Objectification, Bodily Revenge, and National Identity: Refashioning ‘Comfort Women’ in Chinese Cinema

Abstract

ABSTRACTConsidering comfort women as both a contested object of knowledge and a productive figure, this article examines the representational endeavours undertaken by Chinese filmmakers in the past three decades. Specifically, it analyses three fictional films – How Many Levels are Hells (1992), Zhenzhen (2002), and City of Life and Death (2009) – which were produced in disparate socio-political and historical circumstances. Central to this article is a careful examination of women’s violated bodies on screen that have aroused nationalistic sentiments and concomitantly unsettled the very nationalism produced under the rubric of an ingrained masculinist public culture. The article highlights how these cinematic representations address the thorny problems of commodification and objectification of women’s sexuality, the crisis of survival faced by former comfort women, and the universal suffering of comfort women regardless of their nationalities. In a broader sense, by interrogating the comfort women issue as a purveyor of knowledge, the article contributes to the film studies of female sexuality and the memorialisation of World War II in contemporary China.