2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

The struggle for dignity and justice for ‘Comfort Women’ and other victims of military sexual slavery has risen from obscurity to become a major international issue during the past 25 years. This evolving shift in the perceptions of the public, academics, media, and some international leaders provides a framework for discussion of the complex interactions and rivalries among activists and historians.

Many agree that anynarrative or historical synthesis is at least in part an appropriation due to authors’, and sponsors’ choices of whose voices are important or worthy of representation.  In most cases, though not all, these appropriations  reinforce the general contours of power in the political-economic and cultural settings in which they take place.

Claims of ‘objectivity’ of one type or another have long served to make these appropriations appear to be natural, inevitable or even desirable. Said another way, claims of objectivity legitimize the authority of academics, historians, mass media, pundits, courts, and other structures of power to synthesize and narrate the lived experience of millions of otherwise largely disenfranchised people. Meanwhile, survivors and ‘activists’ – themselves often disenfranchised – have long attempted to break, redefine, or in some instances exploit the same systems of appropriation and representation of human experience.

Navigating these complexities becomes especially urgent when confronting mass crimes that by their nature have are deeply embedded in the political-economic and cultural context that gave birth to the mass crime in the first place.