Applying Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Theory to the Issue of Japanese Military “comfort Women”: With a Focus on Ding Ling’s “when I Was in Xia Village”(1941)

Applying Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Theory to the Issue of Japanese Military “Comfort Women”:

With a Focus on Ding Ling’s “When I Was in Xia Village”(1941)^[1]

Jin Yinhe  (2017-32973)

     The issue of Japanese military “comfort women” involves in a complicated manner the discourses of both nationalism and gender, just as has been pointed out by Ueno Chizuko, a Japanese woman sociologist who turned attention to it early on.^[2] It is precisely at this juncture that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s discourse of the subaltern has been pointed out. Spivak has importantly alluded to the fate of women unable to speak out under the double oppression of British imperialism and Indian patriarchy. Raised for the first time in South Korea in the 1990s, the issue of Japanese military “comfort women” is currently a historical issue for the entire East Asia including the two Koreas and China and, at the same time, a global issue. In the heart of this complex issue is the issue of women created under the double oppression of colonial ruling power and patriarchal power structure. It is problematic that South Korean discourse on “comfort women” so far has been consolidated as the image of an “unfortunate girl from colonial Korea taken away to Japanese troops.” Can subalterns receive empathy and support for the resolution of issues only when they are in the image of victims? In other words, is it impossible for subalterns to raise other kinds of voices?

     Chinese woman writer Ding Ling’s (1904-86) short story “When I Was in Xia Village” (1941) presents a new voice in that it puts forth a novel image of Chinese “comfort women,” one that is not of an unfortunate girl from an occupied territory taken away by Japanese troops. This work realistically depict the eventful life of a Chinese woman: forcibly taken and subjected to sexual slavery by Japanese soldiers who have occupied her village during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), she is then dispatched as an intelligence agent by the communist Chinese authorities. While previous studies have evaluated Zhenzhen(贞贞), the main character, as either a “traitor” or a “national hero,” it seems that researchers’ views of current women’s issues are still based on nationalism. If the so-called resistant “voluntariness” of subalterns is interpreted as unscrupulous or opportunistic in all studies on minorities,^[3] then the social structural contradictions surrounding these people will be rendered invisible.

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