Resistance Without Resolution: Metonymy and Decolonial Desire in Comfort Woman
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This paper examines Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997) through the ghostly, queer metonymic relationship between Induk and Akiko, demonstrating how metonymic form disrupts narrative closure typically imposed on comfort women representations. When Induk, a comfort woman killed by Japanese soldiers, is replaced by Soon Hyo (who becomes Akiko), the novel transforms this colonial numbering system from a tool of dehumanization into a structure enabling solidarity through contiguity. Drawing on David Lodge’s distinction between metaphor (similarity) and metonymy (contiguity), and Teagan Bradway’s theory of metonymy as “the figural logic of desire,” this paper argues that Induk’s spectral presence sustains Akiko’s resistance through adjacency rather than symbolic substitution. Where metaphor would collapse comfort women into symbols (reproducing stigmatization), metonymy preserves specificity while enabling connection through sustained adjacency. Against colonial violence that sought to render comfort women fungible and silent, Akiko’s desire for liberation manifests through queer intimacy with Induk’s spirit, enacting what Walter Mignolo calls “epistemic reconstitution.” By attending to metonymic form—while acknowledging that such structures transmit trauma alongside resistance—this reading shows how Keller participates in decolonizing comfort women narratives, creating space to resist without requiring impossible perfect resistance, to testify without closure, and to desire liberation without demanding satisfaction that may never come.
Abstract
This paper examines Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997) through the ghostly, queer metonymic relationship between Induk and Akiko, demonstrating how metonymic form disrupts narrative closure typically imposed on comfort women representations. When Induk, a comfort woman killed by Japanese soldiers, is replaced by Soon Hyo (who becomes Akiko), the novel transforms this colonial numbering system from a tool of dehumanization into a structure enabling solidarity through contiguity. Drawing on David Lodge’s distinction between metaphor (similarity) and metonymy (contiguity), and Teagan Bradway’s theory of metonymy as “the figural logic of desire,” this paper argues that Induk’s spectral presence sustains Akiko’s resistance through adjacency rather than symbolic substitution. Where metaphor would collapse comfort women into symbols (reproducing stigmatization), metonymy preserves specificity while enabling connection through sustained adjacency. Against colonial violence that sought to render comfort women fungible and silent, Akiko’s desire for liberation manifests through queer intimacy with Induk’s spirit, enacting what Walter Mignolo calls “epistemic reconstitution.” By attending to metonymic form—while acknowledging that such structures transmit trauma alongside resistance—this reading shows how Keller participates in decolonizing comfort women narratives, creating space to resist without requiring impossible perfect resistance, to testify without closure, and to desire liberation without demanding satisfaction that may never come.