Jeong Min Kim’s study examines three forms of black markets – sex,
U.S. army goods and military scrip – that were central to social and
economic life in wartime Korea. By tracing how sexual transactions
between Korean women and American GIs became a crucial medium for the
wartime black market, her research sheds new lights on the global and
gendered processes that turned such army supplies and military scrip
to a quasi-currency on the local market. In this talk, she examines
how the black market for American military scrip grew as a
transnational sexual economy across Korea and Japan during the Korean
War. Her talk offers a new narrative of everyday life in 1950s Japan
and Korea at the intersection of close encounters between local women
and American GIs, the political economy of sexuality, and a global
history of war and military bases.