The Violated Female Body as Nation: Cultural, Familial, and Spiritual Identity in Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman

Abstract

If gendered discourse is narrated by a woman, the female voice becomes a trope of identity and power—transgressing, dismantling, violating the law, and speaking her violation. By linking corporeal violence and linguistic, textual, and critical discursive violence engendered in representation, one inevitably confronts the body as the contested site of horrific memory, resistance, defiance of invisibility, and de-silencing. In Nora Okja Keller's poetically complex novel, Comfort Woman, the voice of a Korean comfort woman recounts her individual past and the past of her collective self. Akiko speaks of her body, abused by Japanese soldiers, as the broken nation of Korea, as a link to other violated women, as well as to her mother, grandmother, and daughter, who remain alive in her confused mind and spirit. At the same time, her daughter tries to lead a modern life in Hawaii but is powerfully drawn into her mother's past and current life and body. It is through the voiced violated female body that the cultural identity of Korea confronts the historical authority of the Japanese occupation, but only in death can Akiko return to her rightful spiritual country.