Teaching with haunting memories: coalition-building and decolonial feminist inquiry into gendered nationalism and militarized histories

This paper examines how gendered nationalism and militarized memories remain with us as active forces that shape and are embedded in our subjectivities and educational discourses. We draw on work on rememory and on scholarship on coalition-building to guide our collaborative analysis, questioning, and interpretation of this decolonial feminist inquiry. The memoirs of Kim Bokdong, a Korean comfort woman, and Youngmi, Jinny, and Yoonsun, camptown women, served as interlocutors in our inquiry. These women’s voices, silences, and affective presences guided how we remembered, interpreted, and wrote about our own embodied experiences through rememory. We illustrate how we authors embodied gendered nationalism from a young age through education and social practices in schools, families, and broader society. We suggest that rememory lays a foundation for praxes of accountability and coalition-building, requiring education to engage with women’s voices without appropriation and victimization.