Comfort women surviving pandemics: From erasure to embodied hope towards a feminist-postcolonial theology of radical hospitality

Abstract

The article accords epistemic privilege to comfort women as embodiment of the perversion of hospitality. It draws a parallelism between their surviving the pandemics of World War II as forcibly recruited sex slaves and COVID-19. Through their lived experience as survivors of pandemics, a feminist-postcolonial theology of radical hospitality first critiques biblical narratives of men’s hospitality to men. The parallel stories of Lot’s offer of his virgin daughters (Gen. 19) and the Levite’s offer of his concubine (Judges 19) expose, first, the hierarchisation of male guests over women, as property of men, and secondly, the inviolable creed of hospitality conferred on men by men, that is sustained by the cultural code that marks women’s bodies as violable. Secondly, the article argues that extending hospitality to comfort women (for example, war reparations) goes beyond the “law of ekstasis”, as touted in Fratelli Tutti, as comfort women themselves embody love, reciprocity, and inclusion.