The ethno-nationalist solidarity and (dis)comfort in the Wednesday Demonstration in South Korea

Abstract

‘Comfort women’ refers to the estimated 80,000 to 200,000 women who were forced to serve the Japanese imperial army sexually, physically, and mentally during WWII in and beyond the Asia-Pacific region. Drawing on ethnographic research that I conducted on the protests for comfort women called ‘the Wednesday Demonstration’ from September 2019 to August 2020, this intervention traces both how sexually violated women and their bodies are represented in ways that comfort Minjok (Korean ethnicity) and how discomfort can function as a starting point of alternative feminist knowledge production and transformative praxis. This intervention interrogates how the comfort women narrative draws on paternal metaphors of colonial history—the ‘raped daughter (comfort woman)’ and ‘weak father (colonized Korea)’—and how it reinforces the savior fantasies of Korean men. It then illustrates how this narrative creates an ethnic comfort zone in which the sense of the ‘we, Koreans’ fueled by ethnic victimhood is strengthened and a unified Korea (victim) is re-imagined in opposition to Japan (perpetrator) as the other. By introducing activist Jung Ah-lim’s case, this paper examines how her feelings of discomfort revealed forms of epistemic injustice in which Korean ethno-nationalist leaders determine forms of knowledge regarding comfort women and control the direction of political acts for their nationalist purposes. In doing so, this intervention shows how discomfort enables Jung Ah-lim to pursue her own knowledge and transformative praxis for the comfort women issue.