The Representation of the Cold War Regime in Recent Korean Films about the Comfort Women: An Analysis of Herstory and I Can Speak

Abstract

Herstory and I Can Speak have advanced beyond previous films about the so-called comfort women by representing a reflective post-memory generation and comfort women as subalterns that can speak. The two films also weave into their narratives the mobilization and exploitation of female bodies and sexuality under the Cold War regime that persisted and became entangled with Japans colonial rule of Korea, as well as introspection about the patriarchy within us. These works exemplify the advances made in Korean society regarding public memory of the comfort women issue. However, the two films reenact the Cold War relationships between Korea, Japan, and the US by showing Japanese courts in the 1990s ignoring what the former comfort women said in transnational legal venues and the US House of Representatives in the early 2000s becoming the worlds first official body to listen to those voices. In addition, both films portray the post-memory generation that has heard the testimony of the comfort women as consisting solely of Koreans, betraying their indifference to the transnational nature and complicated temporality of the comfort women issue. That has kept introspection on these issues from going beyond Koreas borders. How can we represent the complicated temporality of the amalgamation of colonialism and the Cold War regime that together make up the comfort women issue in Korean society? By demonstrating that this question is the point at which progress on the comfort women issue has stopped in Korean society, this paper seeks to specify the creative approach that public memory needs to develop in relation to this fraught historical and contemporary context.