Legacies of the comfort women of World War II

The stories of the former comfort women -- long suppressed, but now emerging -- have galvanized both Asian and non-Asian intellectuals working in a variety of fields. Throughout the past decade, in particular, scholars of Asian history and politics, feminists, human rights activists, documentary filmmakers, visual artists, and novelists have begun to address the subject of the comfort system; to take up the cause of the surviving comfort women's struggles; to call attention to past (and present) sexual violence against women, especially during wartime; to consider the links among militarism, racism, imperialism, and sexism; and to write the unwritten stories of former comfort women into the narratives of twentieth-century political history.