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

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.