Becoming Vocal: Politicizing the Voices of "Comfort Women"

This presentation examines "comfort women" survivors’ everlasting struggle to make their voices heard by focusing on two key aspects of their testimonies: the linguistic and the ideological framework through which survivors narrate their experiences. The act of speaking alone does not guarantee that a voice can be recognized and heard. Rather, many conditions must be fulfilled before speakers become legible to listeners. In this presentation, I examine the complex conditions within which "comfort women" survivors come to be recognized as legitimate speakers whose words are taken seriously.

I begin with a critical analysis of the 2017 South Korean film I Can Speak, discussing how the protagonist transforms from a "silent" victim into a vocal survivor-activist through her acquisition of English and her speaking tour in the United States. I analyze how such a plot reinforces Anglophone (and especially US dominance) in the transpacific redress movement. Next, I turn to the testimonies of Chinese women in the resistance who were captured and forced into Japanese military sexual slavery. Examining how they strategically foreground their heroic resistance when disclosing their experience of sexual assault, I reveal how anti-Japanese nationalism simultaneously legitimizes the discussion of sexual violence, an otherwise taboo subject, while severely restricting the scope within which it can be discussed.

Keywords: sexual violence, testimony, survivor activism