Whose Comfort?

Speaker: Professor Yonson Ahn, director of Korean Studies at Frankfurt University.

Discussant: Dr Jelke Boesten, Reader Gender and Development, KCL.

Chair: Dr Kieran Mitton, War Studies, KCL.

It’s our great pleasure to invite you to the seminar event of Whose Comfort? at King’s College London, hosted by the Gender Studies Network and the Conflict Security and Development Research Group.

The issue of sexual violence against civilian ‘comfort women’ during World War II has drawn widespread attention in recent years, debated not only within Asian countries but across numerous international forums.

 

Professor Yonson Ahn, author of Whose Comfort?, will address the comfort women system, examining body politics, femininity, and military masculinity to understand how body, sexuality and identity are deployed in the maintenance of colonial and nationalist power, patriarchal relations, and ethnic hierarchies.

Dr Jelke Boesten, Reader of Gender and Development in the Department of International Development at King’s, will provide comments and discussion.

Professor Yonson Ahn is the director of Korean Studies at Frankfurt University. Whose Comfort? is based on Prof. Ahn’s unprecedented research conducted over 20 years on the system of military comfort women during WWII. The work draws on unique in-depth interviews, testimonies and unparalleled research to analyse the impact on both comfort women and Japanese soldiers.