The Corporality of Trauma and Testimony: Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman

Abstract

The history of sexual violence taken into consideration for the present study goes back to the period of Second World War, where hundreds of thousands of young girls, euphemistically called the ‘comfort women’ from different Japanese colonies of the time like Korea, China, Philippines, Indonesia, and Taiwan, were abducted and rounded up by Japanese Imperial Army to provide sexual services to the Japanese soldiers at the military camps before and during the war. The most heinous acts of sexual violence, multiple gang rape, vaginal mutilation, venereal diseases and suicides are manifested in the testimonies and autobiographies of many former comfort women who after fifty years of silence finally found their voices to talk about their ordeal and the trauma they suffered. For the present work, Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997) is studied with a psychoanalytic lens to explore the traumatic history of the real comfort women or the victims of sexual violence. Further, the essay is divided into three other parts where in the first part, the significance of the survivors’ testimonies is investigated through Wendy S. Hesford’s essay “Reading Rape Stories: Material Rhetoric and the Trauma of Representation” (1999). The second part of the paper discusses the rise of trauma theory that has provided novelists with new ways of conceptualising trauma and has shifted attention away from the question of what is remembered of the past to how and why it is remembered charted out by Cathy Caruth’s 1996 published work, Unclaimed Experiences. And the final part is devoted to the transmission of intergenerational trauma as represented in fictional narratives studied through Anne Whitehead’s Trauma Fiction (2004).