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, the book 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. Through innovative archival research, it uncovers the crucial roles that local women played in circulating war supplies and currency across the region.
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.
About the speaker:
Jeongmin Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History. Her research and teaching focuses on the histories of modern Korea and East Asia, the US in the world, gender and sexuality, and militarism and capitalism. She is the author of "Black Market Intimacies: The Transpacific Sexual Economy of the Korean War" (Stanford University Press, 2026). She has published two articles related to this project in the Radical History Review and American Historical Review.
She is currently working on two book-length projects. The first, "Unseemly Military: The Undocumented Workers of U.S. Wars and Occupations in Cold War Asia," is a study of the gendered and racialized experiences of local civilians who provided essential labor on US overseas bases. The preliminary research for this project has been supported by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant and the Dave Abrams and Gene Banning Pan Am Research Grant. The second project, "Money's Military Life," chronicles the use of military scrip by the Japanese and U.S. army forces in the Asia-Pacific region. Through a comparative historical lens, it traces how the limited monetary value of the notes has created and reinforced differing social and labor values of colonial and occupied subjects.
