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Chunghee Sarah Soh
Chunghee Sarah Soh
Alma mater	Sogang University; University of Hawaiʻi
Occupation	Sociocultural anthropologist
Employer	San Francisco State University
Korean name
Hangul	소정희
Hanja	蘇貞姫
Revised Romanization	So Jeonghui
McCune–Reischauer	So Chŏnghŭi

Chunghee Sarah Soh or Sarah Soh is an American professor of Anthropology at San Francisco State University. She is a sociocultural anthropologist who specializes in issues of women, gender, sexuality.

Her book The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan delivers new insight into the nature of the comfort women issue.

Careers

She graduated from Sogang University in Seoul and earned master's degree and then Ph.D from the University of Hawaii in 1987. She taught cultural anthropology at universities in Hawaii in 1990, Arizona from 1990 to 1991 and Texas from 1991–94. She joined San Francisco State University in 1994.^[3]^[4]

Comfort women

Soh has said "there can be no denial of the tragic victimization of forcibly recruited women who suffered slavery-like conditions."^[5] According to Soh, "it was Japan's colonialism that undoubtedly facilitated the large-scale victimization of tens of thousands of Korean women".^[6]

She wrote a book titled The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan. In the book, she provocatively disputes the simplistic view that comfort women were victims of a war crime were solely the fault of Imperial Japan.^[7]^[8] Instead, she argues that both the Japanese military and the Korean patriarchy are at fault. She asserts that because of the patriarchy that dominated Korea at the time, homes were unstable and thus young girls were more likely to leave, a situation which allowed comfort station owners to recruit them into brothels. Additionally, she argues South Korean nationalist politics and the international women's human rights movement have contributed to the incomplete view of the tragedy that still dominates today.^[9]

Works

Soh, Sarah (2008). The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226767772.
Soh, Chung-Hee (1993). Women in Korean Politics. Westview Press. ISBN 0813320410.
Soh, Chung-Hee (1991). The Chosen Women in Korean Politics: An Anthropological Study. Praeger. ISBN 027593876X.

References

^ 한국여성의 정치참여(1948~2008) [South Korean women's participation in politics (1948–2008)]. Asian Center for Women's Studies, Ewha Womans University. 2009-05-28. Archived from the original on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2015-10-23.
^ 蘇貞姫サラ (2005). 帝国日本の「軍慰安制度」論歴史と記憶の政治的葛藤. In 倉沢愛子 (ed.). 岩波講座アジア・太平洋戦争〈2〉戦争の政治学. Iwanami Shoten. pp. 347–380. OCLC 62789230.
^ "Chunghee Sarah Soh". San Francisco State University. Archived from the original on 2015-02-28. Retrieved 2015-03-07.
^ "Chunghee Sarah Soh". Institute for Corean-American Studies.
^ Kingston, Jeff (May 10, 2009). "Continuing controversy of 'comfort women'". The Japan Times.
^ Volodzko, David Josef (January 15, 2017). "Can Korea handle the truth about Japan's 'comfort women'?" South China Morning Post.
^ The Comfort Women Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan. Worlds of Desire: The Chicago Series on Sexuality, Gender, and Culture. University of Chicago Press. These women have usually been labeled victims of a war crime, a simplistic view that makes it easy to pin blame on the policies of imperial Japan and therefore easier to consign the episode to a war-torn past.
^ "Understanding the plight of the "comfort women"". San Francisco State University. March 18, 2009. Soh illustrates how the prevailing, simplistic view of the phenomenon overlooks the diversity of the women's experiences, the influence of historical factors and the role that Koreans played in facilitating the Japanese comfort system.
^ Soh, Sarah (2008). The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226767772.