Jin R. Choi

To publicly declare that one is a feminist in contemporary South Korea yields a certain stigma and risk, a phenomenon that has drawn sustained and marked attention from international media and scholarly communities. The contemporary wave of feminism in South Korea for the past decade has been met with a strong misogynistic backlash in both online and offline spaces, with cases of femicide, digital and physical violence, a rise in digital sex crimes utilizing emerging technologies, and other cases of gender-based violence. One might ask: What reasons do instigators of misogynistic violence cite as justification for their violence? In this short piece, I point to a few contemporary moments in South Korean politics and discourse to argue that violent misogynistic acts frame feminism as symbolically violent, therefore deserving of physical and material violence in retaliation. Violent misogyny, which comes in forms of physical, sexual, material, or financial harm via misogynistic logics, operates by justifying its violence in pointing to the supposed violence of feminism that “attacked” men “first.” The catch, of course, is that the violence of feminism is but a challenge against heteropatriarchy and hegemonic masculinity, or the institutionalization of heteronormative patriarchy and the ideology of masculinity embedded within social norms, systems, and logics. Misogyny interprets feminism as a challenge to these systems and, therefore, as aggression. It turns to “reciprocate” with magnified acts of violence, actively threatening women and gender minorities’ safety. Violence, therefore, operates as both a rhetorical and material tool to uphold existing cultures and structures of heteropatriarchy and misogyny.

This paper offers a rhetorical analysis to read the San Francisco “Comfort Women” Column of Strength memorial within the context of the United States’ historical violence against Asian women with white sexual imperialism as a theoretical lens. Utilizing in situ rhetorical field methods and critical rhetorical criticism, I contend that the San Francisco “Comfort Women” Column of Strength memorial illuminates how the medium of a public memorial faces certain constraints and difficulties in being able to name and critique U.S. imperialism as a historical narrative to be publicly remembered in dominant national memory. I offer transnational global memoryscape, extending Phillips and Reyes’ global memoryscape, as a concept that necessarily draws our attention specifically towards unequal forces of power across borders, such as Western imperialist forces in Asia. Ultimately, a critical, transnational lens on public memory is imperative to situate national public memories within a global context as memories flow across borders.