Black Market Intimacies: Introducing a Transpacific History of Sex, Money, and War
Jeongmin Kim’s Black Market Intimacies: The Transpacific Sexual Economy of the Korean War (Stanford University Press, 2026) reframes how we understand the Korean War not only as a military conflict but as a deeply gendered and commercial moment in East Asian history. At its core, the book reveals how illicit exchanges of money and commodities—often tied to sexual encounters between Korean and Japanese women and U.S. soldiers—provided the material foundations of regional economies in Korea and Japan during and after the war. Rather than treating these transactions as marginal “side effects” of war, Kim shows that they were central to the formation of what she calls “U.S. military base capitalism” in post–World War II East Asia.
Kim, an assistant professor of history at the University of Manitoba, challenges the conventional view that black‑market and sexual economies exist outside formal economic and legal structures. Instead, she traces how markets for transactional sex and military‑related goods were tightly interwoven with official military supply chains, currency systems, and occupation policies. Drawing on multilingual archives—Korean, Japanese, English, and U.S. military records—she pieces together a transnational web of everyday transactions: Korean women bringing Camel blankets and whiskey to Seoul markets, Okinawan women trading U.S. military payment certificates, and countless other women who moved between sexual labor and intermediary roles in the circulation of war supplies and currency.
By doing so, Kim moves beyond Cold War archives’ tendency to reduce sexual economies to categories of “prostitution” and “violence.” Her work recovers the lived experiences of women whose labor—both sexual and commercial—was essential to sustaining U.S. military presence and local livelihoods. In this way, Black Market Intimacies offers an “intimate and global” history of the Korean War, one that forces readers to rethink the supposed opposition between “sexual intimacy” and “market economy” under conditions of war and occupation.
The book also speaks to a broader field of scholarship on war economies, gender, and military capitalism. In Europe, several related works explore similar themes of gendered labor, black markets, and military occupation, though usually in different contexts. For example:
Occupied Women: Gender, Collaboration, and Resistance in the Nazi‑Occupied Territories(ed. Claire Eldridge and Claire Langhamer) examines how women’s bodies and labor were politicized under Nazi occupation.
The Wages of War: Sex, Money, and the American Occupation of Germany by Maria Höhn looks at the sexual economy around U.S. bases in postwar Germany.
Love, War, and Circumstance: Women and the Second World War in Europe by Sarah Ansari and Elizabeth Buettner traces how women’s work, intimacy, and survival strategies shaped wartime and postwar economies.
Military Brothels in the Occupied Soviet Union by Laura J. Hilton and others investigates state‑regulated sexual economies in Eastern Europe during and after WWII.
These European‑focused studies share Kim’s concern with how war and occupation reshape gendered labor markets and intimate relations, even if they do not replicate her transpacific, Korean‑War‑specific frame. Together, they suggest that Black Market Intimacies is part of a growing global conversation about the intimate economies of militarism, one that connects East Asia to wider patterns of war, sex, and capitalism in the twentieth century.
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