10.25335/PPJ.2.2-09
Zolkos, Magdalena
Magdalena
Zolkos
Goethe University Frankfurt
The "Endangered Voices" of the Taiwanese Victims of Japanese Sexual Slavery
Towards Postcolonial Feminist Ethics of Listening to Trauma
Public Philosophy Journal
2019
Article
en
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
While the question of justice for the victims of sexual slavery institutionalized by the Japanese Imperial Army during the war has generated great communal and scholarly interest, in Taiwan it remains a pressing and unresolved concern what implications this traumatic history has had for the consolidation of the postcolonial and post-authoritarian publics. This is not only because the sexual enslavement of Taiwanese women unfolded before the backdrop of Japan’s colonization of Taiwan, in particular of the Indigenous “highlander” groups but also because the post-war public (and private) narrativization of this history, and any pursuit of justice, were impossible during Chiang Kai-shek’s authoritarian era. Referring to the victims by the Taiwanese term “Ama” (rather than the more common but problematic term “comfort women”), I propose that in contemporary Taiwan the traumatic history of female sexual enslavement is of great significance for contemporary public life because it functions as a kind of “optic,” which reveals and magnifies broader historical dynamics of colonial appropriation, of sexual and epistemic violence against women, and of the marginalization of Indigenous and economically disadvantaged groups. Methodologically, the identification of such an optic draws from cultural theory of psychoanalysis, which links traumatic experience to “unspeakability” and to psychic repression of overwhelming contents, and from sociological and philosophic insights into silencing as a mode of epistemic violence.