Book Launch: Black Market Intimacies: The Transpacific Sexual Economy of the Korean War with Dr. Jeongmin Kim

The Centre for Human Rights Research, the Department of History, and the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Manitoba are pleased to host Dr. Jeongmin Kim (History) for a book launch of “Black Market Intimacies: The Transpacific Sexual Economy of the Korean War” (Stanford University Press, 2026).

This event will take place on Wednesday, October 7, 2026 beginning at 1:00 pm in the Senior Common Room, Room 239 St. John’s College, University of Manitoba. For information on getting to the University of Manitoba, see: https://umanitoba.ca/about-um/our-campuses/getting-here

This is a free event. No registration is required.

About the Book

Black Market Intimacies (Stanford University Press, 2026) 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.

Order here with discount code JEONGMINKIM20 to get 20% off!

About the Presenter

Dr. Jeongmin Kim

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. Unseemly Military: The Undocumented Workers of US 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 other project, “Money’s Military Life” chronicles the use of military scrip by the Japanese and US army forces in Asia Pacific. Through a comparative historical lens, it traces how the limited monetary value of the notes has created and reinforced differing social and labour values of colonial and occupied subjects.