Description
This paper explores how representations of gendered bodies subjected to wartime sexual violence generate affective resonance of hope and challenge gender injustice. Building upon feminist and decolonial scholarship on memory and emotions, it seeks to interrogate how we remember and feel embodied experiences of violence, and how certain bodies are mobilised within postcolonial memory spaces. 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 and global gender-based violence to confront the dominant narratives of reconciliation and post-violence. Utilising auto-ethnography and visual analysis of museum artefacts, I examine how representation of victims' bodies deliver the emotion of hope, and how such emotion resonates with visitors and shapes contested subjectivities around victimhood and justice. I argue that the affective resonances are politically generative, producing new configurations of gendered subject positions and critiques of patriarchal, masculine, and nationalist aspects of the South Korean state. By examining how violence against bodies continues to live on, this paper joins ongoing debates on the role of emotions, memory, and embodiment in understanding gendered violence and advances transnational gender justice.
