Crisis Temporalities: States of Emergency and the Gendered-Sexualized Logics of Asian American Women Abroad

Abstract

The failure of a binding peace treaty to end the Korean War creates a decades-long possibility of open hostilities between North and South Korea and their respective allies: in particular, China and the United States. After their capture at the Chinese-North Korean border and a five-month-long imprisonment in Pyongyang, Asian American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee faced criticism for jeopardizing US foreign relations, accused of betraying their family, race, culture, and nation by North Korean officials and US audiences alike. These journalists' published memoirs reveal multiple states of emergency through their preoccupations with temporality: the split-second decision to cross the border illegally; the minute they trespassed on North Korean territory; the almost sixty years of tense US-North Korean relations. Exemplifying what this article calls "crisis temporalities," these preoccupations reveal how conflicting and overlapping regimes of sovereignty and biopower produce and "make" life—for Ling and Lee in captivity, and also for the vulnerable populations they represent at both the US and North Korean borders: trafficked women, racialized immigrants, and those perceived as criminals and terrorists. Crisis temporalities determine, and are determined by, how, under states of emergency, the gendered-sexualized logics of racial formations determine belonging to the nation-state.