Emotions in the making : sexual violence in the Japanese empire, 1937–1945
Journal article
Gao, Ming. (2024). Emotions in the making : sexual violence in the Japanese empire, 1937–1945. Women's History Review. pp. 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2024.2305502
Authors | Gao, Ming |
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Abstract | This article applies the history of emotions lens to study the emotions experienced by the ‘comfort women’ in the Japanese Empire. Emotions have been a long-neglected aspect in the study of military sexual violence. The article examines how a mélange of positive and negative emotions enabled those women to exercise some limited agency in a confined and tightly regulated space and, in some rare cases, a rather fair degree of autonomy outside of the confined space. By unravelling the varied textures of interactions between sexual violence and emotions, I argue that affective attachment and intimate relations developed in the confined sites of sexual exploitation formed a kind of strategic intimacy that enables those individuals to exercise limited forms, and a finite amount, of agency. Further, the article utilises sources produced from the perspectives of the victimised women and imperial regulators. Those angles investigate emotions expressed through, and embedded in, dynamic power relationships. The dual perspectives bring out gendered experiences of emotions and also reveal a disparate set of nuanced emotions due to positionality. The article therefore offers a critical analysis of the interrelationships among sexual violence, state power, and a particular set of emotions as a form of power and resistance. |
Keywords | Emotions; positive emotions; sexual violence; comfort women; the Japanese empire |
Year | 01 Jan 2024 |
Journal | Women's History Review |
Journal citation | pp. 1-23 |
Publisher | Routledge |
ISSN | 0961-2025 |
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2024.2305502 |
Web address (URL) | https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09612025.2024.2305502 |
Open access | Published as ‘gold’ (paid) open access |
Research or scholarly | Research |
Page range | 1-23 |
Publisher's version | License File Access Level Open |
Output status | Published |
Publication dates | |
20 Jan 2024 | |
Publication process dates | |
Accepted | Jan 2024 |
Deposited | 20 Sep 2024 |
Additional information | © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. |
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. | |
Place of publication | United Kingdom |
https://acuresearchbank.acu.edu.au/item/90z30/emotions-in-the-making-sexual-violence-in-the-japanese-empire-1937-1945
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Publisher's version
OA_Gao_2024_Emotions_in_the_making_sexual_violence.pdf | |
License: CC BY 4.0 | |
File access level: Open |
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