Textual Traces of Transwar “Comfort Women”: A Feminist Critique of Lee Man-hee’s Seven Female POWs

Abstract: This article examines the enduring genealogy of racial–sexual domination through the Japanese empire, Korean War, and Cold War trades in Asians, throughout which the “comfort woman” and the “mixed-blood” child emblematized limit cases of dehumanization. I excavate the two figures by comparing the original and censored scripts of Korean filmmaker Lee Man-hee’s Seven Female POWs (1964/5), where the “comfort woman” appears as a North Korean military POW and her hypothetical “mixed-blood” child as a specter of inter-Korean intimacies. Resituating the postwar stigma of miscegenation as a definitional problem of racial difference in law and visual culture, I expand the discourse of critical race theory beyond its customary geographical domains to argue that dehumanization through racial–sexual domination is the constitutive basis of the trade in humans.