Black Market Intimacies

“Kim brilliantly upends standard accounts of sex for pay in militarized zones with a fresh and compelling new interpretation. While significantly different from Japanese comfort women or the later Korean camptown era, the history that Kim tells will transform the way historians approach the economic impact of military occupation. She is meticulously attuned to the myriad stories of daily life during the Korean war but also exceptionally savvy about the international flows of goods, currencies, and power in the post World War II era, and her graceful prose and ability to traverse scales makes for a page-turner. This book is game changer for the histories of transnational East Asia, US Empire, and the intersection of capitalism and war.” —Nan Enstad, author of Cigarettes Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism

“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

Jeongmin Kim is Assistant Professor of History at The University of Manitoba.

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