Abstract

This treatise attempts to examine the relationship between feminist politics and suffering from the perspective of ‘contact’ to reconstruct the feminist turn of the 1990s. It pays particular attention to the debates on the concept of sexual violence during the enactment of the Special Act on Sexual Violence in the early 1990s, aiming to closely observe how feminists responded to, interpreted, and translated the suffering of others. During this time, the newsletters Loom, Nanumteo of women’s organizations relied on the culture of testimony to conceptualize, agenda-setting, and legislate women’s suffering, which in turn accumulated negative affective values around the ‘suffering bodies of women’. Meanwhile, Go Alone Like a Rhino’s Horn frequently depicted scenes of feminists contacting the suffering bodies of women, thereby presenting a broad concept of sexual violence. However, in the realm of critical discourse, this text was not connected to the movement for the enactment of the Special Act on Sexual Violence. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that this work not only embodied the continuum of sexual violence but also portrayed feminists experiencing internal conflicts between attachment to and deceit of suffering. Although it was not connected to contemporary feminist politics, the text presents a political message by revealing that the role of literature could play regarding the suffering bodies of women was to show a gesture of not accepting death as the end.