Cloth: 978-90-485-7705-7

eISBN: 978-90-485-7862-7 (ePub)

eISBN: 978-90-485-7861-0 (PDF)

In the wake of ongoing global concern over conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), this volume brings together innovative research on the gendered legacies of the Second World War across the “Global Easts.” Focusing on East Asia and the eastern parts of Europe, the book explores how sexual violence—ranging from the Japanese military’s “comfort women” system to the massive assaults committed by German and Soviet forces—has been remembered, silenced, or politicized in the decades that followed. The contributions span four thematic sections: from comparative analyses of wartime violence to postwar justice frameworks, patterns of selective remembrance, and media representations of gendered trauma. Edited by Joohee Kim and Maren Röger, renowned scholars of gender and memory studies in the respective regions, the volume connects these global areas through their shared histories of imperial domination, Cold War divisions, and the belated surfacing of survivors’ voices. By uncovering these entanglements, the book offers a new conceptual and geographical lens on the Global Easts.

Maren Röger is Professor of Central and Eastern European History at Leipzig University and Director of the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO). Her research focuses on the history of mass violence and its aftermath in memory and politics, with a special interest in gendered dimensions.Joohee Kim is Assistant Professor at Duksung Women’s University in South Korea. Her research examines the political economy of sexuality within East Asian capitalism, with a particular focus on the political and cultural dynamics of industrialized prostitution.

These excellent essays on wartime sexual violence in the “Global Easts”–East Asia and Eastern Europe–reveal not only the postwar silence and silencing of the victims but also the social and political factors that long prevented them from seeking or receiving justice, while the comparative perspective makes it clear that similar obstacles to public acknowledgment existed in nearly every country, if in different ways and to different extents. A welcome and important contribution to the scholarship on sexual violence.
Carol Gluck, Professor of History, Columbia University

This book offers compelling, often moving explorations of the legacy of sexual violence in contrasting contexts in East Asia and East Central Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. The contributions illuminate why victims often did not speak about their experiences, or were not listened to; they also analyze cases where a wider public did start to engage with what victims had to say, sometimes taking up these narratives for political ends.
Elizabeth Harvey, Professor of European History, University of Nottingham

Eastern, Asia, Europe, History

License: OA CC BY-NC-ND