The Department of East Asian Studies is pleased to share that PhD student Juwon Kim received an Honorable Mention for the Graduate Student Paper Prize from the Northeast Asia Council at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference on Friday, March 13, 2026.
Kim's paper, “What’s in a Proper Name? Censorship and “Comfort Women” in Seven Female POWs (1965)”, examines a famous case of censorship during the Park Chung Hee era. While the censorship of Yi Manhŭi’s 1964 film Seven Female POWs has often been traced to anti-communist reaction to the humane depiction of North Koreans in the film, this paper argues that the South Korean censors were driven not by Cold War anticommunism per se, but were reacting to Yi’s representation of militarized colonial sexual violence. It links this censorship to the erasure of “comfort women,” not as a proper noun referring exclusively to the military “comfort” system under the Japanese empire but as a common noun encompassing all forms of militarized sexual slavery and violence in Asia during the Korean War and the Cold War.
A revised and expanded version of this conference paper is now available as a peer-reviewed article, “Textual Traces of Transwar “Comfort Women”: A Feminist Critique of Lee Man-hee’s Seven Female POWs,” in the Spring 2026 issue of Verge: Studies in Global Asias (https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/vrg.2026.a984887).
For more information about the awards please visit here: https://www.asianstudies.org/aas-2026-prizes/.