In collaboration with feminist scholars and activists, Comfort Women survivors have spent over three decades raising awareness of the Japanese Imperial Military’s sexual slavery of colonial women during its expansion into Asia (1900-1945). Scholarly research on the topic grew significantly, initially focusing on historical and legal issues, analyzing survivor testimonies and geopolitical ramifications of Japan’s war crimes. While survivor testimony is central to the field, challenges related to preserving historical accuracy and varying interpretations complicate broader understandings of the system of militarized sexual slavery. More recent interdisciplinary scholarship incorporates feminist, postcolonial, and memory studies, but despite this growth, research often remains confined to historical and legal frameworks, neglecting the military comfort system’s extensive impact. This panel addresses these limitations by suggesting a comparative study of Comfort Women for a more inclusive, nuance, and multidisciplinary approach.

Because global patriarchy plays a critical role in justifying sexual violence as a normal part of militaristic endeavors, a comparative approach expands the scope to include similarly impacted groups. Yei Won Lim’s presentation examines the complex genealogy of Comfort Women and military camp town sex workers. She reveals how transnational sexual labor is systematically disciplined and marginalized within national narratives. Lim traces the trajectories of women from various backgrounds—Korean, Soviet, and Southeast Asian—who have been relegated to spatial and temporal zones of exception in U.S. military camp towns. These women’s experiences expose the intricate mechanisms of exclusion that determine national belonging, challenging traditional historiographical boundaries and revealing how sexual labor is simultaneously commodified and stigmatized across different geopolitical contexts.

The logic of commodifying sex and objectifying sexualized bodies extends beyond militarized transactions. Drawing on scholarship comparing adoptees to Comfort Women, Seon-Myung Yoo explores how the logic of justifying sexual service impacts Korean adoptees who were systematically mobilized to provide emotional comfort to military personnel, governments, and adoptive families. Yoo argues that adoptive parents’ expectation that adoptees should provide comfort echoes discourses surrounding militarized sexual violence, demonstrating how American rescue rhetoric conceals the deeply racialized and sexualized dynamics of military humanitarianism. This presentation expands the scope of Comfort Women studies while exposing the insidious ways colonial imaginaries of Asian women and children perpetuate systems of gendered and racialized exploitation.

While the central focus of this panel is militarized logic of (sexual) exploitation, systematic sexual assault accompanied by incarceration is a recurring and comparative form of wartime violence. This panel expands the comparative scope to include shared patterns of sexual violence across different periods and regions. Kimberly A. Nance examines Alicia Partnoy’s “Rosa, I Disowned You,” chronicling the delayed psychological impact of rape during imprisonment by Argentina’s military junta in 1977. Nance analyzes how Partnoy’s narrative construction—separating her present-day self from “Rosa,” her imprisoned twenty-year-old self—parallels psychological dissociation, revealing how her encounter with a documentary on Filipina Comfort Women forces her to acknowledge the shared experiences of government-sanctioned sexual violence across historical contexts.

Because cultural works featuring Comfort Women have the potential to make previously unthought of connections possible, comparative examination of artistic representations across cultural context is particularly vital in the face of declining numbers of survivors as they pass from old age. Ji Nang Kim examines how Tomiyama Taeko’s art collection and Nora Okja Keller’s novel employ “postcolonial submarine” metaphors as floating archives that challenge conventional historical narratives of Comfort Women. Kim analyzes how these submarine spaces become liminal zones where imperial artifacts coexist with victims’ bodies, contrasting Tomiyama’s Japanese feminist anti-militarism and Keller’s Korean American postcolonial justice. By illuminating these alternative archival strategies, the panel reveals how artistic and literary representations serve as powerful sites of memory, resistance, and transnational feminist critique in Comfort Women studies.

Together, these papers represent a significant advancement in Comfort Women studies by expanding beyond traditional historical frameworks to incorporate interdisciplinary and comparative approaches. By examining parallel experiences of sexual violence across different geographic and historical contexts as well as different modes of artistic representations, this panel addresses the urgent need to preserve and honor survivors’ narratives as more survivors pass away with age, while simultaneously developing critical comparative frameworks. This innovative approach will appeal to scholars across disciplinary boundaries—from Asian studies and feminist theory to memory and trauma studies—offering fresh perspectives on a subject that remains politically relevant and ethically imperative.

To ensure we have at least 15 minutes of discussion at the end of the session, we will allocate 10 minutes for introductions and 12 minutes per presentation.