Description
This paper explores how representations of bodies that experienced sexual violence and remembering gendered bodies in war create affective resonance and dissonance, and how it may contribute to gender justice. Building upon feminist research on the intersection of embodiment, gendered violence and war, and memory, this paper contributes to the scholarship on violence is politically generative by constituting the gendered logic of war and identity. My empirical analysis focuses on the War and Women's Human Rights Museum (WWHRM) in South Korea, remembering Japanese military 'comfort women'/wartime sexual slavery. Utilising auto-ethnography, I examine how the representation of victims of sexual violence at the museum creates affective resonance and dissonance where multi-layered interests and narratives are present. The museum has questioned the male-centric and nationalistic narratives of war and colonialism that forget and silence victims. With an emphasis on gender, the victims/survivors' perspectives, and human rights, the museum has the potential for decolonial remembrance. In a post-conflict society, remembering victims' bodies complicates the ideas of 'post' violence, which are productive within affective and materialist regimes of nationalist and masculine aspects of South Korean state. I argue that affective resonance and dissonance from witnessing violence against bodies open a space for reflecting on violence's consequences and imagining gender justice.
