Framed by War

Abstract

Korean women and children have become the forgotten population of a forgotten war. Framed by War traces how the Korean orphan, GI baby, adoptee, birth mother, prostitute, and bride—figures produced by the US military—were made to disappear. Strained embodiments of war, they brought Americans into Korea and Koreans into America, intimate crossings that defined, and at times defied, US empire in the Pacific. The book looks to US and South Korean government documents and military correspondence; US aid organization records; Korean orphanage registers; US and South Korean newspapers and magazines; as well as photographs, interviews, films, and performances to suture a fragmented past. Integrating history with visual and cultural analysis, Framed by War reveals how what unfolded in Korea set the stage for US power in the postwar era. US destruction and humanitarianism, violence and care played out upon the bodies of Korean women and children, enabling US intervention and fortifying transnational connections with symbolic and material outcomes. In the 1950s Americans went from knowing very little about Koreans to making them family, and the Cold War scripts needed to support these internationalist efforts required the erasure of those who could not fit the family frame. These were the geographies to which Korean women and children were bound, but found ways to navigate in South Korea, the United States, and spaces in between, reconfiguring notions of race and kinship along the way.