“It was Akiko 41; it was me”: Queer Kinships in Nora Okja Keller’s Mother-Daughter Narrative.

Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997) prioritizes the point of view of women to discuss the aftermath of war. The novel is centered on a mother-daughter relationship and scholars of Asian American literary studies often interpret the daughter’s story line as a gendered legacy in which she inevitably inherits her mother’s history of sexual traumas. In this article, I consider the role of queerness threaded throughout the novel’s representations of World War II military outposts and Korean “comfort women,” to argue that Korean American intergenerational models contain multiple sexualities as a result of Japanese colonialism and U.S. militarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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