ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the emergence of women’s public memory and its ritual mediation in South Korea during the post-colonial and post–Cold War era. In fact, the idea of a women’s sphere was part of an emerging feminist public space in Korea, responding to the proliferation of various forms of feminist discourse. Since the 1990s, the Japanese military comfort women activism in Korea reconstituted the public memory of comfort women through civic solidarity worldwide. A growing awareness of women’s human rights and feminist activism against sexual violence resulted in strategic interventions in the politics of historical memory. In the public shamanic ritual, shamans and feminists played not only the role of ritual participants but also adopted a performative familial role to these women, as none of their actual family members attended. The ritual alliance between shamans and feminists for memorialisation of comfort women keeps the non-explicit sign of gendered dissent against the violations of women’s human rights.
