Black Market Intimacies: The Transpacific Sexual Economy of the Korean War

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.