Abstract
Performing a mandatory abortion on a teenage woman who is forced into sexual servitude during World War II, a Japanese gynecologist in the military camp in Nora Okja Keller’s novel Comfort Woman (1997) pontificates about “evolutionary differences between the races, biological quirks that made the women of one race so pure and the women of another so promiscuous.” Assuming the position of a social Darwinist, he refers to these seemingly natural differences to make sense of the possible causes for Korean women to enter sexual labor. The gynecologist justifies the oppression, commodification, and sexual exploitation of women by suggesting that men, at the top of the evolutionary ladder, hold dominion over women who, he suggests, are “almost like animals.” He thus concludes in a self-gratifying way: “Luckily for the species, Nature ensures that there is one dominant male to keep the others at bay and the female under control. And the female will always respond to him.”1
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Notes
Nora Okja Keller, Comfort Woman (New York: Penguin, 1997), 22. Hereafter cited parenthetically within the text.
Young-Oak Lee, “Nora Okja Keller and the Silenced Woman: An Interview,” MELUS 28.4 (2003), 158.
See Deborah L. Madsen “Nora Okja Keller: Telling Trauma in the Transnational Military (Sex)industrial Complex,” Interactions 15.2 (2006), 75–84;
Silvia Schultermandl “Writing Rape, Trauma, and Transnationality onto the Female Body: Matrilineal Em-body-ment in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 7.2 (2007), 71–100.
See Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
Cara Cilano and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Against Authenticity: Global Knowledges and Postcolonial Ecocriticism,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 14.1 (2007), 75.
Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (London: Routledge, 2010), 13, emphasis in the original.
Samina Najmi, “Decolonizing the Bildungsroman: Narratives of War and Womanhood in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman,” in Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature, ed. Zhou Xioajing and Samina Najmi (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 210.
Patricia P. Chu, “‘To Hide Her True Self’: Sentimentality and the Search for an Intersubjective Self in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman,” in Beyond the Hyphen: Asian North American Identities, ed. Eleanor Ty and Donald Goellnicht (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), 62.
Masami Usui, “Sexual Colonialism in Korea/Japan/America Spheres in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman and Fox Girl,” Journal of American Studies 36.1 (Spring 2004), 256.
Kandice Chuh, “Discomforting Knowledge, Or, Korean ‘Comfort Women’ and Asian Americanist Critical Practice,” Journal of Asian American Studies 6.1 (2003), 5–23.
Noël Sturgeon, Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory, and Political Action (New York: Routledge, 1997), 61.
A concise translated excerpt from her book was published in English as Francoise D’Eaubonne, “Feminism or Death,” in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 64–67.
Rosemary Radford Ruether, New Woman, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 204.
Such are also the general premises of other influential works of the first generation of ecofeminists, including the following: Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978);
Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (New York: Harper & Row, 1978);
Carolyn Merchant, The Nature of Woman: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1980);
Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986); and
Judith Plant’s Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism (Philadelphia: New Society, 1989).
For a discussion of such critiques see Victoria Dovian’s “Is Ecofeminism Feminist?” in Ecological Feminism, ed. Karen J. Warren (New York: Routledge, 1994), 8–28; and
Greta Gaard’s “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism,” Feminist Formations 23.2 (Summer 2011), 26–53.
Carolyn Merchant, “Ecofeminism and Feminist Theory,” in Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, ed. Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1990), 100.
Ynestra King, “Healing the Wounds: Feminism, Ecology, and the Nature/Culture Dualism,” in Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, ed. Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1990), 107.
Greta Gaard, “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism,” Hypatia 12.1 (Winter 1997), 118.
Ophelia Selam, “Ecofeminism or Death: Human, Identity, and the Environment,” Atenea 26.1 (June 2006), 88.
Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy, “Introduction” in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 5.
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (1986), 24.
Eunsook Koo’s essay “Heterotopia on an Island: The Literary Representations of the American Military Camp Town in Korea,” Feminist Studies in English Literature 10.2 (Winter 2002), 131–140, reads the historical camp towns American soldiers built during the Korean War as the sole manifestations of warfare. Koo applies Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia to describe the “function of creating a space of illusion that exposes every real place as even more illusory” and allows Korean citizens to “maintain the illusion of undamaged national sovereignty” in locations outside the camp towns (133). I agree with Koo’s analysis of space in Keller’s fiction but find that an ecofeminist reading of the spatial logic Keller’s work draws on offers a rich new reading of nature in Asian American Literature.
Greg Garrard, Ecocritisism (London: Routledge, 2004), 59.
Rosi Braidotti, qtd. in Stacy Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 8, emphasis in the original.
Tina Chen, Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 118.
Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 27.
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000);
Silvia Schultermandl and Sebnem Toplu, eds., A Fluid Sense of Self: The Politics of Transnational Identity (Vienna: LIT Verlag, 2010).
Andree Collard and Joyce Contrucci, Rape of the Wild: Man’s Violence against Animals and the Earth (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989).
Margaret D. Setz, “Wartime Sexual Violence against Women: A Feminist Response,” in Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, ed. Carole R. McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim (New York: Routledge, 2003), 138–145.
For a discussion of shamanism in Keller’s novel, see Kun Jong Lee, “Princess Pari in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman,” positions 12.2 (2004), 431–456.
Nora Okja Keller, Fox Girl (New York: Penguin, 2002), 154. Hereafter cited parenthetically within the text.
Lori Gruen, Ethics and Animal: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 4.
Sung-Ae Lee, “Re-visioning Gendered Folktales in Novels by Mia Yun and Nora Okja Keller,” Asian Ethnology 68.1 (2009), 135.
Stacy Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 2.
See Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990);
Katharine H.S. Moon, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in US-Korea Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997);
Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema, eds., Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition (New York and London: Routledge, 1998);
Denise Brennan, What’s Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). For a reading of sex work and agency in Keller’s Fox Girl in particular, see
Silvia Schultermandl, “Hooked on the American Dream?: Transnational Sexual Labor in Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl,” Feminist Studies in English 15.2 (2007), 159–184.
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Schultermandl, S. (2016). Nature and the Oppressed Female Body in Nora Okja Keller’s Ecofeminist Aesthetics. In: Tally, R.T., Battista, C.M. (eds) Ecocriticism and Geocriticism. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137542625_10
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