Diaspora of Camptown: The Forgotten War's Monstrous Family

While there are many ways in which the violences of the US-Korea relationship are silenced, the voids that are perhaps most audible surround issues of sexual exchange between American servicemen and the Korean women who work in the system of militarized prostitution, a system that dates back to the U.S. occupation of Korea in 1945 and continues to this day. The name that these women acquired in Korean popular discourse was yanggongju, literally meaning "Western princess," but often translated as "Yankee whore" or "GI bride." Here, Cho analyzes the way in which the yanggongju is a figure that is both central and spectral in a Korean diaspora constituted by the double trauma of war and the failure to remember it.