"They Comfort Me": The Politics of Representation and the Power of Survivor Visibility for WWII Korean Comfort Women and Modern-Day Asian Femme Sex Workers
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The purpose of my paper is to compare WWII Korean comfort women's experiences of gendered, racialized, and class-based imbalances of power to those of the modern-day Asian femme sex worker and explore the possibility that these two marginalized groups may share commonalities in the way they practice resilience, empowerment, and survivorship. Before analyzing such dynamics of power, it is important to first clearly define and describe the characteristics of Korean comfort women and Asian femme sex workers, as these identities are prone to misconstruals based on histories of misrepresentations. This research will draw upon literature on the history of the comfort system, testimonies of Korean comfort women, statistics on sex workers, literature on stereotypes about Asian sexuality, interviews with Asian femme sex workers in the Bay Area, and literature on feminist theories. This paper will conclude that incomplete understandings of Korean comfort women and Asian femme sex workers contribute to their disempowerment, and thus, this project will culminate with a creative piece that aims to account for such lack of nuance in existing narratives in the format of a feature film screenplay.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | [ca. May 2018] |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Yi, G. |
|---|
Subjects
| Subject | Korean |
|---|---|
| Subject | comfort women |
| Subject | Asian |
| Subject | femme |
| Subject | sex workers |
| Subject | race/ethnicity |
| Subject | gender |
| Subject | class |
| Subject | power |
| Subject | choice |
| Subject | coercion |
| Subject | feminism |
| Subject | survivor |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Yi, G. (2018). "They Comfort Me": The Politics of Representation and the Power of Survivor Visibility for WWII Korean Comfort Women and Modern-Day Asian Femme Sex Workers. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/bm365vn2526
Collection
Stanford University, Program in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Honors Theses
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- Contact
- gyi@stanford.edu
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