

Literature Review & Research Methodology

Yoshiaki Yoshimi’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military during World War II, Margaret Stetz’s Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II, as well as Toshiyuki Tanaka’s Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in

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