Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Black Market Intimacies reveals how illicit exchanges of money and commodities involving sexual encounters between Korean and Japanese women and US soldiers provided the material foundations of the regional economy across Korea and Japan during the Korean War. Against the conventional view that illicit exchanges exist outside the formal economy and legal regulations, Jeongmin Kim examines how the interlinked markets for transactional sex and goods crucially constituted the transpacific formation of US military base capitalism in post-World War II East Asia. Going beyond what is commonly categorized as prostitution and violence in Cold War archives, Kim weaves together stories from the myriads of mundane records scattered around multilingual archives to document larger transnational webs of the war economy.
From Korean women who brought camel blankets and whiskey to local markets in Seoul, to middle-aged Okinawan women dealing in US military notes, Kim uncovers the crucial roles that local women played in circulating war supplies and currency across the region through their sexual and intermediary labor. The result is an intimate and global history of the Korean War that urges us to rethink the often-antithetical relationship between sexual intimacy and market economies in the context of war and occupation.
"Jeongmin Kim shatters simple binaries like licit and illicit, formal and informal, military and civilian, and production and reproduction that have hitherto governed the way that scholars have framed the significance of the actions and experiences of people who continue to live under the overlapping structures of everyday violence that is the post-World War II US empire. In her skillful hands, readers see the connections between a young woman living near a US base in Busan, a garment store owner sourcing velvet in Ginza, military payment currency (MPC) dealers in Fukuoka and Naha, Japanese base workers in Tachikawa, and US soldiers stationed in Korea who are enjoying R&R in Japan." —Wendy Matsumura, author of Waiting for the Cool Moon: Anti-imperialist Struggles in the Heart of Japan's Empire
"Exploding conventional notions of the 'sex industry' as one narrow sector of the economy in which sexual services are exchanged for money, Black Market Intimacies shows how the entire economy of the Korean War—one that involved the illicit circulation of military goods across Korea, Japan, and the U.S.—was mediated by sexual labor. A profound and probing must-read for anyone interested in the complex nature of women's labors under conditions of war, military occupation, and capitalism." —H. Yumi Kim, University of California, Berkeley