Women as timekeepers: a feminist cosmopolitical intervention in international relations through the comfort women issue

Abstract

This dissertation offers a feminist cosmopolitical intervention into mainstream International Relations discourse by reimagining the comfort women issue through indigenous Buddhist theorising. It foregrounds the significance of time as a structuring condition of violence through many forms. The examination of Buddhism’s impact on Japan’s imperial project reveals two truths: firstly, that the comfort women re-emerges as a vision of the sacred courtesans in Japanese medieval history and secondly, that these women were subjected to the horrors of organised sexual slavery due to a collapse in the understanding of cyclical time. Ultimately, this reveals how women are timekeepers who bear truth through their positioning within alternative temporalities, as inspired by Daoist notions of Yin and Yang.