Chunghee Sarah Soh (San Francisco State University)
| DATE: | Friday, September 17, 2004 |
|---|---|
| TIME: | 1:30 p.m. |
| PLACE: | IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton St., 6th Floor |
| FORMAT: | Colloquium |
| SPONSOR: | Center for Korean Studies |
This study explores the contemporary South Korean struggles over historical injustice by paying special attention to the "comfort women" tragedy, which has become perhaps the most internationally sensationalized issue among multiple unsettling legacies of Korea's twentieth century history. Owing to the transnational human rights movement, comfort women are now represented as "military sex slaves" of wartime imperial Japan. Korean activists' definition of the comfort women issue as Japan's "war crime," however, touches on only one dimension of a multifaceted social problem: It does not unravel the complicated sociohistorical and political economic truths about violence against women. The Korean comfort women tragedy is a case of gendered "structural violence" in patriarchy under colonial capitalism, carried out through structural mechanisms of class and "race" exploitation, local collaboration, and common masculinist sexual cultural mores, so as to serve the imperialist war efforts.
Chunghee Sarah Soh is a sociocultural anthropologist who specializes in women's issues, gender/ sexuality, and social/cultural change. She is the author of The Chosen Women in Korean Politics: An Anthropological Study (Praeger, 1991) and Women in Korean Politics (Westview Press, 1993). Her current research, is concerned with the "comfort women" issue. Field research for this project has been carried out in Korea, Japan, The Netherlands, and the National Archives in Washington D.C. Dr. Soh is a graduate with highest honors of Sogang University in Seoul, and earned her Master's and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Hawaii.
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Sponsored by a Grant from the Korea Foundation.
