Feeling for 'Comfort Women': Performing Human Rights Discourse in Asian/America

This essay complicates the process of ”coming-to-voice” for and about ”comfort women.” It critiques Asian/American involvements in the ”comfort women” issue as part of the American bio-politics. The essay regards post-WWⅡ Americanized representations of ”comfort women” as a self-interested cultural translation of the racial and gendered other with epistemological problems. While the international ”coming-to-voice” for ”comfort women” establishes America as the guardian for humanity, its ethnographic exploitation reproduces such cultural binaries as West and East, America and Asia, self and other, freedom and torture, at the same time generating spectacles of trauma. This essay examines the epistemological and emotional investment in various Asian/American public discourses by asking how talking about and for ”comfort women” fabricates the narrative of a universal human value. While affirming the necessity of humanitarian redress, the essay raises the questions: How does the notion of a universal humanity conjure an American nationhood as the benevolent self reaching out to the suffering other? How are Asian/Americans variously implicated in this narrative? How, in the process of Americanizing ”comfort women” issues, does cultural politics of emotion come to organize public empathy? The essay examines the performative aspect of emotions like empathy, pride, and shame in the ”comfort women” political theaters. While certain emotions subjugate ”comfort women” as ”our” object of investment, some emotions may offer new ways of reading trauma. Ultimately, the essay asks: If certain emotions for the victims risk propertizing ”them” for ”our” self-interested purpose, can ”we” possibly seek humanitarian ends with this self-other divide?