A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism: Doing Feminist Ethics Transnationally (New Approaches to Religion and Power) [1st ed. 2023] 3031437659, 9783031437656

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NEW APPROACHES TO RELIGION AND POWER

A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism Doing Feminist Ethics Transnationally Keun-joo Christine Pae

New Approaches to Religion and Power

Series Editor

Joerg Rieger Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN, USA

While the relationship of religion and power is a perennial topic, it only continues to grow in importance and scope in our increasingly globalized and diverse world. Religion, on a global scale, has openly joined power struggles, often in support of the powers that be. But at the same time, religion has made major contributions to resistance movements. In this context, current methods in the study of religion and theology have created a deeper awareness of the issue of power: Critical theory, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, subaltern studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, and working class studies are contributing to a new quality of study in the field. This series is a place for both studies of particular problems in the relation of religion and power as well as for more general interpretations of this relation. It undergirds the growing recognition that religion can no longer be studied without the study of power. For Further information and to submit a proposal for consideration, please contact Senior Editor Philip Getz, [email protected]

Keun-joo Christine Pae

A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism Doing Feminist Ethics Transnationally

Keun-joo Christine Pae Religion and Women’s and Gender Studies Denison University Granville, OH, USA

ISSN 2634-6079     ISSN 2634-6087 (electronic) New Approaches to Religion and Power ISBN 978-3-031-43765-6    ISBN 978-3-031-43766-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43766-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: massimiliano finzi / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgment

It was a long journey to write this book. I feel indebted to many people who have supported me during this journey. I appreciate Denison University’s generous support for my multiple research trips. Thanks to the support of my colleagues at the Department of Religion and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, I could sharpen transnational feminist perspectives. Especially Dr. Dave Woodyard’s tireless support for my scholarship encouraged me to finish writing this book. My students at Denison University inspired me to think transnationally. I cherish many moments when my students read and discussed some parts of this manuscript. I am also grateful to Pacific Asian North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry for intellectually and spiritually inspiring me and showing me how to produce Asian/American feminist scholarship responsibly. The Sunlit Center in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, has welcomed me whenever I visited for research. With their resources and support, I could write a significant portion of this book. I thank all the staff, volunteers, halmeonies, and imos at the center. Without Dr. Kwok Pui-lan’s encouragement, I could not have embarked on a journey to write a book. Thank you, Dr. Kwok, for your scholarly inspiration and mentoring! I am indebted to Dr. Joerg Rieger, who supported my book project. Dr. Su Yon Pak and Dr. Kathy Talvacchia read and commented on my book proposal at its early stage. I am grateful for their support and sisterhood. My deep appreciation goes to Drs. Jin Young Choi, Wonhee Anne Joh, Nami Kim, and Boyung Lee for their sisterhood, scholarly inspiration, and patience with me. The editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan was patient with me, too, while I struggled to collect and v

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organize my ideas. I am thankful for all the help and support of Sujatha Mani and Philip Getz at Palgrave Macmillan. My appreciation also goes to Dr. Michael Pettinger, who thoroughly read and edited the manuscript. Meeting a meticulous editor like Dr. Pettinger is a blessing for a person like me who speaks and writes English as a second language. I cannot thank my doctoral advisor Dr. Gary Dorrien enough for believing in me when I first started imagining Asian transpacific American feminist theology and ethics in the context of US military prostitution in South Korea many years ago. Thanks to his belief in my intellectual curiosity, I have been able to research anti-war and anti-racist transnational feminist ethics without fear. I am deeply grateful to my mom and dad, Myung-sook Jung and Joo-­ seon Bae, who encouraged me to cross the Pacific Ocean. They have always had a home for me wherever I go. My sisters, Keun-wook and Keun-jung, have supported me in various ways. Thank you all! My two lovely children, Juahn Julian and Jubin Lucas, have sustained me through my long journey to write this book. Without them, this book could have been published some years earlier. However, their presence in my life has deepened my theological ideas and understanding of the mystery of life and faith. I love you, two kids! Jinwoo, my love, deserves all my gratitude. His unfailing love and support enabled me to conceive this book. Finally, thank God for every dream I have in you!

Contents

1 A Transpacific Imagination of Feminist Theo-­Ethics  1 2 The Transnational, the Political, and the Theological 23 3 US  Military Prostitution and Sexual Ethics for Peace and Justice 53 4 COVID-19 and Anti-Asian Gender-Based Violence 87 5 The Memories of Killing and Interfaith Spiritual Activism129 6 The Diasporic Body of Jesus: A Feminist Ethic of Diasporas165 7 Yearning for Wholeness195 Index199

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CHAPTER 1

A Transpacific Imagination of Feminist Theo-­Ethics

At the Pacific Ocean In 1905 at age five, Mary crossed the Pacific Ocean with her family, first from Korea to Hawai’i and then on to California a year later. Her grandparents had been among the first converts to Christianity in northern Korea. Mary would proudly inform people that Dr. Samuel Moffett, one of the first American Protestant (Presbyterian) missionaries to Korea, had baptized her entire family. The story about her grandmother opening the first school for girls in Pyeongyang, the current capital city of North Korea, is another source of family pride. Mary’s odyssey begins with her narration of the political turmoil in Korea at the turn of the twentieth century. Imperial Japan prepared to annex the Korean Peninsula after its victories in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), historical events that she did not personally experience.1 Her odyssey interweaves multiple story strands—her ancestors’ stories, her own life journey, and the stories of her great-grandchildren. For Mary, Korea and the United States were connected through Christianity and the Pacific. The transpacific migration of people would be the natural result of US-Korea relations. Through this 1  Mary Paik Lee, Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America, with an introduction by Sucheng Chan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. C. Pae, A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43766-3_1

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sense of transpacific connection between home over there and home here, Mary tried to understand anti-Asian racism (or what she calls anti-Oriental racism), Japanese imperialism, wars in Korea and Vietnam, and Asia’s dramatic economic development, all of which complicated her reflection on her elder son’s disability, her younger son’s unexpected death, and life unfolded in God’s mystery. As I spent the 2020–2021 COVID-19 lockdown with Mary Paik Lee’s memoir, Quiet Odyssey, I wondered what would have happened to her if she had crossed the Pacific Ocean in 2020, when the pandemic closed many borders, airports, and harbors. Would Mary’s experience have been radically different? Unfortunately, the resurgence of anti-Asian hate with COVID-19 seems to replay Mary’s story in America more than a century later. When Mary’s family arrived on American soil, the American public perceived the Asia Pacific as a “yellow peril” filled with great dangers such as moral decadence, diseases (i.e., bubonic plague in China), sexual corruption, and non-Protestant religions. That public perception might not have changed much. However, what Mary left in my feminist consciousness is not simply the vicious cycle of anti-Asian hatred caused by the historically tumultuous US-Asia relationship. Rather, her memoir illuminates the transnational and diasporic identity shared among Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants, the liberative role of Christianity in Asian immigration and Asian American community building, the way in which they all experienced racism marked by alienation and violence, and most of all, the ongoing intimate connection between persons’ lives in North America and the Asia Pacific. Although Mary is one of only a few Asian American women who recorded their lives on American soil in the early twentieth century, her life marks neither the beginning nor the end of Asian women’s transpacific migration. Neither is her odyssey a quiet one. Her odyssey, along with many courageous Asian Pacific American women, has been inscribed in the waves of the Pacific Ocean, the broadest and deepest body of water on Earth. Every page of Quiet Odyssey exudes the sensuous Ocean, the mystery of life embedded in every ocean wave, as if the Pacific Ocean had mysteriously created contact zones in which multiple generations, times,

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and memories ebb and flow.2 The Pacific both connects Asia to the United States and separates the two continents. Likewise, it silently remembers and embodies the history of Asian immigration to the United States, America’s wars in the Asia Pacific, tourism at the cost of exoticized Asian women and Pacific Islanders, global trade, cheap female labor in sweatshops along the Pacific Coast of Asia and the Americas, migrant laborers, endangered marine lives, fears of unknown diseases, and more. The Pacific Ocean is like Mother God, who continually creates life, holds the tears and dreams of Her creation, and embraces silenced victims of history. How would feminist theology and ethics look from the point of view of the Pacific connected to many bodies of water on Earth? Global crises like COVID-19, war, and climate change challenge critical theologians and ethicists to search for creative and audacious praxes of liberation from life’s precarity, fears of death, and inequalities. What kind of theological praxis and moral discourse might emerge if Asian/American women’s transpacific lives were brought to the center of feminist theological inquiry? How can we read their stories in light of the transnational, postcolonial, and diasporic stories of globally disenfranchised women who have lived in similar contexts? A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism revolves around these questions as it searches for a Christian transnational feminist theology and ethics of liberation. Among the many possible entry points to transnational feminist theology, this book reflects on Asian/American women’s lived experiences and 2  I use the term “the Pacific” geographically and metaphorically. The term does not refer to Pacific Studies or Transpacific Studies. Unfortunately, my construction of transnational feminist theology and ethics does not include the significant experiences of Pacific Islanders who continue to live under Euro-American settler colonialism. Asians take part in this colonialism. I use the term The Pacific here to underline America’s presence in international politics and Asian politics in particular. Also, the Pacific Ocean points to East Asian immigration, which in general has occurred through the Pacific passage. If the term Pacific were used analytically in other scholarly writings, the term would need to complicate and engage with Pacific Islanders’ identities and politics in the larger picture of transpacific politics and international politics. The Pacific Islands should not be treated as auxiliary to Asian American studies.

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memories of Christianity, transpacific wars, US military bases, and the neoliberal global market. A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism is the result of my years of mentoring and friendships received and cultivated through the grassroots organization Pacific Asian North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry (PANAAWTM).3 In the almost two decades since I was an international student in a master’s program, I have been active in PANAAWTM, the organization which has encouraged theological discourses with postcolonial and transnational inquiries from Asian and Asian American feminist perspectives. Taking Asian/American women’s embodied epistemology as an indispensable method for doing theology, PANAAWTM scholars have critically interrogated the global power structure or, what I call, the “relations of imperial ruling.” My term is similar to feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith’s concept of “the relations of ruling.” Smith writes about ruling in an effort means to identify a complex of “organized practices, including government, law business and financial management, professional organization, and educational institutions as well as discourses in texts that interpenetrate the multiple sites of power.”4 The relations of ruling signify not only the rhizomatic relations of power structures but also the agency and consciousness of the knowledge producers (i.e., scholars, activists, and organizers) complicatedly positioned in these relations. Postcolonial feminist scholar Chandra Mohanty extends Smith’s theory to multiple contexts for the emergence of contemporary third-world feminist struggles, including colonialism, class, gender, racial formation, citizenship, the state, social agency, consciousness, identity, and writing.5 I appreciate the analytical methods of Smith and Mohanty. At the same time, PANAAWTM’s feminist theology has led me to scrutinize religious ideologies and Christian theologies coded in the structures of power from interpersonal to international relations. Furthermore, I add “imperial” to the “relations of ruling” to underscore the asymmetry of global power structures shadowed by the long history and legacy of Euro-American colonialism. Imperialistic desires and practices (i.e., neocolonialism) are now shared among rapidly  This history of PANAAWTM can be found at www.panaawtm.org  Dorothy Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), 3; quoted in Chandra Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 56. 5  Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 57. 3 4

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industrialized countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America or what Jinkyung Lee calls “sub-empires.”6 The legacy of Euro-American colonialism, neocolonialism, and sub-empires’ mimicking historical empires do not simply divide the world and its peoples into oppressors and the oppressed. Instead, this hierarchical power structure is constructed and managed on multiple levels of interpersonal, communal, local, and international relations. Hence, a critically contextual analysis can usefully interrogate gender-­ and-sexuality-based oppression, interlocked with other forms of oppression, that happen at various social locations in the complex web of power structures. In its critically contextual analysis, this book examines the transborder moves of (neo)colonialism with attention to the imperial relations of ruling manifested on the Asian body. In this way, we can comprehend how the personal is internationally political. Central to my feminist theo-ethical inquiry is how the neoliberal market economy, globalized military-­ industrial complex, and prostitution industries have systematically exploited gendered, raced, and sexed labor, particularly disenfranchised Asian female bodies in the transpacific space. Here, Asian female bodies include local, diasporic, and migrant subjects. These subjects’ bodily experiences suggest critical entry points to the relations of imperial ruling. These relations must be analyzed first before any theological and ethical discourses—especially on justice and liberation—are conceptualized. By analytically positioning Asian female bodies in the imperial relations of ruling, A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism grounds a feminist theology of liberation for and by Asian/American women in solidarity with other marginalized groups in multiple contexts. As Mohanty reminds us, globally disenfranchised people’s embodiment and personification of the intersection of sexual, class, and racial relations, and colonialism can ground transnational feminist ethics with historical specificities.7 Cautious of Mohanty’s argument, this book scrutinizes America’s role in congealing the global power structure a bit further, noting how it depends on the militarized white heteropatriarchal neoliberal economy. Thus, I refuse to see the US as separate from the transnational context. For “the transnational” does not merely constitute non-USWestern women or counter-spaces to the US. Instead, as a concept, the transnational concentrates on the movements and influences of peoples 6  Jin-Kyung Lee, Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work, and Migrant Labor in South Korea (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 62. 7  Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 52.

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and ideas which cross multiple borders, cultures, and generations, and it particularly examines the power differential between these peoples and ideas, a power differential partially due to nations’ geopolitical contexts.

Conceptualizing Transnational Feminist Theo-­Ethics: Who and How? In her influential book Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology, Kwok Pui-lan questions who and how can do postcolonial/transnational feminist theology.8 According to Kwok, since feminist theology prioritizes women’s experiences as a source for critical reflection on God and the Sacred, women are the primary producers of feminist theology, while male theologians can still play a critical role in building up allyship with them.9 “Women” include cisgender and transgender women, and gender nonconforming people. Postcolonial/transnational feminist theology complicates gendered power relations as they intersect with race, colonialism, and religion (in this case, Christianity). For Kwok, doing postcolonial feminist theology is arguably “the ‘writing back’ process in postcolonial literature—only that this time the writing subjects are the formerly colonized Christian women, and the matter to be discussed in theology.”10 This does not mean that (former) colonizers or those who do not share the history of being colonized cannot do postcolonial feminist theology. Instead, Kwok argues: [B]oth the (former) female colonizers and the (former) colonized women are able to do postcolonial feminist theology, although they will have different entry points, priorities of issues, accents, and inflections…[F]emale subalterns who experience the intersection of oppressions in the most immediate and brutal way have epistemological privileges in terms of articulating a postcolonial feminist theology that will be more inclusive than others.11

8  Kwok Pui-lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 125. 9  Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology, 125–26. Paraphrasing Kwok’s argument, I add cis-gender and transgender women to signify sexual identities embedded in the category of women. 10  Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology, 126. 11  Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology, 127.

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Kwok’s arguments challenge Christian feminist theologians, particularly those in North America, including Asian/American feminist theologians like myself, as our social locations may not be congruent with what she identifies as “female subalterns.” Yet, by consciously practicing solidarity with these women, we write and engage transnational feminist theology courageously and creatively for global peace, justice, and ecological well-being. Transnational feminist theo-ethics should involve the critical questions of who can do transnational feminist theology; of where transnational feminist knowledge is produced; of how feminist theologians and ethicists should engage with transnational feminist knowledge; and of what kind of praxis transnational feminist theo-ethics can produce when there is a massive gap between the values we cherish and the realities we witness and in which we live. At a basic level, the question of “who” concerns the positionalities and social locations of transnational feminist scholars and activists, but at a deeper level, the question is more about how transnational feminists and their knowledge are positioned in the complex relations of imperial ruling. Since transnational feminist theology and ethics prioritize the two-thirds-­ world women’s embodied knowledge of oppression and resistance to injustice in multiple contexts, it is necessary to scrutinize how they write their knowledge, where their knowledge is produced, who transfers their knowledge to the Western/US academy, and how their knowledge is consumed. The question of “how” articulates not only the methods of producing transnational feminist knowledge but also the ethics of producing knowledge and engaging those who embody transnational and postcolonial knowledge. The last question of “what” seeks out moral visions and actions to bring concrete changes at a material level. Together, each chapter of this book addresses all these questions through different modes of inquiry and with attention to particular issues arising in the relations of imperial ruling. These modes of inquiry first complicate the issues before identifying any moral visions and theological discourse that might bring concrete changes to oppressive contexts. On a ground level, theology is God-talk, and ethics is the question of how we should live. Thus, transnational feminist theo-ethics should challenge the conventional God-talk by producing an alternative understanding of God, for instance, free from militarized heteropatriarchal nation-building. This task would require different ways of seeing the sanctity of life created by God and of renewing theological understandings of

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beauty in life, given that various forms of violence—gender-based, militarized, economic, political, and ecological violence—are deliberately denouncing globally disenfranchised people’s right to life. A transnational feminist theo-ethical discourse must be radical enough to challenge people to walk away from their habitual ways of thinking and living so that they can recover the sanctity and beauty in life created by God. For this reason, I present transnational feminist theo-ethics as radical praxis.

Radical Praxis: Proximity and Reflexivity Transnational feminist theo-ethics is “radical praxis” that produces liberative and transformative knowledge of gender, sexuality, and the Sacred while generating creative and audacious movements for structural changes. What ethical practices would consist of radical praxis? We begin by first considering radical praxis in the process of producing knowledge. According to transnational feminist scholars M.  Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty, transnational feminism as radical praxis must wrestle with “the ethics of the cross-cultural production of knowledge” and “politics of power, spatiality, and knowledge production.”12 Producing transnational feminist knowledge is a radical form of activism for justice. The entire process of producing and distributing transnational feminist theo-­ ethics must be just. Second, keeping in mind Alexander and Mohanty’s cautions, I endeavor to speak “in proximity to” globally disenfranchised women.13 “Proximity” means that by maintaining epistemically close relationships with globally disenfranchised women, transnational feminist theo-ethicists recognize differences among these women and their contexts. Simultaneously, transnational feminist scholars critically reflect on their positionalities when writing transnational feminist theo-ethics. Thus, I do not speak on behalf of female subalterns even though we may have race, gender, class, and immigration status in common. Neither do I represent marginalized women in multiple contexts. Instead, I interrogate how the relations of 12  M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Cartographies of Knowledge and Power: Transnational Feminism as Radical Praxis,” in Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis, ed. Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar (Albany: State University of New  York Press, 2010), 42. 13  Korean American poet and literary critic Cathy Park Hong inspired me to contemplate how to speak “in proximity to” (formerly) colonized women and globally disenfranchised women.

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imperial ruling have fragmented, compartmentalized, and erased sexual, gender, and racial stories of poor women across the globe. Third, throughout the book, I consciously practice “self-reflexivity” while speaking in proximity to globally disenfranchised women. According to feminist religious studies scholar Nami Kim, a self-reflexive scholar-­ teacher engages in “the production of knowledges that are critical, transformative, and accountable.”14 Asian/American feminist scholars should not detach the pursuit of knowledge from “the daily reality of personal and political engagement.”15 In light of self-reflexivity, scholar-teachers’ physical locations and places are as important as their social identities and positionalities in global politics when they produce transnational feminist knowledges. Such scholar-teachers name and analyze a politics of spatiality to interrogate how producing knowledges creates inequality and power differentials. Where knowledge is produced, how it is produced, and what institutional location a knowledge producer  occupies are as important questions as who produces knowledge. A critical reflection on the politics of spatiality should enable transnational feminist scholars to interrogate how we are “implicated in the very systems we are trying to challenge and dismantle” beyond critiquing and opposing the dominant system.16 I am a first-generation Korean American, more specifically, a transnational person living in both Korea and the United States geographically, culturally, and linguistically. Although my formative education happened in South Korea, I received professional academic training in Christian theology and social ethics in the United States. Having lived in transnational contexts for many years, I identify with Asian Americans, Koreans in diaspora, and immigrants not only in the United States but also in South Korea. Whether I live in the United States or in Korea, I feel that I am living in a betwixt and between space in which I become a global citizen, if not “a citizen of the universe,” as Gloria Anzaldúa locates herself.17 My lived experiences of migration and diaspora connect me to the larger community of postcolonial women, women in two-thirds world, migrant women, and women of color. However, this does not mean that I am a(n) 14  Nami Kim, “Self-Reflexivity, Knowledge Production, and Cross-Racial Solidarity,” in Asian and Asian American Women in Theology and Religion, edited by Kwok Pui-lan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 155. 15  Kim, “Self-Reflexivity, Knowledge Production, and Cross-Racial Solidarity,” 155. 16  Kim, “Self-Reflexivity, Knowledge Production, and Cross-Racial Solidarity,” 155. 17  AnaLouise Keating, “‘I’m a Citizen of the Universe’: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Spiritual Activism as Catalyst for Social Change,” Feminist Studies vol. 34, no. 1/2 (2008): 53–69.

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(local) expert who can speak about these women’s experiences or political goals. Instead, it means that as a privileged person teaching at a selective liberal arts college in the United States, I should be critically aware of an imbalance of power between the institution of which I am part, and the communities in the two-thirds world and in the US in proximity to whom I am speaking. Since my primary teaching and research happen in Central Ohio, where Asians make up only 3% of the state’s total population, I feel disconnected from the world if I am not conscious of the global power structure influencing my everyday reality or if I am not intentional about keeping proximity to globally marginalized women.18 Furthermore, as radical praxis, transnational feminist scholarship is communal work. I always speak with the communities of postcolonial women and globally disenfranchised women. Like Mohanty, I foreground globally disenfranchised women as “an analytical and political category” and not as a descriptive category.19 Speaking in proximity to these women in the struggle against militarism, racism, sexism, and global capitalism, I imagine communities of transnational feminist scholars and activists. My imagined communities resonate with Mohanty’s articulation of the Third World’s imagined community of oppositional struggles, which “suggests potential alliances and collaborations across divisive boundaries, and ‘community.’”20 The imagined communities are historically concrete, but their identities are fluid, as global power moves fluidly. In the meantime, imagined communities can be imagined only when transnational feminist scholars, teachers, and activists are in close touch with the real communities in struggles for peace and justice. PANAAWTM is my immediate community and the place from where I can imagine transnational feminist communities. There are also many other communities in Ohio, in the United States, and many places in Asia that claim and inspire me. The chapters of A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism move in and out of these imagined communities, interweaving diverse women’s stories of resistance to injustice, of visions for justice, and of survival wisdom.

18   Ohio Government, Asians in Ohio https://development.ohio.gov/files/research/ P7004.pdf 19  Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 46. 20  Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 46.

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Spiritual Activism: Interconnectedness and Interstitial Integrity As a form of radical praxis, transnational feminist theo-ethics retells, renews, and reimagines globally disenfranchised women’s stories of resistance, survival, and the Sacred, all of which constitute what I call “spiritual activism.” As a concept, spiritual activism underscores the inseparability between one’s inner spiritual transformation and one’s outer work for social change aligned with peace and justice while overcoming oppositional consciousness of right versus wrong. Moreover, women’s spiritual activism, generated through their diverse experiences with the Sacred and the Divine, exists as radical praxis at the core of transnational feminism. The Sacred inspires transnational feminists to imagine, dream, and act upon the audacious dreams of justice while “activism” grounds them in (proximity to) women’s lived experiences and embodied knowledge. My comprehension of spiritual activism has constantly been evolving thanks to new feminist practices, alternative visions, critical conversations, global solidarity movements, and an expanding transnational feminist network. Yet two key concepts—interconnectedness (interdependence, intersubjectivity, or interrelatedness) and interstitial integrity—are central to my meditation on spiritual activism. Interconnectedness, or what Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh calls “interbeing,” is the reality that all beings—all forms of life, all living beings in the universe—are interconnected beyond time and space.21 Similarly, Brazilian ecofeminist theologian Ivone Gebara understands “relatedness” as the primary reality constitutive of all beings, a notion that goes beyond consciousness and Western rationality.22 We may comprehend interconnectedness or imagine ourselves in the vast web of interconnectedness only at a metaphysical or spiritual level. Thus, relatedness can be understood as a “religious experience,” “a cosmic condition,” and “an experience of the Divine,” as Gebara defines it from a Christian ecofeminist perspective.23 Recognizing the self as interconnected to all living beings can be compared to spiritual reckoning with a rediscovered reality of being. 21   Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ (New York: Riverhead Books, 2007), 10–12. 22  Ivone Gebara, Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999), 83. 23  Gebara, Longing for Running Water, 91–92 and 102.

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A deep appreciation of interconnectedness helps us recognize our deep yearning for the sacred and move beyond an oppositional politic. As Alexander argues, the work of decolonization should make room for the deep longing for wholeness expressed on a material, physical, existential, and psychic level because colonization has produced “fragmentation and dismemberment at both the material and psychic levels.”24 Certainly, the logic of colonialism and neoliberal capitalism divides and conquers various oppositional political movements and popular resistance for justice and peace. In this context, solidarity across differences becomes challenging to practice and imagine. For Alexander, the source of yearning for wholeness is our deep knowledge that “we are in fact interdependent—neither separate nor autonomous” and have a “sacred connection to one another.”25 Hence, an oppositional politic might be necessary to start a movement but cannot sustain us since it contradicts our desires to express interdependence and to be embraced by it. Our movement toward wholeness, or what Alexander calls “the work of spirit and journey,” opens our very core to a fundamental truth: “We are connected to the Divine (the Erotic, and the Sacred) through our connections with each other.”26 Such spiritual interconnectedness prompts us to assemble and reassemble ourselves in the community while working for social justice. The notion of interstitial integrity, which Asian American feminist theologian Rita Nakashima Brock conceptualizes, suggests this construction of the self within interconnectedness. Certainly, the self cannot exist in isolation but is always in radical relationality to others—including non-­ human beings, peoples, multiple cultures, social systems, religions, and spiritualities. Interstitial integrity is similar to Gloria Anzaldúa’s term nepantla, in-between or betwixt times and spaces, where a person’s sense of who and what they are is continuously undergoing change.27 Differently from Asian American male theologians’ argument that the Asian American identity is liminal and marginal, Brock’s interstitial integrity highlights Asian/American women’s embodied identity grounded betwixt and between engaged relationships, and the feminist theological praxis of decolonization. Imagining interstices—small tissues or fibers that connect 24  M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 281. 25  Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 282. 26  Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 282–283. 27  Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 3rd edition (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007), 94–97.

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different spaces and parts of the human body—, Brock suggests that “interstitial integrity more accurately describes how human beings construct a self in any culture.”28 Interstitial integrity characterizes the fluidity of our identities, which are always co-constitutive with others’ cultural, racial, sexual, and religious identities: namely, the story of racial relations and immigration on North American soil and beyond. In the meantime, interstitial integrity gives full attention to the agency of a person, not as an individualized entity but as a relational being. As Brock says, interstitial integrity helps us to be attuned to the fullness of life and to participate in “its ever-changing rhythms and patterns rather than to be starved by unrealized hopes or a thin nostalgic past.”29 Similarly, for Alexander, taking the Sacred seriously would mean “wrestling with the dialectic of permanent impermanence.”30 Human life is paradoxically anchored in permanent impermanence. Given this reality, interstitial integrity cultivates the wisdom of survival and resistance betwixt and between engaged relationships. In return, wisdom born and reborn in interstitial integrity reveals and re-reveals God, ever-changing and expanding the life of interstitial integrity. A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism delineates postcolonial women’s embodiment of interconnectedness and interstitial integrity in their spiritual activism and ­identifies that embodiment as a radical praxis for spiritual, religious, and social changes.

28  Rita Nakashima Brock, “Cooking without Recipes: Interstitial Integrity,” in Off the Menu: Asian and Asian American North American Women’s Religion and Theology, eds. Rita Nakashima Brock et al. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 136. 29  Brock, “Cooking without Recipes,” 139. 30  Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 327. Brock’s interstitial integrity can be compared to Alexander’s emphasis on knowledge of Sacred and Divine as “knowledge that is applied and lived in as consistent and as committed a way as possible so as to feel and observe the meaning of mystery, not as secret, but as elusive (327).” Interstitial integrity is evolving knowledge and wisdom of oneself in the ever-changing world. And yet this wisdom and knowledge is deeply grounded in one’s lived experiences of survival and resistance. Again, a self is not isolated from the community. Her wisdom, knowledge, and experience of the Sacred and the Divine are always communal.

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Decolonizing Feminist Theological Methods: Resignifying Gender and Sexuality Decolonizing the relations of imperial ruling is the essential goal and method of transnational feminist theo-ethics. To decolonize every part of human life, we should decolonize the tools of analysis, the methods of producing knowledge of transnational feminist theo-ethics, and cross-­racial and cross-cultural interactions. Christianity matters in the  decolonizing process due to its ideological and spiritual support for Euro-American colonialism and its ongoing legacy. It is critical for transnational feminist theo-ethicists to pay particular attention to how postcolonial women write and rewrite both metanarratives and quotidian stories, including of their religious experiences, understanding of the Sacred, and embodied knowledge of survival and resistance. The deep gaze of this process would enable us to conscientize how disenfranchised women on a global scale have created and left cracks in the historically consolidated imperial relations of ruling. Argentinian feminist liberation theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid’s decolonizing methods for Indecent Theology are especially useful in tracing these cracks. Althaus-Reid argues that, “all political theories are sexual theories with theological frames of support.”31 Her argument underlines the heteropatriarchal marriage between the church and the neoliberal capitalist politics that theologically, economically, politically, and morally devalue the sexual stories of globally disenfranchised women, queers, and gender non-conforming people. These people’s experiences of dehumanization stem from the social perception of their sexuality and their socially hypersexualized body. By bringing sexual stories of the poor (not in a sensationally pornographic way but as analytical tools) to the center of transnational theo-political imagination, transnational feminist theo-­ ethicists can trace cracks left by history’s victims and listen to the stories from these cracks. Jesus of Nazareth and his birth through Mary, as well as Christian rituals such as the Eucharist, can all be read sexually in these cracks, the  cracks showing poor people’s resistance, survival wisdom, silenced suffering, memories, and hope. Reading Christianity sexually opens a window to interrogate global economic politics sexually and religiously in search of transnational feminist liberation. Althaus-Reid’s 31  Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 176.

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method is connected to Kwok’s emphasis on “resignifying gender” and “requeering sexuality” as critical methods of doing postcolonial transnational feminist theology.32 Yet gender and sexuality are always interlocked with other analytical categories such as race, class, religion, and places (e.g., rural areas, metropolis, third world, and urban ghettos). An interstitial approach expands on intersectional analysis by scrutinizing the analytical categories in the relations of imperial ruling, namely, “legal, political, and historical institutions and geopolitical circumstances.”33 Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism employs gender and sexuality in analyzing global power structure and transnational feminist movements on a micro and macro level. Chapters in this book are organized in a spiral way, as various issues and contexts show similar queries but at different levels. A particular issue analyzed in each chapter creates multiple points for analyzing the intricate relations of economic, political, military, and patriarchal power. The global power relations and women’s everyday practice of liberation would prove that “the personal is internationally political and spiritual.” In light of the inseparability between the personal and the transnational, the political and the sexual, and the sensual and the spiritual, this book moves in and out of the following intellectual themes: (1) an intersectional and interstitial analysis of gender, sexuality, race, and class; (2) an antimilitary, anticapitalist, and antiracist feminist praxis; (3) the interrogation of the politics of knowledge production; (4) decolonizing Christian theology; and (5) spiritual activism as transnational feminist theo-ethical praxis. Some chapters engage in all these themes while others do not. The spiral structure integrates and expands on these themes, leading the readers to contemplate transnational feminist politics of spatiality and praxis at various levels.

Issues in Transpacific Feminist Theology and Ethics Moving transnationally in and out of different issues and contexts but maintaining a particular attention to the transpacific relations between the United States and Asia, this book builds up comprehensive transnational feminist theology and ethics. However, I do not “introduce” transnational feminist theological thoughts but to “make” liberative ethical discourses  Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology, 128, 137.  Falguni Sheth, “Interstitiality: Making Space for Migration, Diaspora, and Racial Complexity,” Hypatia 29, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 75. 32 33

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with communities to which I speak in proximity. In addition, this book includes my autobiographical reflection as an example of conscientizing the transnational in everyday life and of unfolding the relations of imperial ruling in everyday life. Chapter 2 argues the need for a transnational approach to feminist theology and defines key concepts, theories, and methods for the rest of the book. Conceptualizing “the transnational,” I elaborate on theoretical tools for transnational feminist theology and ethics as radical praxis, particularly from an Asian/American feminist perspective. At the same time, I articulate more carefully an ethic of producing transnational feminist knowledge and, in so doing, question the process of producing knowledge in the neoliberal capitalist market. In light of intersectionality and interstitiality, the chapter further considers how to interrogate the globally asymmetrical power structures constructed by various historical, legal, and geopolitical institutions and Euro-American colonialism and their effects on globally disenfranchised people. Postcolonial/transnational feminism underlines the intersectional experiences of women of color inside and outside the United States. The primary goal of the critical analysis of global power structures is to search for ways to practice transnational solidarity across differences in given political economic situations. In addition, solidarity is theologically conceptualized based on interstitial integrity as the image of human realities and the Divine, with spiritual activism as its manifestation. The chapter ends by envisioning transnational feminist solidarity mainly through the three movements of Kwok Pui-lan’s postcolonial feminist theological imagination: historic, dialogic, and diasporic imagination. These movements are crucial to imagine feminist theo-ethics transnationally. Chapter 3 searches for peace-and-justice-oriented sexual ethics when war, militarized violence, and military prostitution delimit our imagination of sexual and religious freedom. By seriously considering the bodily experiences of military prostitutes and soldiers in US camptown prostitution in South Korea, I meditate on a Christian feminist ethic of sex that can reinforce Christian commitment to peace and justice. Since 1945, the US military has been stationed in South Korea for the sake of the country’s peace and security while using poor women sexually in order to maintain US military morale and militarized masculinity. In light of Korean American cultural theorist Jin-kyung Lee’s concept of “necropolitical labor,” this chapter investigates the interlocking of race, gender, sexuality, and class in military prostitution and soldiering. Lee defines necropolitical

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labor: “the extraction of labor from those ‘condemned’ to death, whereby the ‘fostering’ of life, already premised on their death or the disposability of their lives, is limited to serving the labor demands of the state or empire.”34 As necropolitical labor, both prostitution and soldiering require laborers to perform gendered and sexualized labor, which repeatedly exposes them to deadly violence. At the same time, neither soldiers nor prostitutes are considered part of the normative industrial sector. By employing necropolitical labor as a theoretical tool, this chapter centralizes the physicality of war into sexual ethics. The bodily experiences of prostitutes and soldiers justify developing antiwar feminist ethics for peace-­and-justice-oriented sexual ethics and vice versa. Korean prostitutes in US camptowns embody not only militarized necropolitical labor but also resistance to war, militarism, and gender-based violence. The latter is crucial to contemplate sexual ethics for global peace and justice. This chapter engages in the creative social activism by and for Korean military prostitutes, especially embodied by the women of the Sunlit Center. This grassroots organization has advocated for the elderly women who used to work in camptown prostitution. The Sunlit Center women’s creative activism informs feminist theo-ethics that inspires people to (re)claim their body sovereignty, resist war and militarized violence, and recognize the body as essential to life. The analytical focus of Chap. 4 is gender-based anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on Marxist feminist scholar Iris Young’s “five faces of oppression,” this chapter shows that gender-based violence is closely linked to other forms of oppression, such as exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, and cultural imperialism. To analyze the interlocking of anti-Asian violence and gender-based violence, I critically investigate war rhetoric dominating the pandemic situation at the beginning of the global lockdown, and its political economic impact on Asian/American women. Anti-Asian gender-based violence cannot be understood properly without analyzing the complicated history of Asian immigration to the United  States, US-Asia relations, and the Christian ideologies behind this history, all connected to the US government’s militarized policies to protect “pure Americans” from physical, spiritual, and sexual diseases. To explore the complexities of Anti-Asian racism, particularly against women, this chapter interrogates the shooting incidents at Asian/American-owned spas and massage parlors in the Atlanta area of  Lee, Service Economies, 5–6.

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Georgia. The case demonstrates (1) the impact of war metaphors for COVID-19 on racialized gender-based violence, (2) prostitution industries around US bases in Asia as the militarized root of the hyper-­sexualizing of the Asian female body, and (3) evangelical purity culture’s justification of continued racist gender-based violence and Asian/American evangelicals’ compliance with it. In a critical response to anti-Asian gender-based violence, this chapter makes an “indecent” proposal of a life-affirming feminist theo-ethic that emphasizes beauty in ordinary life, the unity between body and spirit, and the unity between sexuality and sensuality. This feminist theo-ethics brings our attention to sexual metaphors embedded in Christian theology, biblical narratives, and rituals intertwined with the political. Marcella Althaus-Reid’s Indecent Theology in dialogue with Nishinaabeg scholar, storyteller, and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s radical resurgence inspires my life-affirming feminist theo-ethic. Both Althaus-Reid and Simpson would agree that sexual metaphors, not war metaphors, can help global citizens of faith imagine God’s radical and intimate love for all, and practice transnational feminist solidarity as a radical praxis of “indecentizing” global/national security free from heteropatriarchal militarism. Expanding on Chap. 3’s emphasis on the body as the existential ground of human life, Chap. 4 proposes “body literacy” as a feminist method that grounds the feminist imagination and practice of transnational solidarity in historically specific contexts. If German feminist theologian Dorothee Soelle and Vietnamese Zen peace activist Sister Chan Khong engaged in a serious Christian-Buddhist dialogue for peace, what type of spiritual activism would emerge? How would this spiritual activism heal the political, spiritual, and psychological wounds split open and bleeding by war? Through an imagined interfaith dialogue between Soelle and Chan Khong, Chap. 5 deepens the understanding of spiritual activism as a radical praxis of healing. Soelle’s in-­ depth study of mysticism and human suffering from a Christian perspective illuminates spiritual activists as healed healers who belong to this world but simultaneously let go of this world by resisting the systemic status quo of domination. Similarly, Chan Khong’s peace activism, based on the five precepts of Engaged Buddhism, suggests how healed healers assemble and reassemble themselves in the continuous cycle of human suffering without losing their integrity. Imagining their interfaith dialogue as an antidote to militarized violence, I affirm that spiritual activism is the process of healing political, spiritual, psychological, and emotional wounds inflicted by the war. Furthermore, both spiritual activists accentuate a storytelling method

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because it strengthens “empathy” among tellers and listeners and expands the “I” in everything in the web of interconnectedness/interdependence among all living beings. As its case study, this chapter examines the transnationally and transgenerationally haunting memories of the Korean War (1950–1953), particularly civilian massacres committed by the US and the Korean military during the war. To tell the stories of wartime killing, this chapter employs Alexander’s frame of time as a palimpsest in which past, present, and future memories and stories of militarized violence collapse beyond fixed time and space. Alexander’s concept is useful in explaining why the Korean War is a physically, metaphorically, and politically unending war. This chapter offers detailed information on racialized and sexualized civilian massacres as the colonial legacy as well as the complex intersection of US foreign policy, Korea’s struggle for independence, and Protestantism that condoned US–South Korean military atrocities against unarmed civilians. Although Soelle and Sister Chan Khong’s spiritual activism is not a direct remedy to the collective trauma of the Korean War, it suggests how feminist spiritual activism can assemble and reassemble the community after the massive scale of a traumatic event and prevent future military violence at every level. With a deep appreciation of transnational feminist scholarship on the diaspora, Chap. 6 elaborates on a liberative diasporic consciousness and border-crossing feminist solidarity. What kind of radical praxis of transnational feminist solidarity would be engendered through Jesus of Nazareth, whom we can feel tangibly in the Eucharist, and who is continuously revealed through radical interconnectivity and interstitial integrity? Imagining the Body of Jesus representing the collective subjectivity of diasporas, the chapter interweaves various diasporic stories that haunt one another. These stories contemplate whether diasporic subjects embody indefinite divisions in human society or transnational solidarity overcoming a division between the center and the periphery. Additionally, I engage in Kwok’s diasporic consciousness and Anzaldúa’s nepantla in search of the transformative power at a diasporic space. At the same time, Alexander’s elaboration on Caribbean diasporic spirituality and biblical scholar Jin Young Choi’s reflection on the transcorporal body of Jesus become valuable resources to imagine the Sacred emerging from the spaces of interstices. Finally, this chapter creatively interprets haunting and ghosts in diasporic spaces––ghosts that refuse to be forgotten but visit us in our

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(sub)consciousness to heal and liberate us from diasporic violence, inviting us to embody a liberative diasporic consciousness. A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism invites readers to participate in making transnational feminist theo-ethics. In fact, transnational feminist ethics is always in the making, as the global power structure moves fluidly, and we always navigate through life’s uncertainties. Traveling through my own life’s uncertainties, I can visualize Mary Paik Lee in my life and feel connected to the communities of feminist activists transnationally and transgenerationally. In the web of interconnectedness that embraces the memories of previous and future generations together, I participate in making transnational feminist theo-­ ethics from where I stand. This book is where I stand with transnational feminist scholars and activists now. A note on transliteration: All Korean words are spelled according to the Revised Romanized System of 2000 publicized in South Korea. I retain the spellings and orders of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese names as appear in English-language publications (given name followed by surname, e.g., Jung-hee Park). In a few instances, surname appears before given name (e.g., Kwok Pui-lan) because some people follow the East Asian naming convention when writing their names in English or their names are reported as such in Western media (e.g., Kim Jong-un).

Bibliography Alexander, M.  Jacqui. 2005. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham: Duke University Press. Alexander, M.  Jacqui, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. 2010. Cartographies of Knowledge and Power: Transnational Feminism as Radical Praxis. In Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis, ed. Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar, 23–45. Albany: State University of New York Press. Althaus-Reid, Marcella. 2000. Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics. New York/London: Routledge. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2007. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 3rd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Brock, Rita Nakashima. 2007. Cooking without Recipes: Interstitial Integrity. In Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology, ed. Rita Nakashima Brock, Jung Ha Kim, Kwok Pui-Lan, and Seung Ai Yang, 125–143. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Gebara, Ivone. 1999. Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

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Keating, AnaLouise. 2008. ‘I’m a Citizen of the Universe’: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Spiritual Activism as Catalyst for Social Change. Feminist Studies 34 (1/2): 53–69. Kim, Nami. 2020. Self-Reflexivity, Knowledge Production, and Cross-Racial Solidarity. In Asian and Asian American Women in Theology and Religion, ed. Kwok Pui-lan, 153–170. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kwok, Pui-Lan. 2005. Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Lee, Jin-kyung. 2010. Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work, and Migrant Labor in South Korea. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mohanty, Chandra. 2003. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press. Ohio Government, “Asians in Ohio,” https://development.ohio.gov/files/ research/P7004.pdf Paik Lee, Mary. 1990. Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America, ed. Sucheng Chan. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Sheth, Falguni. 2014. Interstitiality: Making Space for Migration, Diaspora, and Racial Complexity. Hypatia 29 (1): 75–93. Smith, Dorothy. 1987. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Thich Nhat Hanh. 2007. Living Buddha, Living Christ. New York: Riverhead Books.

CHAPTER 2

The Transnational, the Political, and the Theological

Thinking About the Transnational, the Political, and the Theological The COVID-19 pandemic, the damaging effects of climate change, and the Black Lives Matter movement are spectacular instances of the personal being international, politically and spiritually, in the complexly interconnected web of life. In this web, we humans see our lives bound to one another beyond borders, political differences, religions, cultures, and more. However, such instances also illustrate the power differential between diverse groups of people who are beholden to the institutional infrastructure which complicatedly intersects with their differences in race, gender, sexuality, religion, and geographic locations. Although the entire world is struggling with commonly shared crises, ranging from militarized violence to a pandemic, we are not equal in these crises. Even global solidarity movements can be compartmentalized and fragmented, silencing the parties that share different political views and interests even if they strive for the cause of human rights, as Atalia Omer insightfully points out in the case of religious peacebuilding.1

1  Atalia Omer, “Religion, Nationalism, and Solidarity Activism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, eds. Atalia Omer, R. Scott Appleby, and David Little (Oxford University Press, 215), 614–615.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. C. Pae, A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43766-3_2

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What theological and ethical discourses would help people become aware of global power structures like the quotidian proximity of transnational militarism, the neoliberal market economy, and human-caused ecological destruction? How would these power structures look through the feminist lenses of gender and sexuality intersecting with race, class, and religion? What kind of praxes would be necessary to work for just peace at every level of human life, from interpersonal relations to international relations?2 What I propose for transnational feminist theo-ethics begins with these critical questions in search of liberative praxis. Liberative praxis is, of course, foregrounded in women’s centuries-long embodied wisdom of survival, justice, peace, and resistance to the militarized heteropatriarchal power system. Here, two essential questions also arise: “Who” can do transnational feminist theology and ethics? And “How” can one critically engage with and produce transnational feminist knowledge, especially when the relations of imperial ruling stubbornly maintain the massive gap between commonly cherished values and global realities? The two questions of “who and how” challenge us to consider a liberative God or the Sacred in our times. I define transnational feminism as radical praxis. According to M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty, such praxis must wrestle with “the ethics of the cross-cultural production of knowledge” and “politics of power, spatiality, and knowledge production.”3 With Alexander and Mohanty’s cautions, I delineate how to produce transnational feminist theo-ethics “in proximity to” globally disenfranchised women. “Proximity” means that transnational feminists do not aim to speak on behalf of politically vulnerable women (i.e., subalterns). Instead, we transnational feminists ask how the relations of imperial ruling have formed politically and economically vulnerable female subjects and have fragmented and compartmentalized their stories. Simultaneously, we consciously trace such vulnerable women’s embodied knowledge of justice and liberation both transgenerationally and transnationally. Hence, transnational feminist praxis must involve retelling, retrieving, and reimagining feminist stories of resistance, survival, and the Sacred, which together compose what I call spiritual  Different from liberal or negative peace, just peace emphasizes just social orders and just human relations as bearing and offering the status of peace. Thus, I consider not only antiwar peace activism but also social movements for just social relations, whether they be racial, sexual, class, and gender equity, to be examples of peace activism. 3  M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Cartographies of Knowledge and Power: Transnational Feminism as Radical Praxis,” in Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis, ed. Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar (Albany: State University of New  York Press, 2010), 42. 2

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activism: inseparability between one’s inner-spiritual transformation and outer-worldly transformation. As Kwok Pui-lan argues, signifying gender and sexuality is crucial for doing and imagining postcolonial/transnational feminist theology.4 The sexual and gendered stories from the global poor become the binding site for producing liberative theological knowledge of “interstitial integrity,” the image of the Divine particularly proposed by Asian American feminist theologians. In what follows, I construct a transnational feminist theo-ethic in our time that opens a space for transborder solidarity for just peace. For this, the chapter first defines feminist theoretical perspectives on “the transnational” and develops “interstitiality” as an analytical tool, which shifts an analytical focus from the intersectionality of social identities to political institutions. Interstitial integrity as an image of God and spiritual activism as a praxis of interstitial integrity are key to transnational feminist theo-­ ethics. Additionally, the chapter proposes a transnational feminist theo-­ ethic as radical spiritual activism, a type of activism that must involve the rewriting and retelling of the Sacred and of postcolonial women’s survival wisdom. This activism must actively pursue transnational solidarity from where we stand. Furthermore, the process of rewriting and retelling necessitates storytelling and imagination as methods for radical praxis of transnational feminist theo-ethics, as both womanist scholar Lylie Maparyan and Kwok Pui-lan illuminate in their womanist spiritual activism and postcolonial feminist theology respectively.

The Transnational: Rethinking Knowledge Production What is theology? What is ethics? On a basic level, theology is a God-talk, and ethics is about how we should live. A theo-ethical discourse, as a normative discourse, contemplates two interrelated questions of how we should live if we want to embody a critical discourse or knowledge about God, and how we should produce this knowledge. Since any form of knowledge is ascribed to the power structure, feminist theo-ethics inquires about “who” is producing a particular form of God-talk and “how” this God-talk has affected gender relations and vice versa. Feminist theologians have scrutinized the gendered and sexualized power structure embedded in any theological talk. Just as Marcella Althaus-Reid argues that, “all political theories are sexual theories with theological frames of support,”  Kwok Pui-lan, Feminist Theology and Postcolonial Imagination (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 125, 137. 4

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so too must transnational feminist theo-ethicists interrogate the political-­ economic agenda which is rife with theological discourse that is built upon the interpellation of gender and sexual hierarchy.5 A new transnational feminist theo-ethical discourse for our time should be radical enough to challenge society to reexamine habitual ways of thinking and living. The epistemic site of this discourse remains in the kernel of God’s preferential option for the poor, shared among various liberation theologies. In a neoliberal capitalist world, global crises such as COVID-19, climate change, and armed conflict disproportionately affect the global poor, including refugees in camps, women of color in the global supply chain, elderly people with insufficient economic and health resources, people with disabilities, migrants, sex workers, and large populations of the Global South. Even though they are victimized by such global crises, the global poor nonetheless produce critical knowledge about the relations of imperial ruling and finally liberative transnational feminist ethics. As Mohanty accentuates, globally disenfranchised people’s embodiment and personification of the intersection of sexual, economic, and racial relations and colonialism ground transnational feminist ethics with historical specificities.6 Mohanty’s words might usefully be compared to “God’s preferential option for the poor.” As liberation theologians have understood, the poor have a special place in God’s heart because of their embodied knowledge of God’s peace and justice, a knowledge which generates a new understanding of God.7

5  Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 176. 6  Chandra Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 52. 7  The poor are not an ahistorical entity. In every critical discourse, the poor must be named in the specific context. Scholars should analyze the particular constituencies of the poor through the lens of intersectionality and avoid romanticizing them. By doing so, the poor do not remain merely in the abstract and rhetorical realm. Their heterogeneity and material realties can be revealed only through historical specificities and critical contextual analysis. From an Asian and Asian American feminist perspective, Nami Kim elaborates on the importance of Asian feminist scholars’ critical self-reflexivity which would disabuse them of romanticizing Asian women as one homogeneous pot of economically deprived people when they develop Asian/American feminist theology. See Nami Kim, “The ‘Indigestible’ Asian: The Unifying Term ‘Asian’ in Theological Discourse,” in Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology, eds. Rita Nakashima Brock et al., (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 23–43.

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And what is the notion of “transnational feminism”? To be sure, any definition or even any genealogy of transnational feminism cannot capture the rich heterogeneity among transnational feminist voices, the rigorous scholarship, the audacious resistance against imperial relations of ruling, and ever-expanding feminist and LGBTQ global networks. Here, I more simply map out transnational feminism with three key and basic points. First, comprehending that the personal is the internationally political, transnational feminism focuses on the complicated relationship between micropolitics in everyday life and macropolitics. Justice at a micropolitical level, even for personal relations, is inevitably connected to the macropolitical structure and its supportive ideologies. Second, gender and sexuality should be used in analyzing power relations such as colonialism, neoliberal capitalism, heteropatriarchy, racism, and militarism, as well as subjectivity, agency, and knowledge production. Third, transnational feminism as radical praxis emphasizes the epistemic privilege of disenfranchised women and gender queers, especially in the postcolonial world and First Nations. These women’s knowledge of political activism and networking with other women together form the backbone of transnational feminism. Also, bearing in mind moral values such as intersubjectivity, interconnectivity, accountability, and mutual responsibility, we should scrutinize the entire process of producing transnational feminist knowledge. Every kind of knowledge is certainly inseparable from the social locations of its producers. Despite its conceptual limit, the positionality or the social location of a producer of transnational feminist knowledge should be scrutinized in any discourse. However, one’s positionality does not automatically validate or dismiss the legitimacy or authenticity of one’s transnational feminist knowledge; in this regard, Nami Kim points out the complexity of “self-referentiality.”8 Instead, one’s positionality and social location merely mark a critical entry point to transnational feminism and theo-ethics. Let me unpack these key points. After having critically reviewed Women’s Studies Programs in US colleges and universities, Alexander and Mohanty defined “the transnational” in transnational feminism in their 1997 anthology as: (1) A way of thinking about women in similar contexts across the world, in different geographical spaces, rather than as all women across the world; (2) an understanding of a set of unequal relationships among and between 8

 Nami Kim, “The ‘Indigestible’ Asian,” 25.

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­ eoples, rather than a set of traits embodied in all non-US citizens (particup larly because US citizenship continues to be premised within a white, Eurocentric, masculinist, heterosexist regime); and (3) a consideration of the term “international” in relation to an analysis of economic, political, and ideological processes which foreground the operations of race and capitalism (for instance, those which would therefore require taking critical antiracist, anti-­ capitalist positions that would make feminist solidarity work possible).9

Their definition of the transnational traces the transnational linkage of the political economic infrastructure without presenting so-called global and transnational women as collectively embodying third-worldness marked by darker skin color, exotic culture, Orientalism, colonialism, poverty, and misogynistic and patriarchal religion. Mohanty’s 1989 article, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” criticizes a group of Western feminist scholars precisely for reproducing colonized knowledge of third-world women. These scholars lump third-world women into one homogeneous group oppressed by the heteropatriarchal familial system and religious ideologies, while detaching them from historical contexts, as if misogynistic religious ideologies, patriarchy, poverty, and racism marked the fundamental characters of third-worldness, and thus as if these structures were ahistorical.10 Despite their (presumed) good intentions, Western feminist scholars often fail to speak in proximity to third-world women. They tend to emphasize gender oppression over other forms of oppression. They often fail to see gender oppression interlocked with colonialism, globalization, and racism, as well as the intricate collaboration between third-world women and men in social movements. As a result, in Western feminist scholarship, third-world women are frequently portrayed as victims to be saved from their male counterparts. These white feminists create further epistemological roadblocks because they suppose the universality of (white liberal) feminist methods, economic development as a universal solution, the superiority of Western feminism, and the (presumed) rationality of secular liberal feminism in opposition to religious feminism.11 9  M.  Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty, “Introduction: Genealogies, Legacies, Movements,” in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), xix. 10  Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 17–42. 11  Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 38–42.

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Mohanty’s critique applies to feminist theologies as well. As Kwok Pui-­ lan critically observes, much white liberal middle-class feminist theological discourse concentrates on “challenging the construction of gender at the cultural and symbolic level.”12 Although challenging the interpellation of metaphors, symbols, meaning-making, and religious ideologies is an essential feminist activity, this activity involves a process which requires a critical reflection on what “sources” we use and what “material” changes the meaning-making will bring. Since gender oppression is always interlocked with other forms of oppression, the meaning-making of gender in feminist theology alone does not necessarily change the realities of poor women or the political economy. In the worst case, feminist theology becomes a “decent” academic business to benefit middle-class white women instead of critically interrogating the messy relations of ruling other than gender. The (unintentional) stereotyping of Asian/third-world women can be found among Asian feminist theologians too. For instance, Nami Kim warns about the danger of some Asian feminist theological discourses creating a unifying image of Asian women and Asia’s religious and spiritual traditions. These discourses have characterized Asia’s third-­ worldness in terms of poverty and oppression, “whereas Asia’s cultural and religious traditions have represented the spiritual sphere, where all the timeless values are kept intact,” and thus “authentic,” different from the West as well as other third-world regions.13 Decent and self-referential Asian feminist theology may also benefit (Western-educated) middle-class Asian feminist theologians in the neoliberal capitalist world. Alexander and Mohanty expand on their 1997 definition of the transnational. The expansion was necessary because the neoliberal market economy, global militarism, armed conflicts, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and settler colonialism had intensified the system of suffering inflicted on women and queer folk globally. In the meantime, women’s transnational solidarity movements, including Indigenous women’s radical activism for bodily sovereignty, had become more strategic, creative, and global. Academic discourses of the transnational, especially in feminist and LGBT/queer studies, have also been prolific in North America.14 Alexander and Mohanty assert that their renewed definitions of the  Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology, 129.  Kim, “The ‘Indigestible’ Asian,” 36–37. 14  Alexander and Mohanty, “Cartographies of Knowledge and Power,” 24. 12 13

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transnational should wrestle with the following: (1) The links between the politics of location, the spatiality of power, and that of knowledge production; (2) the physicality and materiality of space in terms of contestation over land; (3) a sharper focus on the ethics of the cross-cultural production of knowledge; and (4) a foregrounding of questions of intersubjectivity, connectivity, collective responsibility, and mutual accountability as fundamental markers of a radical praxis.15 Alexander and Mohanty’s four points of scrutiny constitute a transnational feminist ethics on how we live our own lives “as scholars, teachers, and organizers, and our relations to labor and practices of consumption in an age of privatization, and the hegemonic imperial projects that are at stake.”16 If Alexander and Mohanty’s earlier definition of the transnational conceptualizes it in the global political economy, their revised definition underscores the required responsibility and integrity of transnational feminists, especially those located in North America. Producing knowledge can hardly be innocent of a profit-making economy. In the age of globalization, producers collect materials from somewhere (i.e., the two-thirds world), assemble them into pre-designed products, and sell them in the market. Multinational corporations exercise power to decide what can go into the market. Knowledge production is not much different. Hence, the entire process of making, sharing, and selling transnational feminist knowledge should be analyzed critically. With respect to Nami Kim’s argument, which I referenced previously, the positionality and social location of a transnational feminist knowledge producer should also be interrogated in this academic market. More specifically, we should ask: How do we produce knowledge? How do we consume it? Who offers materials for the production of knowledge? Who reaps the benefits? Althaus-Reid once warned that Latin American Liberation theology has lost its revolutionary voice and become conventionally heterosexual in order to appeal to European and North American markets.17 The neoliberal market economy has power to affect not only the process of producing knowledge but also knowledge itself. Certainly, transnational feminism as radical praxis contests the lucrative logic of the profit-driven-market economy and continues to create alternative ways to produce and share knowledge

 Alexander and Mohanty, “Cartographies of Knowledge and Power,” 42.  Alexander and Mohanty, “Cartographies of Knowledge and Power,” 42. 17  Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 4–5. 15 16

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horizontally.18 Asian American feminist theologians’ concept of interstitial integrity as the Divine image and praxis can suggest alternative ways of producing and sharing liberative knowledge about God and human life.

Interstitial Approach and Interstitial Integrity Toward Decolonizing Theology Transnational feminist theo-ethics creatively and critically interweaves transnationalism, feminism, theology, and ethics. Transnational feminist knowledge challenges an implicitly and explicitly heteropatriarchal God-­ talk and shows its impact on our everyday lives as well as international relations. Alternative forms of God-talk inevitably require new ways of thinking and relating to others, including non-Christian traditions and secularism. To be sure, transnational feminism is nothing new to feminist theologians of the Pacific Asian North Asian American Women in Theology and Ministry (PANAAWTM) who reflect on their lives and religion, crossing multiple boundaries. Although my direct entry point to transnational feminist theo-ethics would be my transpacific life as an immigrant to the United States from South Korea, this experience can be contemplated only in connection to the collective (and conflicting) memories of Asian diasporas as well as PANAAWTM’s embodied knowledge of God from transnational feminist consciousness. Here, PANAAWTM theologian Rita Nakashima Brock’s concept of “interstitial integrity” can inform not only the transnational feminist imagination of God but also the complex identity formation of Asian American women, who have crossed the Pacific or lived in the historical imagination of transpacific migration. What is interstitiality? How can it be used methodologically to show the relations of imperial ruling’s impact on one’s self-understanding?

18  The relationship between the market economy and the production of (academic) knowledge is an area that should be explored further. I have two cases in mind. Recently, two publishing companies published two theological books on settler colonialism, decolonization movements, and resistance to militarism. Both books were anthologies that collected voices from among the Global South scholars and scholars of color in North America. Each book is $125. The price may discourage people from buying their own copies. As the publishers target university libraries in North America and Western Europe as the books’ buyers, transnational knowledge collected in the anthologies is likely to serve only a small number of students and scholars who have the privilege to access university libraries. These books are examples of not returning poor people’s knowledge to them and to their education.

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An Interstitial Approach According to feminist philosopher Falguni Sheth, “interstitiality” methodologically considers the complex nexus of “legal, political, and historical institutions and geopolitical circumstances” that are often invisible but form a significant backdrop that “shap[es] the self-understandings and interests” of diasporic and politically vulnerable populations.19 An interstitial approach shifts the analytical focus from the complex intersection of social identities of disenfranchised subjects to the institutional infrastructure, or similar to the relations of imperial ruling. This shift is intended to interrogate the problems that politically vulnerable subjects face as they live in spaces of multiplicity, fragmentation, hybridity, and cultural and racial impurity (e.g., spaces of interstices) owing partially to historically conflicting nationalities and to domestic and international politics (i.e., the war on terror, armed conflict, immigration law, building codes, property law, the marital code, etc.). Interstitiality underscores both intra-­ group diversities and conflict of interests, for example, among women of color, but it can simultaneously create “alliances or political solidarities through intersectionality” across historically situated conflicts.20 Social identities such as race, gender, sexuality, and class are visible markers of politically vulnerable subjects (i.e., diasporic, postcolonial, and migrant subjects) as seen in intersectionality analysis. The term, “intersectionality,” coined by Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, limns where power comes from and collides and where it intersects and interlocks.21 Comprehending the complex intersection of social identities, Crenshaw explains oppression of Black women in various social institutions due to their race, gender, and other identities. In contrast, social institutions and geopolitical circumstances are relatively invisible aspects of subjects, even as they interweave socially constructed identity markers and maintain structural oppression. By slightly expanding on the shift of the analytical focus from intersectionality to interstitiality, we can understand how the institutional infrastructure or the relations of imperial ruling 19  Falguni Sheth, “Interstitiality: Making Space for Migration, Diaspora, and Racial Complexity,” Hypatia 29 no. 1 (2014): 75. 20  Sheth, “Interstitiality,” 76. 21  Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-Discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1 (1989): 139–41, https://chicagounbound. uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=uclf

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privilege certain individuals in the similarly oppressed group due to their race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, and dis/abilities, and how politically disenfranchised subjects manipulate these very institutions to protect their survival.22 Consider the social identity category of Asian American Pacific Islanders. From an outsider’s perspective, AAPIs share similar identity markers (i.e., race), political interests, and immigration backgrounds, and thus naturally build coalitions and solidarity. During the 1960s, the term Asian Americans emerged as the Pan-Asian American movement for racial justice and grew mostly among East and Southeast Asian Americans.23 Despite historical conflicts between China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, and other countries, Asian Americans from these cultural heritages and national origins created Pan-Asian solidarity to fight against racial injustice, the experience they shared. Increasingly, the term Asian American included South Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI). However, scholars have criticized the inaccurate and even oppressive implication of the term “AAPI.” First, as racial category, AAPI does not show the unequal distribution of resources among Asian Americans.24 Even cross-ethnic solidarity for racial justice requires an arduous and concerted effort among ethnically diverse Asian American communities. Second, Pacific Islanders’ struggles and experiences are far different from those of many Asian Americans. As indigenous Hawaiian scholar Lisa Kahaleole Hall notes, Hawaiians are not immigrants or refugees but colonized and occupied subjects.25 The model minority myth, the hypersexualization of the female body, and the effeminate male body so often applied to Asian Americans do not apply to many Pacific Islanders whose big and brown bodies are perceived as a threat and whose economic status is far from the model minority stereotype.26 Thus, AAPI is first and foremost a US census category. The identity also reflects  Sheth, “Interstitiality,” 79–80.  Rita Nakashima Brock and Nami Kim, “Asian Pacific American Protestant Women,” in Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America vol. 1, ed. Rosemary Skinner Keller and Rosemary Radford Ruether (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 498. 24  Robert Teranishi, Asians in the Ivory Tower: Dilemmas of Racial Inequality in American Higher Education (New York: Teachers’ College Press, 210), 52–59. 25  Lisa Kahaleole Hall, “Which of These Things Is Not Like the Other: Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders Are Not Asian Americans, and All Pacific Islanders Are Not Hawaiian,” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (2015): 730. 26  Hall, “Which of These Things Is Not Like the Other,” 743–744. 22 23

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the US military strategy which treats the Asia Pacific as a single region for military operations, while legitimizing US colonial occupation of Hawai’i, Guam, Saipan, and other Pacific Islands. As settlers, Asian Americans have lived in the Pacific Islands for many generations. Asian American scholar Candice Fujikane reminds us of Asian American settler colonialism not only in Hawai’i but also across the mainland United States, noting “the constellation of the colonial ideologies and practices of Asian American settlers who are part of the broader structure of the US settler colonial state.” 27 Critical discussion of the AAPI identity continues. In light of an interstitial approach, the critiques of AAPI identity understate how US law and foreign policy lump people together while compartmentalizing their social activism. Yet AAPI scholars and activists have searched for the opportunity to create genuine solidarity without erasing any groups’ differences; they complicate their differences and conflicts of interest. The critical self-­ reflection of fourth generation Japanese American Fujikane on Asian American settler colonialism is an example of the fluidity of an Asian American subject’s understanding of herself, which blurs the boundary between victims and oppressors. By explaining a subject’s fluid understanding of a self in the given historical and social context, Sheth’s interstitial approach first aims to name impediments to intra-group solidarity—the obstacles created by historical conflict in Asian Americans’ ancestral homelands, US legal and political institutions, and many others. By limning the construction of these obstacles, we may conceptualize our social identities strategically for social justice where coalition-building across differences can  emerge.28 Thus, an interstitial approach can preclude politically disenfranchised subjects from “easy racial analytics” as it critically explains the complex formation of these subjects through various legal, military, economic, educational, and geopolitical institutions.29 Instead of portraying them merely as vulnerable subjects living in culturally, historically, and racially hybridized and fragmented spaces, how might such an interstitial analysis of Asian/American women’s lives capture their survival wisdom—their ability to outsmart the oppressive institutional 27  Candace Fujikane, “Asian American Critique and Moana Nui 2011: Securing a Future beyond Empires, Militarized Capitalism and APEC,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 13 no. 2 (2012): 191. 28  Sheth, “Interstitiality,” 79–80. 29  Sheth, “Interstitiality,” 81.

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infrastructure—as well as their building of international and cross-racial solidarity, and their embodied knowledge of the Sacred? Interstitial Integrity In her Asian American feminist theological work, Rita Nakashima Brock develops the critical concept of “interstitial integrity,” emphasizing active remembering, re-remembering, and reclaiming the historical memories of Asian/American. Similar to Sheth’s interstitial approach, Brock understands histories and memories as important sources by which to comprehend how one’s understanding of the self is formed. This is also a way to begin understanding Divine interstitiality. Brock’s interstitial integrity, more significantly, honors Asian/American women’s centuries-long courage and activism for justice, equity, and peace domestically and internationally, and does so recalling more than the historically conflicting nationalities attached to their ethnic identities. According to Brock, “interstitial integrity more accurately describes how human beings construct a self in any culture.”30 This characterizes the multiple stories of race, ethnicities, (Native Americans, whites, Blacks, Asian Americans, Latinx, and so forth) and immigration on North American soil. All our identities on American soil have been differently and yet interstitially constructed by colonization, then transplanted, and thus hybridized in North America. However, this transplanted and hybridized Asian American self has lived with “integrity,” meaning that the self has been accountable to themselves, to their communities, to other communities, and to non-­ human environmental beings. Brock traces interstitial “integrity” through Asian Pacific American women’s work for racial justice in North America and the international liberation movement for their homelands, which has lasted since the late nineteenth century. Without dividing us Asian American women into Asians or Americans, or by loyalty only to our particular ethnic groups, we have worked on both frontiers at once for justice for ourselves, our compatriots, and for people in other countries.31 As Brock further stresses, interstitial integrity helps us be attuned to the fullness of life and 30  Rita Nakashima Brock, “Cooking without Recipes: Interstitial Integrity,” in Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology, eds. Rita Nakashima Brock et al. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 136. 31  Nakashima Brock, “Cooking without Recipes,” 139.

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participate in “its ever-changing rhythms and patterns rather than to be starved by unrealized hopes or a thin nostalgic past.”32 Interstitial integrity mirrors the Divine interstitiality that holds all forms of life together with integrity without losing any of them. Brock’s emphasis on Asian American women’s social justice work as the backbone of interstitial integrity corresponds to Sheth’s interstitial approach in terms of solidarity building. Despite their intra-diversity, salient differences, and historically conflicting nationalities, often created by international treaties, immigration and property laws, and armed conflict, Asian/American women have been arduously building up domestic and international solidarity for racial justice, against US military bases in Asia Pacific, for justice for victims of the Japanese military sexual slavery during World War II, for immigration reform, and more. Solidarity building happens cross-racially but almost always requires intra-group solidarity. Citizenship from a Theo-Political Perspective Sheth’s interstitial approach and Brock’s interstitial integrity together forge the critical lens through which to analyze US laws of citizenship and immigration in the US. Theo-political interrogation of citizenship can create a transformative space where globally disenfranchised people empathize with one another across multiple borders. In terms of theological anthropology, Asian and Asian American women’s critical reflection on citizenship and immigration unpacks a deeper meaning of God, which, in return, debunks racially, sexually, and religiously oppressive ideologies and practices of citizenship and immigration laws. In Mohanty’s analysis, citizenship and immigration laws in the US are fundamentally the process of defining insiders and outsiders by weaponizing race, gender, sexuality, and religion.33 Global relations of inequality are manifested through these laws. For instance, women of color have entered the US labor force in domestic or laundry work, agricultural labor, garment industries, and sex industries. Lisa Lowe analyzes the transpacific connection of garment industries built upon the necessary alliance “between racialized women and third-world women within, outside, and across the border of the United States” under the condition of neoliberal

 Nakashima Brock, “Cooking without Recipes,” 139.  Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 67.

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capitalism.34 The garment industry’s sweatshops in San Francisco and Los Angeles hire (undocumented) immigrant women from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Hong Kong, South Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines, where US/multinational corporations are also conducting garment assembly work. Despite linguistic, cultural, religious, and national differences, these immigrant women share material continuities not only with one another, but also with Chicanas and Latinas who work in maquiladoras in Latin America, and Asian women who work in textile factories in Southeast Asia, Bangladesh, India, and other parts of Asia.35 Sheth’s interstitial approach illuminates inter and intra-diversity among these racially and ethnically different groups of women. Simultaneously, the analysis of intersectionality as the necessary component of an interstitial approach creates spaces for these women’s alliances and political solidarity for justice. By the same token, Brock’s interstitial integrity accentuates these globally disenfranchised women’s moral agency, integrity, and survival wisdom to live accountable to themselves, their families, and their communities without losing their personhood under multi-­ layered oppression. The neoliberal global market economy transcends citizenship bound by national borders, accelerating documented and undocumented immigration into economically developed countries across the globe. Recall Althaus-Reid’s critical argument that all political theories are sexual theories that have theological support.36 Citizenship laws in the US, along with white, heteronormative empire-building, should therefore be read theologically and sexually. In a way similar to white supremacist immigration law, heteropatriarchal Christian theology has frequently distinguished insiders (the saved) from outsiders (sinners and heathens). This distinction is often made based on (women’s) sexuality. For instance, consider Jane Schaberg’s critical study of Mary Magdalene. Throughout its history, Western Christianity has portrayed Mary Magdalene as a prostitute and sinner possessed by unclean spirits whom Jesus cleaned. Despite her essential leadership role in the early Christian church—she was after all the first person who encountered the risen Christ—Mary Magdalene is known

34  Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 165. 35  Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 165. 36  Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 176.

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predominantly as a forgiven sinner, as if her citizenship (or membership) in the church was conditioned upon her gender and sexuality.37 Conditional citizenship is nothing new to women of color and third-­ world women. Mohanty insightfully notes that “notions of sexuality (morality of women), gender (familiar configurations), and race (“Oriental”)” are implicitly written into laws of immigration, naturalization, and nationality in Euro-American liberal states.38 In this light, colonial Christianity has a long history of sexually demoralizing women of color, and thus of excluding them from the church and the state. White Christian colonialists saw both enslaved Black and Native American women as morally and sexually dirty and, as a result, rapable. Hypersexualization of Asian women is co-constitutive with this colonial legacy of demoralizing Black and Native female bodies. US immigration laws have routinely questioned the sexual purity of Asian/American women. In the late nineteenth century, all Chinese women on American soil were considered prostitutes, just as Cold War America saw all East and Southeast Asian women as prostitutes who seduced allegedly innocent young American soldiers in the war zones in Asia. Contemporary nation-­ states’ regulations on sexuality, gender, and race may offer comparative studies and struggles of US women of color and third-world women. Religion should not be dismissed from these studies and struggles either. Sheth’s critical study of the Western formation of Muslims as an unruly population shows the political and legal oppression against the gendered and raced Islamic body. According to Sheth, US liberal democracy systematically casts out Muslim men and women based on their distinctive differences in race, language, and religion/culture. As the US government has singled out Muslims through the focus on the War on Terror in local, national, and international media, Islam has become equated with a radically foreign culture rather than religion.39 Unlike Christianity, Islam cannot be a civic religion but only a radically different culture, one marked by irrationality. As a result, cultural difference becomes the fundamental reason for Muslims’ presumed incapacity to adhere to the values and laws of liberal 37  Jane Schaberg, The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian Testament (New York: Continuum, 2004). 38  Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 71. 39  Falguni Sheth, Toward a Political Philosophy of Race (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 91.

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democracy. Their incapacity translates to a threat to the public who faithfully obey laws in the liberal secular state.40 By extension, Muslim women’s veils become the symbol either of submission to patriarchy or of transgression of Western democratic values. The veil signifies gender oppression and violence, making Muslim women objects to be saved from their violent and oppressive male counterparts. In the meantime, the veil delivers a message of transgressing “a fundamental value of political liberalism: transparency or publicity.”41 The veiled bodies of women provoke suspicion, invoke guilt, or they are perceived as something to hide, if not the archetypal symbol of gender oppression. Western society, including liberal feminists, cannot imagine Muslim women wearing veils without being coerced. If we critically connected citizenship and immigration to interstitial integrity, we would recognize the physical, juridical, and social violence that those who live between hybridized spaces and cultures experience. They are immigrants of color, refugees, non-Christians, and third-world women in the global supply chain whose loyalties to nation-states are tested and suspected. In these contexts, God as interstitial integrity reveals women’s survival wisdom and courage across multiple borders and boundaries. From a transnational feminist perspective, interstitial integrity shows multiple entry points to liberative theo-ethical knowledge, destabilizing the complicatedly layered boundaries between the center and the periphery. Decolonizing (Feminist) Theology Interstitial integrity accurately shows that interconnectedness rather than separation between insiders and outsiders is the human reality in a globalized world. By contemplating the transpacific connections of the garment industry and citizenship and immigration laws in liberal states, we can engage in comparative studies of women’s experiences in similar contexts across the globe. Interconnectivity among these women expands interstitial integrity beyond Asian/American women’s embodied knowledge of God. In other words, interstitial integrity challenges us to analyze critically our location in global politics, especially in terms of spatial inequality. Instead of looking for nation-state bound citizenship, in interstitial integrity we can also see ourselves interconnected to others and imagine being  Sheth, Toward a Political Philosophy of Race, 93–95.  Sheth, Toward a Political Philosophy of Race, 99.

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“citizens of the universe,” as Gloria Anzaldúa claims.42 Alexander similarly accentuates the importance of observing and appreciating interconnectedness among all beings. Engaging in the Sacred in transnational feminism, she rediscovers that “the very core to a fundamental truth” is that “we are connected to the Divine through our connections with each other.”43 Alexander’s words deepen the understanding of interstitial integrity as radical praxis when colonialism, neocolonialism, and neoliberal global capitalism segregate and compartmentalize the self at both a material and a psychic level. The work of decolonization should make room for “the deep yearning for wholeness, often expressed as a yearning to belong … both material and existential, both psychic and physical, and which, when satisfied, can subvert and ultimately displace the pain of dismemberment.”44 Probing the Divine and the Sacred through interstitial integrity with Alexander’s words filled with yearnings for wholeness, we may feel that interstitial integrity moves us to the work of decolonization of healing the pain of dismemberment by rigorously building communities. Furthermore, the healing work resulting from the conscientization of interconnectedness can be done only in the community. Although transnational feminists often present an imagined community for anti-capitalist, anti-war, and antiracist work, they need to be physically grounded in particular communities such as PANAAWTM. Since our body is a medium to experience interstitial integrity and to carry out activism for peace and justice, our sense of belonging to a tangible community sustains our wholeness in a compartmentalized world. Through multiplying their communities, transnational feminists as scholars, activists, and organizers have transgenerationally and transnationally cultivated wisdom to heal the broken and fragmented world. As Su Yon Pak and Jung Ha Kim underscore, PANAAWTM women remember, witness, and cultivate wisdom in between and among various human relationships. We are constituted by these relationships in friendships, in intergenerational relationships, and among members and leaders of the community.45 In interstitial integrity, we multiply our wisdom, holding together what is seen and unseen, and 42  AnaLouise Keating, “‘I’m a Citizen of the Universe’: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Spiritual Activism as Catalyst for Social Change,” Feminist Studies 34 no. 1/2 (2008): 53–69. 43  M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 283. 44  Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 281. 45  Su Yon Pak and Jung Ha Kim, Introduction to Leading Wisdom: Asian and Asian North American Women Leaders (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017), 7.

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refusing to let go of seemingly different worlds.46 This wisdom gives us the freedom to be who we are. Wisdom born out of and nurtured in interstitial integrity empowers us to navigate life’s uncertainties without fear while fostering community built upon genuine friendships.

Spiritual Activism: Radical Praxis Transnational feminist theo-ethics as radical praxis generates many creative forms of activism for peace and justice. The feminist activism and transnational solidarity through interstitial integrity that I envision is spiritual activism. According to womanist scholar Layli Maparyan, spiritual activism is both “social or ecological transformational activity rooted in a spiritual belief system or set of spiritual practices” and “putting spirituality to work for positive social and ecological change.”47 Note that a spiritual belief system and spiritual practices are not necessarily bound to institutionalized religions and their doctrines. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, two women of color spiritual activists, accentuate: We reach a spirituality that has been hidden in the hearts of oppressed people under layers of centuries of traditional god-worship. It emerges from under the veils of La Virgen de Guadalupe and unrolls from Yemaya’s ocean waves whenever we need to be uplifted from or need the courage to face the tribulations of a racist patriarchal world where there is no relief. Our spirituality does not come from outside ourselves. It emerges when we listen to the ‘small still voice’ (Teish) within us which can empower us to create actual changes in the world.48

Moraga and Anzaldúa illuminate the inseparability between women of color’s spirituality and their justice work to bring concrete changes in the world. This empowering spirituality can only be found when women of color are willing to trust their own voices, resources, and power for personal and social transformation by disrupting heteropatriarchal religious teachings and practices. The power of spirituality is to ground women of color in concrete contexts and not to transcend or spiritualize women’s  Pak and Kim, Introduction, 8.  Layli Maparyan, The Womanist Idea (New York: Routledge, 2012), 119. 48  Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, “El Mundo Zurdo: The Vision,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 4th Edition, ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), 195. 46 47

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everyday struggle for survival and social justice.49 In addition, such spirituality in spiritual activism should be differentiated from New Ageism that picks and chooses any cultural/religious/spiritual teachings and practices for an individual’s well-being without being accountable to the communities that originate or preserve those teachings and practices. Spiritual activists do not prioritize individual well-being over community but rather comprehend the inseparable connection between the two. Individual well-­ being and healing from the multiple layers of oppression must come through the community and vice versa. Tracing genealogies and histories of womanism as a spiritual movement, Maparyan gathers sources and examples for spiritual activism around the world: Sister Chan Khong, a Vietnamese Buddhist nun who led anti-­ Vietnam War peace activism with Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh; Immaculée Ilibagiza, a Catholic activist against genocide and for post-war healing in Rwanda; Kiran Bedi, who transformed India’s largest women’s ward, Tihar Jail, into an ashram by teaching inmates Vipassana yoga and meditation; Pregs Govender, a yoga practitioner and antiapartheid activist in South Africa; and Wangari Maathai, a leader of the Green Belt movement in Kenya and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, whose world views and spiritual activism are grounded in Kikuyu traditional/cultural eco-­ spirituality and Christianity.50 Maparyan’s five case studies of spiritual activism help me comprehend spiritual activism as a radical praxis of transnational feminist theo-ethics. In what follows, I articulate three crucial aspects and practices of spiritual activism. First, as I mentioned earlier, spiritual activism gathers diverse spiritual resources from women’s lived experiences, including of organized religions (e.g., Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Sikhism), ancestral wisdom, and decolonized/retrieved indigenous spirituality. Like Moraga and Anzaldúa, the five women in Maparyan’s case studies ground their respective spiritual/religious practices in concrete political-economic contexts. By doing this, they focus their spiritual energy on transforming social structures and, at the same time, empathetically embracing others’ suffering instead of abstracting spirituality. Since the five women see a self only in connection to all beings, their activism and solidarity work illuminate interstitial integrity. Here, interstitial integrity becomes a form of spiritual activism that brings the spiritual and the material together, and  Moraga and Anzaldúa, “El Mundo Zurdo,” 195.  Maparyan, The Womanist Idea, 145–287.

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both realms mutually change each other. Transnational solidarity is the foreseeable outcome of interconnectedness. Additionally, the core of spiritual activism endeavors to overcome oppositional politics. Although oppositional politics might be necessary to start a movement, it cannot sustain the movement or protect the activists from anger, self-destruction, and despair. Maparyan argues, “if the politics is not undergirded by a sense of the spiritual, the sacred, it is a dead end.”51 Similarly, Alexander states that an oppositional politics “can never ultimately feed that deep place within us: that space of the erotic, that space of the Sacred, that space of the Divine.”52 Through Maparyan’s and Alexander’s words, we can think of solidarity as political activism undergirded by a sense of the spiritual for a long-term and sustainable practice. Second, storytelling is a crucial method among spiritual activists to convey their meditation on social injustice, revolutionary visions, and the Sacred. Spirituality that is practiced and experienced by activists intergenerationally can be communicated to others through stories or, what I call, “creative non-fiction writing.” Creative non-fiction writing refers to how spiritual activists share hidden truths about liberation and oppression through various ways of telling symbols, metaphors, myths and folktales; writing fictions, non-fictions, and poetry; creating artwork and liturgical drama, and more. Whatever forms they choose, and even when their stories seem fictional, their stories always hold truths about women’s survival wisdom, their spirituality, their embodiment of the Sacred, and most importantly, liberative knowledge of how we should live. Furthermore, storytelling as part of spiritual activism involves a conscious act of remembering, reflecting on, and rewriting women’s critical understanding of the spiritual and the material. Narratives, written honestly by transnational feminist activists, or what Althaus-Reid calls “doing theology out of the closet,” create spaces where interconnectedness is imagined and embraced.53 The activists’ agencies are fully known to the audience who can see themselves in the activists’ world. These spaces reveal the vulnerability, courage, mystery, and ambiguity of human life and God. Experiencing the interconnectedness of all creation in interstitial integrity requires a different kind of learning, producing knowledge, and conscientizing social injustice. The stories from Sister Chan Khong,  Maparyan, The Womanist Idea, 4.  Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 282. 53  Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 92. 51 52

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Ilibagiza, Bedi, Govender, and Maathai show how their historically concrete stories are interconnected, crossing different times and spaces, first through the global political economy, and second through the power of spirit (shared spiritual activism). Readers can appreciate this “interconnectedness” by “feeling” their stories. Here, feelings should be understood as both mental/intellectual and spiritual work—a holistic way of knowing the Sacred through our hearts, minds, and bodies together— work that subsequently changes our moral perceptions and actions on a personal and collective level. Storytelling in spiritual activism is a method of speaking about what cannot be fully conveyed in human language and of taking tellers and listeners to a new level of consciousness. However, it is crucial to scrutinize which stories are repetitively produced and why, and how they are consumed in the neoliberal market. As Mohanty warns, the existence of third-world women’s narratives in the US academic space and market is not a worthy example of decentering hegemonic histories and subjectivities constructed upon European colonialism and white supremacy.54 Diversifying women’s narratives in the Eurocentric space of knowledge production may demand more exotic and different stories in which “individual women write as truth-tellers and authenticate ‘their own oppression,’ in the tradition of Euro-American women’s autobiography.”55 A division of labor in producing feminist knowledge can unfortunately also happen in the process, say if third-world women and women of color become memoir writers or producers of embodied knowledge, while white feminist scholars write “high” theories in analyzing women’s varied experiences. This state of labor division favors particular stories, such as third-world women’s organized political struggles in the midst of global crises rather than their everyday life in so-called times of peace. These stories may produce monolithic images of third-­ world women either as victims or as feminist warriors. Mohanty argues that it is significant not just to record one’s history of struggle or consciousness, but also to scrutinize how narratives are recorded, namely, how we read, receive, and disseminate such imaginative records.56 Third, with the above cautions from Mohanty, I delineate spiritual activism concerning how to speak in proximity to globally disenfranchised women and how to move beyond self-referentiality. One way to do this is  Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 77.  Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 77. 56  Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 78. 54 55

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to exercise self-reflexivity quite intentionally, as I argued in the previous chapter. Maparyan exercises self-reflexivity by first analyzing her positionality before connecting her womanist knowledge to spiritual activism across the globe. Her intellectual, feminist, and spiritual “positionality” stems from her critical consciousness of the spiritual root of womanist activism. From this positionality, Maparyan builds up (imagined) relationships with the five spiritual activists, rigorously using a womanist lens to understand these women’s spiritual activism. Through her concept of “Luxocracy, or rule by inner light/higher self” (which is a symbolic term for an alternative political economic structure), Maparyan arduously creates dialogue between herself and the five activists as well as among the five.57 This imagined dialogue reconceptualizes Luxocracy and simultaneously allows new perspectives on spiritual activism. For example, after having met with Sister Chan Khong at Plum Village and having pondered her book Learning True Love, Maparyan states: Sister Chan Khong’s emphasis on peace as her issue of choice, which encompasses both its inner (psychological/spiritual) and outer (political) dimensions, allowed me to move the discourse about womanism beyond ‘the mantra’ of race/class/gender/sexuality and racism/classism/sexism/heterosexism and to highlight the fact that all forms of outer political change are predicted upon inner person change. A big part of womanist social change work involves changing the landscape of the psychospiritual interior. This is done through everyday methods… as well as through large-scale political mobilizations and mass media interventions, all of which we see in Chan Khong’s work.58

Through a womanist eye, Sister Chan Khong’s activism brings womanism into transnationalism rather than Chan Khong’s work being converted to womanist work, even as her peace activism illuminates a womanist “way” or “spirit.”59 For Maparyan, womanism does not belong solely to US Black women. Its methods and spiritually grounded vision can be shared and illuminated among non-Black women across the globe. In this way, US womanists can move toward transnational solidarity and speak in proximity to global women of color.

 Maparyan, The Womanist Idea, 3–4.  Maparyan, The Womanist Idea, 174. 59  Maparyan, The Womanist Idea, 175. 57 58

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Similarly, Black feminist Jennifer Nash urges Black feminists to become familiar with “both transnationalism and the broader category ‘women of color’” by surrendering intersectionality “not as a form of ‘defeat’ but as the beginning of reimagining black feminist theoretical and political life, as a deep act of generosity that unleashes connections between black feminism and women of color feminism.”60 For US academia has created a false dichotomy between intersectionality as US black feminists’ theoretical work and transnationalism as a theoretical frame of non-US women of color, and thus has promoted competition between Black women and so-­ called global women of color. In many cases, the Black female body represents women of color feminism in the US and the South Asian female body represents transnational feminism. The false demarcation of Black feminism, transnational feminism, Asian American feminism, Indigenous feminism, and Latinx feminism is an example of the colonial legacy of compartmentalization. By re-remembering and exhuming forgotten stories of women of color’s international and domestic solidarity, we can see unequal relations even among compartmentalized groups and overcome the colonial legacy of compartmentalization. Sheth’s interstitial approach dissects unequal power relations inside and among compartmentalized groups and simultaneously illuminates similar experiences with US institutions across different groups. In addition, Nash imagines radical intimacy between intersectionality and transnationalism both as theories, political movements, and creative projects, without forgetting each other’s particular genealogy.61 This intimacy or familiarity, what I call “speaking in proximity,” is evident in Maparyan’s womanist spiritual activism as well as Brock’s interstitial integrity.

Transnational Feminist Solidarity in Kwok Pui-lan’s Postcolonial Imagination Spiritual activism relies on solidarity building, and transnational feminist solidarity building is the manifestation of interstitial integrity. In this regard, Kwok writes:

60  Jennifer Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined after Intersectionality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 84. 61  Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined after Intersectionality, 109–110.

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In mobilization of transnational networks that stand in solidarity with…victims of violence, war, and oppression, we see the grace of God—divine interstitial power at work. Such a power is energizing and enabling, because it rejoices in creating 'synergetic relations,’ readjusts and shifts to find new strength, and discovers hope in the densely woven web of life that sustains us all.62

Transnational solidarity is an open door through which to witness and experience interstitial integrity inspired by Asian/American feminist spiritual activism. As I bring this chapter toward a closure, I elaborate on re-­ remembering and rewriting as a feminist ethic of transnational through Kwok’s three critical movements of postcolonial feminist imagination— historical, dialogical, and diasporic. These movements are not linear, but they overlap and interweave in complex ways.63 The relationship among the three critical movements presents the understanding of “time” as spiral and palimpsestic, just as Alexander conceptualizes palimpsestic time: the rescrambling of “here and now” and “then and there,” closing the distance between two or three moments in time.64 In this understanding of time, colonialism has traveled through multiple generations, bringing neocolonialism into ideological proximity with neo-imperialism, which accords with one method of timekeeping, namely “Christian neoliberal corporate financial time.”65 Hence, it is logical that decolonization requires holistic thinking: decolonizing time beyond a fixed or singular concept. I consider historical, dialogical, and diasporic imagination within this understanding of time and decolonization. Kwok’s historical imagination aims to reconstitute and release the past so that the present is livable. Third-world women’s collective and embodied memories are a powerful tool in resisting institutionally sanctioned forgetfulness by the colonial and neo-imperial ruling.66 Historical imagination presents third-world women as agents of writing and remembering painful history and memory. They find pleasure not only in asserting their individualist sexuality or sexual freedom, as found in white bourgeois 62  Kwok Pui-lan, “Fishing the Asia Pacific: Transnationalism and Feminist Theology,” in Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology, eds. Rita Nakashima Brock, et al. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 18. 63  Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology, 30–31. 64  Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 246. 65  Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 246. 66  Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology, 37.

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culture, but also “in the commitment to communal survival and in creating social networks and organizations” so that they and their communities can be healed and can flourish.67 By exercising historical imagination, we Asian/Asian American feminist theo-ethicists can retrieve our communal and historical sources for global peace and justice, and genuinely care about people who retell the stories and memories of decolonizing movements. As a concept and as a region, the transpacific captures Kwok’s dialogical imagination, which critically interrogates the modes and zones of contact between the dominant and the subordinate, or the relations of imperial ruling. Despite the common belief shared in the American public, Asia and America are not two separate entities but are “constantly influencing each other within the broader regional formation of the Asia Pacific.”68 The Pacific as a concept cannot be separated from European, American, and Asian imaginations or fantasies of economic expansion, domination, a clash between civilizations, exoticized indigenous cultures and women, and military operations. For Asians, the Pacific is unthinkable without remembering European and American imperialism. China and Japan’s legacies only add Asianized imperialism to the region, while South Korea and Singapore have risen as regional powers, if not sub-empires.69 In the meantime, the Pacific invokes imperialist nostalgia among Europeans and Americans—wars, conquest, and endless wealth. The term “transpacific” is the most recent effort at naming this forced contact zone.70 The transpacific requires us to be equipped with a transnational feminist lens to reflect on what is happening to us on American soil that is also happening outside the US.  By re-remembering and rewriting (hi)stories, including those of the Sacred, deeply embedded in the transpacific, Asian and Asian American women open entry points to transnational feminist theo-ethics. Through Kwok’s dialogical imagination, I learn not only “the fluidity and contingent character of Asian cultures,” but also the crucial realities of human life marked with transition and pilgrimage which dwell in our identities.71 Thus, dialogical imagination makes transnational solidarity  Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology, 37.  Kwok Pui-lan, “Fishing the Asia Pacific,” 9. 69  Viet Thanh Nguyen and Janet Hoskins, “Introduction: Transpacific Studies: Critical Perspectives on an Emerging Field,” in Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field, ed. Viet Thanh Nguyen and Janet Hoskin (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014), 2–4. 70  Nguyen and Hoskins, Introduction, 2. 71  Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology, 43. 67 68

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necessary because we can navigate life’s uncertainties and ambiguities only in contact zones where our identities and cultures are unsettled but interconnected with (dis)similar cultures and identities. Finally, diasporic imagination destabilizes the center and periphery and recognizes the periphery as the subject of producing critical knowledge of oppression, war, poverty, and forced diasporas.72 Kwok introduces “the image of the storyteller who selects pieces, fragments, and legends from her cultural and historical memory to weave together tales that are passed from generation to generation.”73 This image represents what I previously analyzed as a storytelling method. Kwok’s image of the storyteller shows a woman agent who is accountable to her/their community while rediscovering collective wisdom of survival and resistance. Through storytelling and consciously engaging in others’ stories of survival wisdom, a woman subject grounds her/their transnational solidarity. Furthermore, diasporic imagination critically interrogates diasporic subjects’ negotiation of multiple cultures and identities, and the inclusion or exclusion of women and sexual minorities from diasporic recordings which an interstitial approach shows. Gender is a signifier of power relations in diasporic memories, whereas negotiation with multiple cultures and religions is required to build up transnational solidarity through intersectionality. Kwok’s diasporic imagination beautifully elaborates on interconnectedness: “a diasporic consciousness finds similarities and differences in both familiar territories and unexpected corners; one catches glimpses of oneself in a fleeting moment or in a fragment in someone else’s story.”74 Diasporic imagination relays Alexander and Mohanty’s definition of the transnational, which urges us to consider women in similar contexts rather than all women in general. Despite salient differences and power differentials among diasporic and politically vulnerable subjects, these vulnerable subjects can build alliances for social justice as they see one another’s contextual similarities created and sustained by various institutions. Transnational feminist solidarity emerges from diasporic imagination, as diverse diasporic subjects see one another in their distinctive (not unique) stories across different times and spaces. These three critical movements of postcolonial imagination theologically necessitate transnational feminist solidarity for global peace and  Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology, 45.  Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology, 46. 74  Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology, 50. 72 73

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justice and liberative theo-ethics. Simultaneously, the movements show how “my” consciousness is always positioned in the collective and historical psyche of postcolonial women’s stories, enabling “me” to speak in proximity to postcolonial women. Two important aspects of transnational feminist solidarity emerge from Kwok’s postcolonial imagination: (1) geopolitical and local practices of women’s solidarity movements across differences (the material), and (2) imaginative and creative practices of solidarity (the spiritual). Both practices mutually inspire each other in postcolonial women’s historical, dialogical, and diasporic imagination, generating new practices and theories of transnational feminist theo-ethics. More specifically, in terms of praxis, the local and global “practices” of feminist solidarity are possible in genealogies and memories of women’s international movements for concrete changes from interpersonal relations to international relations. Concrete practices of solidarity across divergences in intra and intergroups inspire new “theories” and imaginations for present and future practices of solidarity. In palimpsestic time, our imagined transnational feminist future has been unfolded in postcolonial women’s centuries-­ old practices of critical caretaking of our communities, of one another, and on behalf of an interconnected life.

Conclusion Critically engaging in secular and Christian transnational feminist scholars, this chapter has constructed transnational feminist theo-ethics as radical praxis to be manifested through women’s solidarity movements. To forge genuine and robust feminist solidarity, I have adopted an interstitial approach to complicate one’s social identity beyond intersectionality and to name obstacles to intra- and intergroup solidarity. The theological concept of interstitial integrity delineates how politically vulnerable and diasporic subjects develop their self-understandings in various cultures and locations and in so doing maintain integrity for themselves and accountability to their multiple communities. Interstitial integrity highlights both God’s image emerging in the solidarity network among women of color across the globe and Asian/Asian American feminist theo-ethical discourse on transnationalism. Interstitial integrity unfolded in spiritual activism emphasizes interconnectedness among all living beings and the inseparability between inner transformation (the spiritual) and outer social changes (the material). Through Kwok Pui-lan’s postcolonial imagination, the chapter has reminded us how to

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remember, re-remember, and rewrite postcolonial women’s continued memories of interstitial integrity revealed in transnational feminist solidarity. The following chapters will show various women’s embodied practices of interstitial integrity and spiritual activism in resistance to heteropatriarchy and militarized neoliberal capitalism.

Bibliography Alexander, M.  Jacqui. 2005. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham: Duke University Press. Alexander, M.  Jacqui, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. 2010. Cartographies of Knowledge and Power: Transnational Feminism as Radical Praxis. In Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis, ed. Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar, 23–45. Albany: State University of New York Press. Althaus-Reid, Marcella. 2000. Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics. New York/London: Routledge. Brock, Rita Nakashima. 2007. Cooking without Recipes: Interstitial Integrity. In Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology, ed. Rita Nakashima Brock, Jung Ha Kim, Kwok Pui-Lan, and Seung Ai Yang, 125–143. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Brock, Rita Nakashima, and Nami Kim. 2006. Asian Pacific American Protestant Women. In Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, ed. Rosemary Skinner Keller and Rosemary Radford Ruether, vol. 1, 498–505. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-Discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989 (1): 139–167. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&c ontext=uclf. Fujikane, Candace. 2012. Asian American Critique and Moana Nui 2011: Securing a Future beyond Empires, Militarized Capitalism and APEC. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 13 (2): 189–210. Hall, Lisa Kahaleole. 2015. Which of These Things Is Not Like the Other: Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders Are Not Asian Americans, and All Pacific Islanders Are Not Hawaiian. American Quarterly 67 (3): 727–747. Keating, AnaLouise. 2008. ‘I’m a Citizen of the Universe’: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Spiritual Activism as Catalyst for Social Change. Feminist Studies 34 (1/2): 53–69. Kim, Nami. 2007. The ‘Indigestible’ Asian: The Unifying Term ‘Asian’ in Theological Discourse. In Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology, ed. Rita Nakashima Brock, Jung Ha Kim,

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Kwok Pui-lan, and Seung-Ai Yang, 23–43. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Kwok, Pui-Lan. 2005. Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. ———. 2007. Fishing the Asia Pacific: Transnationalism and Feminist Theology. In Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology, ed. Rita Nakashima Brock, Jung Ha Kim, Kwok Pui-Lan, and Seung Ai Yang, 3–22. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Lowe, Lisa. 1996. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke University Press. Maparyan, Layli. 2012. The Womanist Idea. New York: Routledge. Mohanty, Chandra. 2003. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press. Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 2015. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. 4th ed. Albany: State University of New York Press. Nash, Jennifer. 2019. Black Feminism Reimagined after Intersectionality. Durham: Duke University Press. Nguyen, Viet Thanh, and Janet Hoskins, eds. 2014. Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Omer, Atalia. 2015. Religion, Nationalism, and Solidarity Activism. In The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, ed. R. Atalia Omer, Scott Appleby, and David Little, 613–655. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pak, Su Yon, and Jung Ha Kim, eds. 2017. Leading Wisdom: Asian and Asian North American Women Leaders. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Sheth, Falguni. 2009. Toward a Political Philosophy of Race. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2014. Interstitiality: Making Space for Migration, Diaspora, and Racial Complexity. Hypatia 29 (1): 75–93. https://www.jstor.org/stable/ 24541954. Teranishi, Robert. 2010. Asians in the Ivory Tower: Dilemmas of Racial Inequality in American Higher Education. New York: Teachers’ College Press.

CHAPTER 3

US Military Prostitution and Sexual Ethics for Peace and Justice

Reframing Sexual Ethics in the Militarized World On June 23, 2022, the low gray sky was about to pour heavy rain when representatives, activists, human rights lawyers, and scholars from the Solidarity Network for Human Rights in the Camptown (Kijichon Inkwon Yeondae) gathered for a press conference in front of the Korean National Assembly building in Seoul. Kijichon refers to camptowns around US bases in South Korea where American soldiers buy liquor and sex for rest and recreation. Since World War II, more than one million Korean women, and recent migrant women from Asia and East Europe have sold sexual labor to GIs who have been stationed supposedly for the peace and security of South Korea. The network is a consortium of diverse women’s organizations opposed to militarized prostitution, including the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, My Sister’s Place (Durebang), the Sunlit Center, and Hansori. In 2012, the network filed a lawsuit against the Korean government for violating the human rights of Korean camptown prostitutes by surveilling sex businesses in camptowns, coercing prostitutes to take regular tests for venereal disease, and quarantining the women (allegedly) found with sexually

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. C. Pae, A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43766-3_3

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transmitted infection (STI).1 The press conference urged the Korean Supreme Court to deliver the verdict, as four years had passed since the lower court recognized the government’s violation of these women’s lawful rights. As the press conference progressed, a group of Christians on the other corner of the fence around the Assembly building started singing Christian hymns loudly. This group protested the comprehensive anti-­discrimination law, first introduced to the National Assembly of South Korea in 2007. Since then, the proposed law has been amended, debated, and protested, but has not been voted on by lawmakers even now. The proposed law is intended to prevent any forms of discrimination based on religion, gender, sexual orientation, race, disability, language, and country of origin. However, many conservative Christians in Korea, or what Nami Kim calls “the Korean Protestant Right,” have opposed it, mainly because of the law’s intended protection of LGBT+ people. Furthermore, the Korean Protestant Right argues that if the comprehensive anti-discrimination law were passed, Korea would be flooded with Muslim refugees and foreign migrant workers who would threaten Christianity and pollute the Korean race.2 Based on selective readings of the Bible, the mainstream Korean church has condemned prostitutes like kijichon women for bringing moral decadence and sexual corruption into society and threatening heteropatriarchal family units by alluring (allegedly) innocent men. However, 1  I use sexually transmitted infection (STI) and venereal disease (VD) interchangeably. Although venereal disease is a controversial and even an offensive term, the term VD had been frequently used in the US camptown prostitution since 1945 until recently, and many researchers translated a Korean term for sexually transmitted disease (seongbyeong) to venereal disease. In the context of camptown prostitution that prostitutes were sexually exploited and stigmatized, VD might be a better term to describe their lived experience. 2  What Korean American feminist theologian Nami Kim refers to as “the Korean Protestant Right” is the group that has been politically vociferous against LGBTQ rights and refugee and migrant rights. Kim critically analyzes the Korean Protestant Right’s anti-homosexuality, which stems not simply from their conservative interpretation of selective biblical passages, but also from their unexamined fear and anxiety over possible social changes in hierarchical gender order, gender binarism, and heteropatriarchal norms in family and the church. By the same token, the Korean Protestant Right spread anti-Muslim sentiments with sexual and gender languages, claiming that Muslim men are barbaric and hypersexual. Korean society must protect innocent Korean women from marrying these “uncivilized” men. Nami Kim, The Gendered Politics of the Korean Protestant Right: Hegemonic Masculinity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 81–150.

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Christianity has also helped camptown prostitutes regain their voices and sense of dignity. For instance, one of the iconic camptown activists, Yon-ja Kim, is a “bible woman” who studied Christian theology after working in camptown prostitution for many years. She was the first camptown prostitute to come out to the public to testify about brutal violence against and exploitation of camptown prostitutes, pejoratively called “Western Princess (yanggongju).” Yet, in her memoir, Kim emphasizes, “What I want the world to know is not about my miserable life in camptown prostitution but about my activism for peace.”3 Various other Christian groups have supported the comprehensive anti-discrimination law because they believe in God’s love and justice for all. The Christian protest group’s pamphlets reminded me of religious ethicist Janet Jakobsen’s analysis of the conflicted relationship between religious freedom and sexual freedom in the United States, where conservative Christian moral discourses dominate the political discourse on sex as if religious freedom were incompatible with sexual freedom and vice versa.4 The Korean Christian group’s protest was an example of Christian sexual morality opposing sexual freedom and religious freedom. Their opposition to the comprehensive anti-discrimination law presumably stems from their unexamined fear and anxiety over losing the power to control heteropatriarchal sexual morality in society and the church. The Korean Protestant Right argues that heteropatriarchal monogamous relations are the only morally allowed conjugal relationship by God. For them, therefore, prostitution and same-sex relations are the worst sins. Unfortunately, this argument neglects sexual violence inside the church and other social institutions such as the military, as well as the political-economic complexities of prostitution industries, including camptown prostitution in South Korea. Observing the Solidarity Network’s press conference and the simultaneous conservative Christian group’s protest, I felt both the oppressive and the liberative powers of sexual ethics that Christianity could produce. Subsequently, I wondered what kind of feminist sexual ethics would be necessary to strengthen Christianity’s liberative power and to support the 3  Yon Ja Kim, A Big Sister in Americatown Screams until Five Minutes before Her Death (Americatown Wang-unni Jukgi Obun Jeonkkaji Aksseuda) (Seoul, South Korea: Samin, 2005), 300 (Korean). 4  Janet Jakobsen, Sex Pervert: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 41–43.

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antiviolence and antiwar activism of women’s organizations such as the Solidarity Network. Leaving the National Assembly building, I began to reimagine a feminist ethic of sex for peace and justice that would liberate us from war and militarized violence. This ethic is possible by taking US military prostitution as a site for producing critical knowledge of such ethics. Taking US military prostitution as the epistemic site for sexual ethics means bringing the human body to the center of ethical inquiry. This chapter deliberates on peace-and-justice-oriented sexual ethics when war, militarized violence, and military prostitution delimit our imagination of sexual and religious freedom. How can we strengthen religious and political freedom by consciously engaging in gender and sexuality discourse? Religious freedom not only signifies a person’s freedom to choose faith and rituals but also underscores pluralistic understandings and interpretations of religious teachings in the critical light of peace and justice. More specifically, I delineate a Christian feminist ethic of sex that can reinforce Christian commitment to peace and justice, by seriously considering the bodily experiences of military prostitutes and soldiers. Prostitution industries around US bases in South Korea contextualize my knowledge of these people’s experiences. How can we critically interrogate prostitutes’ and soldiers’ bodily experiences? As an analytical theory, Korean American theorist Jin-kyung Lee’s “necropolitical labor” can help us examine the interlocking of race, gender, sexuality, and class in military prostitution and soldiering. Reconceptualizing the notions of biopower and labor through their connection to death or possibilities of death, Lee elaborates on the concept of “necropolitical labor,” which means: [T]he extraction of labor from those ‘condemned’ to death, whereby the ‘fostering’ of life, already premised on their death or the disposability of their lives, is limited to serving the labor demands of the state or empire…The notion of necropolitical labor highlights an intermediate stage where the extraction of labor is related to and premised on the possibility of death, rather than the ultimate event of death itself.5

As necropolitical labor, both prostitution and soldiering require laborers to perform gendered and sexualized labor, which repeatedly exposes them 5  Jin-kyung Lee, Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work, and Migrant Labor in South Korea (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010), 5–6.

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to deadly violence. At the same time, neither soldiers nor prostitutes are considered part of the normative industrial sector. Moreover, although the soldiering body and the prostituted body share necropolitical labor, society treats them differently. The soldierly body is glorified as a self-­sacrificial, asexual corpus. In contrast, the prostituted body is condemned as a polluted, hypersexual material. However, as seen in the Solidarity Network’s activism, former military prostitutes reclaim their bodies as those of social activists, refusing to be submissive to the social stigma given to them. In light of necropolitical labor, this chapter deliberates on the critical knowledge of gender and sexuality produced by the bodies of war. It thus centralizes the physicality of war into sexual ethics. Carefully engaging in the Sunlit Center women’s creative social activism, I propose a justice-and-­ peace-oriented sexual ethic. Indeed, such an ethic should inspire people to resist war and recognize the body as essential to life.

Christian Discourse on War and Sex Most Christians do not consider war and peace within the area of sexual ethics. While Christian sexual ethics generally deals with marriage, sexual violence, reproductive justice, and same-sex relations, Christian discourses on peace and war are usually confined to pacifism, just war theory, and just peacemaking. However, ethics of peace and war and ethics of sex share a similar moral guidepost: justice. If Christian sexual ethics inquires about “just” loving relations, as Catholic feminist ethicist Margaret Farley does, Christian ethics of war questions the criteria for “just” war, the “just” conduct of war, and “just” ways of making and building peace.6 If both areas of ethics are deeply concerned with “justice,” how can theologians and ethicists consider sex, war, and peace together? Answers to this question begin with the keen awareness of human sexuality inscribed in the theological and the political. Marcella Althaus-Reid argues that all theological discourses are political and sexual, and theology is as complicated as politics and sex.7 Similarly, all discourses on war are sexual, and war is as complex as sex, just as military psychologist Dave Grossman compares killing to sex and war to love. According to Grossman, 6  See Margaret Farley, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (New York: Continuum, 2008). 7  Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000), 1–7.

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in both institutions (killing/war and sex/love), the male ego has justified “selective memory, self-deception, and lying.”8 Grossman’s words are insightful. It is nearly impossible to study sex objectively because sex involves individual self-esteem, traumas, and good and bad memories.9 In other words, many different people are invested in sex despite Christianity’s centuries-long negative views on the body and sex. The same may be said of war. It involves too many people’s memories, traumas, feelings of guilt and pride, and even their notions of the meaning of life. Yet gender, sexuality, and sex do not readily come to mind when considering war and militarism. Instead, the dominant images of war and overseas bases in the United States are characterized by masculine camaraderie, Christ-like heroism, and patriotism, as if soldiers were non-sexual beings or at least should not express their sexual desires. Their sexual bodies are alienated from the war saga of heroism. The American public has embellished their soldiers with religious languages and symbols analogous to Christian martyrs and even to Jesus, who “willingly” sacrifice their lives for the sake of others and their country, as historian Jonathan Ebel’s critical study illuminates.10 It seems too blasphemous to think of war stories as sex stories because sex is often associated with pleasure, lust, and promiscuity. In other words, sexuality is seen as too corporeal to reflect the nobility of war. Yet, Althaus-Reid challenges us to rethink the separation between pleasure/promiscuity and holiness. Asking whether we leave our rosaries at home when we go to a salsa bar, Althaus-Reid argues that “promiscuities” can show the strength of love and help us see and love as the Other side of God outside of “the heterosexual closet.”11 Then, we may feel God’s loving presence wherever we are—in a gay bar, church, home, and salsa bar. For Althaus-Reid, the search for love and truth is a bodily one.12 Her theological reflection applies to the context of sex and war. Do soldiers bring their rosaries to war, while leaving them behind when they enter 8  David Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (New York: Back Bay Books, 2009), 32. 9  Grossman, On Killing, 33. 10  Jonathan Ebel, G.I.  Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); Ebel argues that America sees soldiering as civil religious practice. The soldierly body invokes Christianized sacrifice, salvation, and redemption in the American public through symbols, myths, and rituals about American soldiers and America’s wars. 11  Marcella Althaus-Reid, The Queer God (London: Routledge, 2003), 4. 12  Althaus-Reid, The Queer God, 2.

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brothels and bars or vice versa? Are they holy and just warriors on the battlefield, while becoming promiscuous when having sex at bars? War and military operations do involve sexual activities. In many cases, these activities are violent because of the vertical separation between the holiness of soldiers on the battlefield (i.e., holy and just warriors) and their promiscuity. Gender-based violence, such as systemic rape against enemy women (e.g., rape camps in Bosnia), sexual slavery, and forced prostitution (e.g., the Japanese military “comfort women” system during World War II), has been routinely used as a weapon of war in order to humiliate enemies and invoke fear among them. American soldiers’ sexualized torture against Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib is one of many further examples of the sexualized dimension of war. Unfortunately, sexual violence inside the US military is also a reality, even if the news seldom reaches the public. The groundbreaking film The Invisible War (2012) unapologetically shows the gruesome realities of sexual violence against soldiers in the military, marred with sexism, toxic masculinity, the oppressive ranking system, the malfunctioning justice system, and military authorities’ lack of understanding of human sexuality in general.13 All of these examples justify why we should talk about sex when discussing war and vice versa. Many feminist scholars and theologians have articulated the intimate relationship between war, sex, and gender-based violence. For instance, feminist psychologist Judith Herman compares a rape victim/survivor’s post-traumatic stress disorder to that of combat veterans.14 Domestic abuse and sexual violence are not separate from wartime violence. In addition, feminist theologian Susan Thistlethwaite illuminates how the Western Church has justified misogynistic violence based on the just war theory— “just” violence against women to discipline and save them from sexual 13  Victims of sexual violence inside the US military are predominantly women, but 20% of victims are men. Due to the hypermasculine nature of the military, male victims experience more difficulties in reporting their cases than female victims. The Invisible War, directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering (New York: New Video Group, 2012). In South Korea, where military service is mandatory for male adults, victims of male-tomale sexual violence in the military rarely speak about their experiences because they are afraid of being feminized and stigmatized as homosexuals; see Insook Kwon, “Masculinity and Male-on-Male Sexual Violence in the Military: Focusing on the Absence of the Issue,” trans. Daisy Y Kim, in Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 223–249. 14  Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence–From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 32.

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sins.15 Both scholars conclude that everyday gender-based violence is intimately connected to structural violence and state-sanctioned violence such as war. Both war and sex can harm many people, partly depending on how we define them and understand their complex operations in human society. For the purpose of this chapter, I define human sexuality as (1) a signifier of power relations among various human bodies involved in military operations, and (2) a social construction to surveil or control disposable populations. These definitions are proposed to criticize the necropolitical nature of war in the following.

Necropolitical Labor: Military Prostitution and Soldiering African postcolonial theorist Achille Mbembe argues that, “the ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who can live and who must die.”16 If sovereignty manifests its power by controlling mortality and by defining life, then war becomes “a means of achieving sovereignty as much as a way of exercising the right to kill.”17 Recognizing politics as a form of warfare, Mbembe interrogates what place is given to “life, death, and the human body” in the order of power.18 Death in politics takes many forms: slavery (with a loss of a “home,” loss of rights over one’s body, and loss of political status), concentration camps, historical colonies, colonial occupation (i.e., occupied Palestine), and war, including war-making, war machines, soldiering, terrorism, and resource extraction.19 Prostitution industries around US bases in South Korea are a suitable example of Mbembe’s “necropolitics” or sovereignty’s exercise of its right to kill. More specifically, military prostitutes have been subjugated to death, carrying out sexualized labor within America’s quasi-colonial camptowns across South Korea. Not only camptowns but also military prostitutes’ bodies are occupied by the US military, the South Korean government, pimps, bar owners, and patriarchal families. Just as 15  Susan Thistlethwaite, Women’s Bodies as Battlefield: Christian Theology and the Global War on Women (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 6–8. 16  Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steve Corcoran (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 66. 17  Mbembe, Necropolitics, 66. 18  Mbembe, Necropolitics, 66. 19  Mbembe, Necropolitics, 75; 78–79; 86.

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the realities of occupied people’s daily lives are invisible to outsiders, those of Korean camptown prostitutes have been unknown. Their invisibility and class and gender identities, along with social condemnation of their sexuality, have enabled sovereignty to condemn them to death more quickly. Expanding on Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, Korean American scholar Jin-kyung Lee articulates the notion of “necropolitical labor.” As explained at the beginning of this chapter, necropolitical labor, as the most disposable form of labor, highlights an intermediate stage where “the extraction of labor is related to and premised on the possibility of death, rather than the ultimate event of death itself.”20 Lee’s notion of necropolitical labor broadens the traditional understanding of proletarianization. Soldiering and prostitution (both domestic prostitution and military prostitution) as necropolitical labor hinge on the proletarianization of raced, gendered, and classed bodies into a workforce invisible to the normalized economic sector.21 Most people may not consider prostitution legitimate wage-earning work. Similarly, military labor, such as soldiering, is seen as honorable and self-sacrificial work rather than a wage-earning job. Both military labor and military prostitution require particular types of gendered and sexualized labor, as I will analyze in the following section. Furthermore, both soldiering and prostitution are necropolitical labor because workers are constantly exposed to deadly violence, possibilities of death, and ultimate disposability for the sake of the fostering of others’ lives. Let us explore what constitutes military prostitution and soldiering and what gender and sexuality have to do with both forms of necropolitical labor. A Case of US Military Prostitution in South Korea Lee argues that the essential dimension of South Korean modernization consists of “commodifying the transformation of sexuality and race into labor power.”22 Military prostitution relies on the commodification of poor Korean women’s sexuality in the unique context of South Korea’s  Lee, Service Economies, 6.  Lee, Service Economies, 5. 22  Lee, Service Economies, 3; Lee analyzes the transformation of the Korean race into a transnational labor force (necropolitical labor) in the case of Korean soldiers fighting the Vietnam War. 20 21

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confrontation with North Korea. The mobilization of the female sex has two related stages: the militarization of prostitution and the industrialization of sex.23 Like many other third-world countries, South Korea’s economy from the 1960s through the early 1980s relied on women’s sexual labor—poor women were recruited into various forms of prostitution to bring in foreign currencies for the country’s economic needs, including US camptown prostitution and kiseang (courtesan in English) tourism for wealthy Japanese tourists.24 Whether Korean prostitutes sell sex to foreigners or domestic men, psychological, physical, and sexual violence and injury are daily realities for these women. US military prostitution in South Korea began in 1945, only a few months after the arrival of the US Twenty-Fourth Army Corps, consisting of some 72,000 soldiers through the port of Incheon. Their mission was to transfer power from the crumbled Japanese empire to Korea, supposedly emancipated from Imperial Japan’s 35-year rule.25 By the end of 1945, Bupyeong, a small town between Incheon and Seoul, had become the first camptown where American soldiers stationed at Incheon bought women and liquor.26 Since then, camptown prostitution has evolved in different stages: the early stage with simple bars and dance halls (1945–1949), the foundation of the Relaxation and Recreation business (1950s), the golden days (1960s), the industrialization of prostitution (1970s to mid-1980s), and the declining period (mid-1980s to present). These stages correspond to the number of American GIs stationed in South Korea, changes in American military policy, and the economic development of South Korea. The system of US military prostitution has been justified by the South Korean government and the US military since the Korean War and the subsequent indefinite stationing of the US military. The Korean War (1950–1953) spread US military prostitution throughout the Korean  Lee, Service Economies, 79–81.  Keun-Joo Christine Pae, “Spiritual Activism as Interfaith Dialogue: When Military Prostitution Matters,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion vol. 36 no. 1 (2020): 74–76. 25  Seung Sook Moon, “Regulating Desire, Managing the Empire: US Military Prostitution in South Korea, 1945—1970,” in Over There: Living with the US Military Empire from World War Two to the Present, ed. Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon (Duke University Press, 2010), 40. From the 1945 to 1948, the US military had occupied the southern part of the Korean peninsula. 26  Ji-yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America (New York University Press, 2002), 20. 23 24

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peninsula, as poverty-stricken women and war orphans followed US soldiers for meager earnings, food, a piece of blanket, and other necessities.27 In 1947 the US military government of Korea outlawed the public prostitution system (e.g., public brothels occupied by licensed prostitutes), which Imperial Japan had installed in Korea.28 However, in 1951, there were estimated to be 64,934 sex workers of various types in Seoul alone, a number showing an increase of roughly 50,000 from 1948 after the abolition of public prostitution by the US military government in the southern Korean peninsula.29 During the war, a newly formed Korean government adopted the Japanese institution of “comfort stations” to serve UN Allied Forces and Korean soldiers. The Korean version of the “comfort women” system was justified to protect respectable women and to reward soldiers for their sacrifice.30 There was little difference between the Japanese military “comfort women” system and US/UN military prostitution. Korean camptown prostitutes, in fact, had been called America’s comfort women (wianbu) for a long time while Koreans have pejoratively called the prostitutes Western Princess (yanggongju), UN madame, or Western whore (yanggalbo). Since its arrival on Korean soil, the US military has fought two wars: one against communism and the other against sexually transmitted infection, which directly threatened the soldiers’ readiness to fight in the war.31 During the US military occupation of the southern Korean peninsula and the Korean War, the US military and the Korean political authorities worked together to control the spread of venereal disease by regulating prostitution industries. As a result, US military prostitution was allowed only in designated bars and dance halls in the cities near US bases in Korea—the Korean Department of Health certified VD cards for prostitutes whose STI test results were negative.32

 Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown, 20–21.  Yi-soo Kang, “Prohibition of Public Prostitution and Women’s Movements during the American Military Occupation (Migunjeonggi Gongchang Pyejiwa Sahwibyeonwa),” in Social Changes and History of Korea during American Military Occupation (Migunjeonggi Sahwibeyondonggwa Sawhisa), vol. 2 (Chuncheon, South Korea: Hanrim University Institute of Asian Cultural Studies, 1999), 263–65 (Korean). 29  Moon, “Regulating Desire, Managing the Empire,” 52. 30  Moon, “Regulating Desires, Managing the Empire,” 45. 31  Moon, “Regulating Desires, Managing the Empire,” 53–54. 32  Moon, “Regulating Desires, Managing the Empire,” 54. 27 28

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Since the Korean War ended as a truce in 1953, the US military has been stationed in Korea indefinitely. According to Korean sociologist Jeong-mi Park’s research, between 1953 and 1960, the Korean government systemized the regulation of US military prostitution through various executive orders issued by the local government, the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs, the Prime Minister, and the President.33 In postcolonial Korea, prostitution was viewed as a colonial legacy. As a result, Syngman Rhee’s regime after the Korean War could not revive a system of prostitution similar to that of the Japanese colonial government—prostitution has remained illegal in South Korea since 1947. However, the regime considered camptown prostitution exceptional. In light of Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and Giorgio Agamben’s notion of a “state of exception,” Park defines the Korean government as “the toleration–regulation regime” concerning US military prostitution since 1953 (the end of the active Korean War).34 Namely, despite the presence of an anti-prostitution law, the Korean government has legally used various ways of regulating camptown prostitution. The Korean War was a state of exception that enabled Korean sovereignty to exercise its maximum power to protect citizens’ lives (biopolitics). The US military’s presence in Korea supposedly protected Korean citizens during the war and post-war. Thus, despite the presence of anti-prostitution laws in Korea, camptown prostitution was depicted as an exception to offer a pleasant working environment for American soldiers. The Korean government tolerated US military prostitution and regulated prostitutes’ sexual acts by stipulating where they could sell sex, how often they should take VD check-ups, and with whom they should be registered. During the dictator Jung-hee Park’s regime (1961–1979), prostitution laws were revised, differentiating domestic prostitutes from US military prostitutes, even while the government chastised those who bought and sold sex. Regulating US military prostitutes appeared to control the spread of STI among the prostitutes, which in turn protected American soldiers. In the early 1970s, in response to the Nixon Doctrine that announced the reduction in the number of American soldiers in South Korea, the Park

33   Jeong-mi Park, “Historical Sociology of Korean Policies Concerning Camptown Prostitution (Hankuk kijich’on Seongmaemaeui Yeoksasahwihak),” Korean Journal of Sociology vol. 49 no. 2 (2015): 10–13. 34  Park, “Historical Sociology of Korean Policies Concerning Camptown Prostitution,” 13.

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administration launched the Camptown Clean-up Campaign.35 Many Korean scholars have published extensively about this campaign. Through the Campaign, the Korean government modernized camptowns with new lights, roads, and buildings, and tried to alleviate the racial tension among American soldiers. At that time, camptown prostitutes were divided into “white-only” and “black-only” because white soldiers, the majority of the United States Forces in Korea (USFK), did not want to buy sex from the women who catered to soldiers of color.36 At the same time, associating with blacks further stigmatized prostitutes, not only in the eyes of white soldiers but also among local Koreans. Thus, for most prostitutes, racial discrimination against black men was a means of exercising their limited agency to choose customers and retain their compromised sense of self-­ dignity.37 The Clean-up Campaign subcommittee urged Korean prostitutes not to discriminate against soldiers of color and made bars and clubs play blues and jazz more frequently. However, the prostitutes’ anti-black racism only mirrored the practice inside the US forces in Korea and larger Korean society. Racial division in the camptown prostitution industry still exists today. The Korean government relied on prostitutes’ sexual labor for its economic development, national security, and relationship with the US military in particular. For this reason, the Clean-up Campaign subcommittee regularly gathered camptown prostitutes to indoctrinate them in the belief that they contributed to the modernization and security of their country through prostitution.38 The prostitutes internalized this patriotic dimension of their work in much the same as soldiers in order to survive in the camptown. Still, they had no illusions about prostitution being viewed as dirty work condemned by society.39 One paradoxical aspect of military prostitution as necropolitical labor is that sovereignty knows its reliance on the condemned population for its livelihood. The most important task of the Camptown Clean-up Campaign was to provide disease-free women for American soldiers. Providing safe, clean, 35  Katherine Moon, Sex among Allies: Military Prostitution in US-Korea Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 128 36  Moon, Sex among Allies, 129. 37  Moon, Sex among Allies, 129. 38  Moon, Sex among Allies, 135. 39  Yon-ja Kim’s memoir and many narratives of Western Princesses published by My Sister’s Place and the Sunlit Center testify to the Camptown Clean-up Campaign’s impact on their bodies and military prostitution industries.

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and commercialized sex for American soldiers has been a persistent goal for the Korean government and the US military since 1945. The Clean-up Campaign and subsequent practices of the Korean government conducted STI check-ups of camptown prostitutes more aggressively and systematically. Those who completed STI check-ups and were declared clean carried their VD cards as if they were ID cards. Local police regularly visited bars and clubs in camptowns to surveil whether female workers there carried up-to-date VD cards. Prostituted women who were found without valid VD cards or who failed to take regular STI check-ups were arrested by local police and sent to quarantine houses in the mountains or prison-­ like women’s shelters. Furthermore, during the Korean government’s combat against STI, many women died of penicillin shock, physical violence, and suicide.40 Jeong-mi Park insightfully argues that, on a surface level, the Korean government’s active involvement in controlling STI in camptown prostitution shows a biopolitical aspect, as it attempted to reconstruct camptown prostitutes’ bodies as disease-free bodies.41 However, Korean sovereignty was only concerned about prostitutes’ STI, not their lives. In other words, Korean sovereignty allowed “Western Princesses to live for American soldiers and let them die in the hands of the soldiers.”42 Park’s analysis shows that sovereignty has exercised its right to kill Western Princesses (necropolitics) while exercising the right to protect the lives of American soldiers and ordinary Korean citizens (biopolitics). Through the legal apparatus, sovereignty extracted sexual labor from Western Princesses, who were at the bottom of the Korean sexual hierarchy and thus condemned to death, for the fostering of the lives of others and the state, as Lee explains of necropolitical labor. Park further argues that governmental policies tolerating and regulating camptown prostitution resulted from Korean sovereignty’s subjugation to Cold War international politics.43 It is critical to recognize that both the state and the capital systematize necropolitical labor as gendered and sexualized labor. As Korean American sociologist Grace Cho analytically argues, the body of the Western Princess has been “materially and discursively 40  The Korean government’s violent control of VD is well recorded in Moon’s Sex among Allies, 84–148. 41   Park, “Historical Sociology of Korean Policies Concerning Camptown Prostitution,” 24–25. 42  Park, “Historical Sociology of Korean Policies Concerning Camptown Prostitution,” 25. 43  Park, “Historical Sociology of Korean Policies Concerning Camptown Prostitution,” 26.

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constructed by competing ideologies of Korean nationalism” as well as “the object of violence and a site of contestation.”44 The Western Princess embodies the hypermilitarization of East Asia, Korea’s collective trauma from Japanese colonialism and the never-ending Korean War, American military imperialism, and Korea’s ambivalent relationship with the United States. Depending on Korea’s (international) political situation, the body of the Western Princess became a self-sacrificial site for national development, a territory occupied by the US, a source of national shame and secrecy, or a symbol of anti-Americanism. The equation of the body of the Western Princess with the Korean nation was especially pronounced when the murder case of Western Princess Geum-yi Yun was publicized in 1992–1993. The body of Yun, slain by Private Kenneth Markle, emerged as an essential site of anti-American military imperialism in South Korea. As Korean nationalists equated her death with South Korea’s sub-colonial status to the United States, Yun became the symbol of innocent Korean women prostituted to and raped by American imperialists due to poverty and the lack of Korea’s sovereign power.45 Juxtaposed to the victims of the Japanese military “comfort women” system during World War II, Western Princess like Yun, who had been previously condemned as wanton women, suddenly appeared to represent South Korea’s subordination to the United States.46 Although Yun’s death was brutal enough to bring public attention to the necropolitical realities of camptown prostitution marred with violence, death, and exclusion, political activism revolving around Yun’s death did not comprehend the normalized deadly violence based on race and gender in camptowns. Neither did male-dominated nationalists see the case as a violation of women’s rights as human rights.47 Instead, the 44  Grace Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 90. 45  Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora, 6. 46  Many political changes in South Korea in the early 1990s enabled the Geum-yi Yun case to appeal to the public. South Korea elected the first non-military president in 1992, which gave Korean citizens hope for the democratization of the country. At this time, the survivors of the Japanese military ‘comfort women’ system finally broke the silence about their experiences with the militarized sexual slavery. In addition, in the late 1980s, the Korean public learned about the US Eighth Army’s alleged involvement in brutally quelling the Gwang Ju Democratization Movement in May 1980. Anti-American sentiments escalated. 47  See Na-young Lee, “Kijichon: The Dark Portrait of the Modern History of Korea” (Kijichon: Hankuk Hyeondaesaui Eodueun Jahwasang), Hwanghae Review 50 (2006): 351 (Korean).

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body of Yun and many other Western Princesses, who were neither innocent nor evil, proves that their prostituted body, and even death, did not belong to themselves but to the state. The state owns necropolitical labor. A Case of Soldiering Soldiering is another kind of necropolitical labor, as the job can be carried out only by necessarily risking one’s life.48 Yet soldiers’ necropolitical labor is embellished with noble values such as honor, pride, discipline, sacrifice, and patriotism, because they carry out the state’s will to conquer and subjugate the enemy. Furthermore, while the US military is a competitive employer in the market sector, many Americans do not connect military labor to a wage-earning job. The United States has passionately honored, respected, and often mystified military labor, while many civilians (and soldiers) refuse to see its economic and sexual aspects, the aspects that Althaus-Reid always wanted us to see in the theological and the political. After all, war is about killing. Killing enemies for soldiers’ own survival is also premised on their own death. Soldiers, especially low-ranking soldiers, are trained to get their bodies involved directly in killing enemies who are perceived as worthy of being exterminated. At the same time, these soldiers risk being “exterminated” by their enemies.49 Military labor, according to Lee, is a particular kind of sexual proletarian labor “where certain aspects of masculine sexuality are (re)constructed, (re)appropriated, and deployed as a range of tasks.”50 The all-volunteer US military is based on the proletarianization and militarization of masculinity. Both aspects highlight the role of the state and capital in recruiting and maintaining gendered sexualities in the military. In addition, soldiering is effectively constructed through patriarchal gender ideologies along with the separation of body and spirit. Susan Thistlethwaite investigates this separation. The military builds up the sex industry through the forced separation of the sexes in military life. Usually, men are recruited into the military, taken out of their familial patterns of human relationships, and no longer governed by civilian norms of sexual and moral conduct.51 Military  Lee, Service Economies, 6.  Lee, Service Economies, 38. 50  Lee, Service Economies, 37–38. 51  Susan Thistlethwaite, “Militarism in North American Perspective,” in Women Resisting Violence: Spirituality for Life, eds. Mary John Mananzan et al. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996; reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2004), 120. 48 49

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training (i.e., reflexive shooting) relies on an ideology of the body that requires a soldier’s body to be suppressed and disciplined to overcome fear and to kill the enemy. The construction of the warrior’s body is interwoven with masculinized ideologies such as dominance over femininity and direct denial of human vulnerability. Sex, then, is used as a vehicle to appease soldiers’ fear and vulnerability or to show their superiority to women and the enemy.52 Feminist international studies scholar Cynthia Enloe supports Thistlethwaite’s analysis of sex used in the military. What she calls “militarized masculinity” indicates the feelings of “power and superiority over women and willingness to inflict violence on anyone deemed inferior.”53 Thistlethwaite further argues that militarism is a product of and support for “the gnosticizing tendency in Christianity to denigrate the body and sexuality and to exclude them from the realm of the spirit.”54 In this case, it should be understood that extracting necropolitical labor demands the intentional separation of the body from the spirit. Alienation of one’s body from spirit, especially among disposable laborers, is inevitable in necropolitical labor in military capitalism. The consequences of the necropolitical labor of soldiering can be detrimental. Even long before the idea of “necropolitical labor” or “necropolitics” had been articulated, American military hero Major General Smedley Butler illuminated how ordinary soldiers paid the true cost of America’s wars with death, disfigurement, dismemberment, and psychological injury. During World War I, American soldiers were not equipped with the proper tools to fight, while a small number of capitalists were interested only in making a lucrative profit from the war. If soldiers were not killed on the battlefield, they might suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder,55 bankruptcy, and various disabilities.56 Today, prolific literature from multiple psychologists and theologians underscores how the labor of soldiering is  Thistlethwaite, “Militarism in North American Perspective,” 122.  Cynthia Enloe, “Beyond ‘Rambo’: Women and the Varieties of Militarized Masculinity,” in Women and the Military System, edited by Eva Isskson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 71–93; Quoted in David Vine, Base Nation: How US Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017), 219. 54  Thistlethwaite, “Militarism in North American Perspective,” 121. 55  Although in Butler’s time PTSD was unknown, his description of the psychological status of the veterans locked in psychiatric institutions was similar to that of soldiers suffering from PTSD. 56  Major General Smedley Butler, War is a Racket (The Butler Family, 1935; reprint, Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2003), 23–26; 56–57. 52 53

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truly necropolitical, harming soldiers’ body, mind, spirit, and morality.57 These scholarly pieces of literature prove the negative psychological, spiritual, and moral impact on soldiers after they were involved in killing other human beings or witnessing the tragic deaths of their comrades. The state’s lack of proper medical support and respect for veterans only further illustrates the disposability of military labor after war. Ironically, military prostitutes could see the necropolitical nature of soldiering. The Western Princess knew that American soldiers came to Korea to make money, not to protect the country, and that these soldiers were recruited among the poor in the United States. These women had no illusions about America but criticized the US’s mismanagement of its economy, high unemployment rates, low educational standards in public schools, racial discrimination, and imperialistic actions toward developing countries.58 In terms of class backgrounds and as the state’s neglected population, Western Princesses saw similarities between GIs and themselves. It may not be an exaggeration to say that any war project is sexualized as long as war relies on human bodies—killing bodies, protesting bodies, fleeing bodies, and killed, tortured, and mutilated bodies. Yet, despite the inevitable relationship between war, the sexuality of soldiers, and military prostitutes, the dominant theories in Christian ethics of war (i.e., just war tradition, pacifism, Christian realism, etc.) often neglect the real human body, as Thistlethwaite reminds us, the sexualized human body that physically carries out war.59 In order to reveal the realities of war and its impact on day-to-day life, it is crucial to analyze war through the lens of sexuality as the signifier of power relations from an individual level all the way through to an international level. Hence, a sexuality-sensitive Christian discourse on war should revolve around how to create more just gender and sexual relations for peace rather than how to determine which war is “just” enough to fight.

57  The particular publications in my mind are: Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2015), Lt. Col. David Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Revised Edition (New York: Back Bay Books, 2009), and Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Lettini, Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury after War (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2013). 58  Moon, Sex among Allies, 30. 59  Thistlethwaite, Women’s Bodies as Battlefield, 6–7.

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What Christian resources can help us critically interrogate the “physical” realities of war and militarism? How can we use them in advancing sexual ethics for peace and justice? I turn now to the Christian Bible to consider these questions.

Bible, Prostitution, War, and Tourism: Reencountering Mary Magdalene The Bible contains many sexualized images of women, such as female prostitutes (e.g., the whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelation and Gomer in the Book of Hosea) and raped and mutilated female bodies (e.g., a Levite’s concubine in the Book of Judges). The church often uses these images to justify God’s punishment of a nation or glorify God’s mercy for sinners. Since many biblical narratives of the sexualized female body are interpreted in relation to individual sin, the audience overlooks the more prominent political-economic structures behind sexual narratives, including war and gender-based violence. One of these narratives is about Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene, the first person to encounter the risen Christ, has generated diverse stories. Feminist theologian Rosemary Ruether radically reimagines the story of Mary: when she encountered the risen Christ at his tomb, Mary was awakened in the mystery of the world and the vision to end massive suffering. Mary realized that giving up fantasies of power and revenge and ending domination and subjugation with the death of Jesus would be a way to bring the Kingdom of God on earth. To her chagrin, Jesus’s male disciples did not understand this vision. For them, it was more urgent to comprehend why the risen Jesus appeared to women like Mary first and not to them, and to rationalize that the coronation of the messianic king was only postponed. Peter and other male disciples could not imagine a new world brought and taught by Jesus beyond the heteropatriarchal structures of power (domination and subjugation). If Jesus was the Messiah, he must rule over the world, and Israel must rule over the Roman Empire.60 Ruether’s reconstruction of the Mary Magdalene saga may capture why the heteropatriarchal church and society have persistently confined Mary in the prison of gendered sexuality and prostitution. Let us

60  Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 8–11.

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examine what critical light the Mary Magdalene legend can shed on prostitution. Both Christians and secular people, ranging from the early Church fathers to the modern media, have portrayed Mary Magdalene as a harlot, a secret lover of Jesus, a woman who was possessed by demonic spirits, or a sinner who anointed Jesus with fragrance before the crucifixion. As Jane Schaberg’s critical study of Mary Magdalene shows, the Christian Testament texts about Mary have been read and filtered through the so-­ called Magdalene legend.61 Schaberg lays out some characters conflated with Mary in the process of her harlotization: (1) an unnamed woman who anointed the head of Jesus (Mark 14:3–9), (2) a woman who anointed Jesus’s feet with perfume (John 12:1–8), and (3) an unnamed woman in the city who was a sinner and wet Jesus’s feet with her tears, wiped them with her hair, and anointed them with ointment (Luke 7:36–50).62 All these characters are related to Mary’s unsuccessful attempt to touch the risen Christ at the tomb. Through the Lukan narrative concerning Mary’s prophetic rituals for the imminent death of Jesus, who prophesized her future, Schaberg argues that the prophet (the woman) is morphed into the whore. This moment of forgiveness for sexual sin obliterated the political anointing and later became the central moment of Magdalene legends.63 The harlotization of Mary Magdalene has something to do with her hometown, Migdal in Galilee, where people with diverse racial/ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds encountered one another, often violently clashing, and where bloody wars for conquest and revolts against the political and religious authorities were familiar. Migdal made its fortune from international trade and tourism as a border town.64 In famous tourist towns like Migdal in the ancient world, prostitution was a common method of survival for many local women. According to Korean biblical scholar Jean Kim, Migdal gave the stigma of prostitution to Mary. Church authorities would later use that stigma in order to undermine Mary’s leadership in the early church community and women’s leadership in general.65 Similarly, Schaberg argues that due to prejudices against 61  Jane Schaberg, The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian Testament (New York: Continuum, 2002), 8–9. 62  Schaberg, The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene, 74–75. 63  Schaberg, The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene, 75. 64  Schaberg, The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene, 85–87. 65  Jean K. Kim, Women and Nation: An Intercontextual Reading of the Gospel of John from a Postcolonial Feminist Perspective (Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2004), 204–207.

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economically independent single women in the border town in the larger society, Mary was portrayed as a prostitute.66 Her identity was reduced to prostitution, the presumed sexuality of single women like Mary in Migdal. Whether Mary was a prostitute or not, it is crucial to analyze the political, cultural, and economic context of Galilee, which forced women into prostitution or (mis)identified them as prostitutes. Simultaneously, we should deliberate why Mary’s sexuality has always mattered in the church rather than Mary’s vision for the Kin-dom of God and her leadership in the early Christian community. Arguably, the legend of Mary the prostitute stems from the fact that Galilee was colonized land, and the Christian Church has participated in European heteropatriarchal colonialism. The colonial influence on the Western Church may explain why the church has constantly misread the radical vision for peace and justice of the Jesus community rooted in Galilee, a colonized border town like a camptown in Korea. As long as the stories of Mary are filtered through the colonialist lens, all women in the colonialized world can be portrayed as rapable, sexually available, and prostituted bodies, while decolonial messages of liberation and resistance against death and violence are suppressed. The hypersexualization and harlotization of women, especially women of color, are, in part, the products of colonialism, as seen in the case of US camptown prostitution. The harlotization of Mary Magdalene limns women’s complex locations in war (i.e., colonial warfare). Colonizers or invaders hypersexualize colonized women or enemy women, and simultaneously local men question these women’s sexuality. As argued in the case of Korean nationalists’ glorification of Geum-yi Yun’s death, women’s sexuality should first be erased in order for local men to stand up for liberation. Whether women are raped or prostituted, their association with foreign soldiers can be considered sexual looseness or disloyalty to the nation. In other words, heteropatriarchal sovereignty does not trust women. Like many towns in Galilee, the ancient tourist town Migdal was highly militarized. In our contemporary world, tourism is closely linked to organized prostitution, although we are often unaware of the militarized natures of many global tourist destinations. For instance, Thailand, the country pejoratively called “Asia’s brothel,” is famous for sex tourism. During the Vietnam War, Thai sex industries were founded and expanded to serve American soldiers who fought in Vietnam.67 Similarly, in the  Schaberg, The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene, 352.  Moon, Sex among Allies, 34.

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Philippines and South Korea, the development of sex tourism from the 1970s and onward was substantially aided by the groundwork put in place by US military prostitution. It began in the same sites where the Rest and Recreation business for US servicemen was constructed.68 Moreover, the governments of these countries used sex tourism in order to provide a substantial portion of the GDP.  According to Australian feminist Sheila Jeffreys, the massive industrialization of US militaries since World War II created the infrastructures of systemic prostitution in many economically struggling countries, particularly in Asia.69 Indeed, the Asia Pacific is full of US bases. Consequently, the women in both sex tourism and military prostitution carry out necropolitical labor for the sake of fostering the life of their nations as well as the US military empire. These days, not only women but also men offer necropolitical labor in transnational prostitution. Transnational feminist scholar M.  Jacqui Alexander’s research on gay sex tourism in the Bahamas enumerates the complex global political economy of extracting sexual labor from young, poor Bahamian males to serve white gay tourists from North America and Europe.70 In the global scene of sex tourism built upon the collectively sexualized body of the (formerly) colonized, white gays become the active consumers, (un)consciously oppressing the hypersexualized body of young Bahamian men. As in Jasbir Puar’s concept of “homonationalism,” just as America’s transnational militarism intentionally turns the white gay body into the body of the patriotic and respected citizenry, so transnational sex tourism puts the white gay body onto the top of heteropatriarchal capitalism.71 Although the comparison between transnational sex tourism and military prostitution is not perfectly aligned, a state’s systematic involvement in both systems built upon the necropolitical body is hardly deniable. Through the analytical lens of gender and sexuality, one 68  Sheila Jeffreys, The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade (London: Routledge, 2009), 129. 69  Jeffreys, The Industrial Vagina, 107. 70  M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 78–88. 71  Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, 10th anniversary ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 2. Puar elaborates on the term, homonationalism as a form of sexual exceptionalism coming out with American exceptionalism. She argues that, “[T]here is a commitment to the global dominant ascendancy of whiteness that is implicated in the propagation of the United States as empire as well as the alliance between this propagation and this brand of homosexuality (2).”

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may see the intersection of militarism, tourism, capitalism, and prostitution marred with the sexualized subjugation of men and women in third world countries. After critically investigating colonialism, militarism, and tourism juxtaposed to the harlotization of Mary Magdalene, how can we construct liberative sexual ethics in the militarized world? I tentatively argue that the stories of biblical characters like Mary Magdalene, whose sexualities are questioned and condemned, should not be used as moral guidance for individual sexual acts, marriage, family, procreation, or even God’s abundant love and forgiveness available to all. Likewise, a prostitute should not be the body representing the worst sinners, those who cannot be forgiven in the secular legal system or who have no right to be protected by the human legal or moral system, but by God alone. Instead, we should scrutinize the militarized political economy behind prostituted women’s lives and their vulnerable socio-economic locations. Moreover, Christian contemplation of God’s redemption should not be directed toward the forgiveness of women in prostitution but lead to a critical analysis of social structures such as war and sex tourism that create massive suffering for people. Additionally, unless we come out of the heteropatriarchal closet of biblical narratives of sex and sexuality, we may not see that military prostitution is constructed upon the patriarchal assumption of male soldiers’ uncontrollable sex drives. This assumption drives politicians and military authorities to provide safe, commercialized sex for soldiers to maintain military morale and to avoid diplomatic conflict caused by the rape of local women. For this reason, feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe argues that, “military rape and military prostitution are not separate.”72 Unfortunately, for a long time, military prostitution, along with gender-based violence, has been considered a byproduct of war, if not collateral damage. Due to the system’s persistence and long history, military prostitution in the global war theater is normalized among politicians, soldiers, and civilians. As a result, many American citizens do not know or want to know what is happening when American troops are stationed in foreign lands. Perhaps presumptions about Mary Magdalene’s involvement in prostitution could be evidence of normalized military prostitution and tourism, not only in the ancient world but also wherever her story has been told and read. 72  Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Berkley: University of California Press, 2004), 21.

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Since military prostitution has affected so many men and women worldwide indefinitely, it is critical to study this institution in any city (i.e., Mary’s Migdal) to spell out gendered and militarized international politics. By examining military prostitution, as Cynthia Enloe argues, we can comprehend how the institution has shaped foreign policies and international alliances, and how military policymakers attempt to construct a type of masculinity that best suits their military’s missions anywhere.73 Furthermore, any military’s policies on prostitution are related to its policies on “rape, recruitment, sexual harassment, morale, homosexuality, pornography, and marriage.”74 Subsequently, the presence of prostitution for a foreign military often captures the double moral standards of local male nationalists. These men often ignore the prostitution policies of their own country’s military and resist local feminists’ efforts to make “sexuality an explicit issue in the wider nationalist movement” while condemning the foreign military’s use of local women’s sexuality.75 Finally, the critical study of military prostitution can also allow us to examine how the scriptural texts regarding prostitution have been interpreted in the heavily militarized context. Military prostitution can be an epistemic site for a liberative Christian ethic of sex. After analyzing war and militarism through the lens of gender and sexuality, what ethical discourse on war can we imagine? How can we, as sexual beings who respect our bodies’ capabilities to love others intimately and to encounter the divine mystery, embody peace, countering war and militarism marred with sexual violence? The Sunlit Center women’s peace and justice activism can offer some answers to these questions.

Embodied Sexual Ethics for Peace from the Sunlit Center The Sunlit Center, located in the Anjeongri camptown adjacent to the United States Army Garrison Humphreys (known as Camp Humphreys or Camp K-6), first began as a gathering place for senior women who were involved in camptown prostitution and continued to live in the camptown even after their bodies were unwanted in prostitution. Due to the 73  Cynthia Enloe, Maneuver: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkley: University of California Press, 2000), 51. 74  Enloe, Maneuver, 51. 75  Enloe, Maneuver, 52.

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ghettoization of camptowns and the negative social stigma on the Western Princess, they could not easily leave the camptown once they entered prostitution. When Soon-deok Woo, a Christian lay leader and social worker, offered a space for senior Western Princesses, they were initially reluctant to visit the center because of their long experience of exclusion from society. However, they would soon come regularly to the center for meals and social events. When local church people visit the center, the senior women ask them to sing Christian hymns and pray for them. The Sunlit Center women have memories of visiting the church with their GI lovers while being shunned by the many local churches in Korea. At least when men accompanied them, camptown prostitutes felt like they were respectable women without worrying about other people’s judgment. With Christian volunteers at the center, these ex-camptown prostitutes began to create new memories of the church and to be amazed by their suppressed memories of love. Their critical reflection on camptown prostitution and a Christian God enabled them to read biblical narratives from an anti-­ patriarchal perspective. Although the center is not a faith-based organization, it has come to embody a Christian faith of its own. This faith has played a significant role in sustaining their gatherings and collaborations with activists from outside camptowns. In 2013, the Sunlit Center women presented two theatrical plays to the public: The Story of Sookja, performed by the center women, and The Village of Seven Houses, performed by professional actors and actresses. The Story of Sookja was born out of the center women’s drama therapy, in which they acted out their previous lives in camptown prostitution. Performing their lived experiences as if they were actresses and outside observers, the women started seeing their bodies differently, not only as useful for prostitution but as flesh with souls that could feel and express sorrow, love, joy, and tears. If they had intentionally separated their bodies from their minds (spirit) in order to survive suffering before, the healing drama sessions enabled them to reflect on what their bodies remembered instead of trying to forget or hide their body memories. After many drama therapy sessions, the Sunlit women decided to perform the play at a local theater in order to communicate with the public audience and raise awareness of the historical presence of camptown prostitution. Before the public performance, the Sunlit Center women prayed together to stay calm. After the performance, they engaged the audience, sharing their stories and answering the questions from the audience. In the summer of 2017, the Sunlit Center women performed a musical, Jukebox. In this musical, the

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women revealed themselves as humans of flesh and memories by singing songs they used to sing with GI clients and lovers. Although the Sunlit Center women do not know the whereabouts of their ex-lovers now, they remember the love that once brightened their lives. The Village of Seven Houses was a collaborative work of the Sunlit Center women and outside volunteers. Yanggu Lee, the director and writer of the play, is a longtime volunteer worker at the Sunlit Center and a social activist in camptowns. After encountering the unattended death of an old woman who used to work in Anjungri camptown prostitution, he began writing the play. During my informal interview with Lee in the summer of 2013, he shared the image of God that emerged from the face of the elderly Western Princess: The old woman’s lonely death showed me certain truths about life. In my play, a dying elderly Western Princess asks Hana from the United States, who researches camptown prostitution, to pray for her. As Hana hesitates, the dying woman says, “When you pray for me, my tears flow into your eyes, and yours into God’s eyes. God is the one whose eyes are full of tears.” I wish everyone in the audience shares the tears with Western princesses and will see the teary eyes of God.76

Lee’s body image of a God with eyes full of tears perhaps represents the physical expression of God’s empathy with victims and survivors of necropolitical labor. Namely, God (the Sacred) resides in the concrete body of empathy rather than floating in the metaphysical realm. In addition, religious rituals such as prayers may create a space of empathy that interconnects the participants in rituals beyond their rational capacities of understanding human suffering. Since 2002, the Sunlit Center has focused on healing ex-camptown prostitutes and restoring their rights and dignity in Korean society. Furthermore, the center has worked arduously to connect these elderly women to various social activists and women’s organizations. As a result, the center has created trust between senior ex-camptown prostitutes and the center staff, activists, visitors, scholars, volunteers, and so forth—namely, the outside world. This trust has motivated the women 76  Since Yanggu Lee’s elaborated image of God has impacted my imagination of God as soon as I heard it from him, elsewhere I have reflected on the image of God whose eyes are full of tears. See, Keun-joo Christine Pae, “A Politics of Empathy: Christianity and Women’s Peace Activism in US Military Prostitution in South Korea,” in Women and Asian Religions, edited by Zayn Kassam (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2017), 223–240.

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to see themselves as activists for social justice, to speak about their experiences of necropolitical labor publicly, and to file a lawsuit against the Korean government for violating their human rights. The Sunlit Center women’s social activism introduces at least two critical aspects of peace-and-justice-oriented sexual ethics. First, their activism shatters the dichotomy between body and spirit but allows them to define what each is to the other. In other words, if the prostituted body previously defined who they were, now the women redefine the acts of their bodies through intentionally performing the memories of camptown prostitution. Second, they centralize “the body” in their healing and protesting so that they can recover body sovereignty. The body is not simply a medium for the spirit or for a higher cause. Instead, as Susan Thistlethwaite argues, the body is the “profound existential starting point” because only the living body feels pain and life.77 Thus, for Thistlethwaite, the existential crisis of the human condition is violence done to the physical body, “not a body/soul dualism and its attendant dualism of sin/grace.”78 Violence done to the Sunlit women’s bodies by the Korean government, the US military, American soldiers, pimps, and others have been risking the women’s lives. By focusing on what has happened to these women’s bodies, we can comprehend the imperial relations of ruling, which are deeply gendered, sexualized, and militarized. To undo violence against their bodies, the Sunlit Center women reclaim their body sovereignty. This enables them to use their bodies not for necropolitical labor but for life-centric labor of peace and justice. The drama therapy and the protest at the Korean National Assembly building signify the Sunlit Center women’s expression of body sovereignty. Theologically speaking, if the Sacred, God, or the Ultimate Reality is the ground of all beings’ existence and body sovereignty, they cannot represent sovereignty that exercises the right to kill.

Sexual Ethics for Peace and Justice So far, I have argued that war falls in the realm of sexuality discourse because embodied human beings as sexual beings always carry out the necropolitical labor of war. Sexuality as a signifier of power relations concerns one crucial ethical question: how to create just power relations  Thistlethwaite, Women’s Bodies as Battlefield, 5.  Thistlethwaite, Women’s Bodies as Battlefield, 4.

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among members of society. Sexuality-sensitive Christian discourse on war and peace aligns with this question of just-power relations. Hence, Christian ethics of peace and war require critical sexual ethics constructed on the justice frame. When sexuality is taught in our theological and religious classrooms, we should approach the subject intentionally, questioning how sexuality discourse will bring peace and justice to every part of human relations. Ultimately, a sexuality-sensitive Christian ethic emphasizes life-centered human relations, denouncing necropolitics. Here, I intentionally avoid Foucault’s term biopolitics but use life-centric politics, life-centered human relations, and life-centric theology, because biopolitics assumes someone else’s necropolitics. My suggestions for a peace-and-­ justice-oriented ethic of sex are fourfold. First, peace-and-justice-oriented sexual ethics must recognize and dismantle the sex negativity deeply ingrained in Christianity. Sex negativity in Christianity stems from the dualistic understanding of the body and the spirit: the body must be disciplined by the spirit because it is vulnerable to sin, especially sexual sin. Body-spirit dualism, which essentially denounces the body as the core of life, allows soldiers to use women sexually as well as to kill other human beings. Most people have an intense resistance to killing other human beings, including enemies, even when their own lives or the lives of their beloved are jeopardized. Since this resistance is so strong, according to Grossman, in many circumstances, “soldiers on the battlefield will die before they can overcome it.”79 However, many military leaders and politicians believe that soldiers can overcome the resistance to and fear of killing other human beings with proper conditioning and training. For example, the reflexive fire training widely used in military boot camps is intended to condition soldiers to fire their arms at targets without thinking. As Susan Thistlethwaite argues, this training is based upon contempt for embodied human life that is “the necessary splitting of consciousness required to kill another human being.”80 Sex, then, becomes a vehicle for overtly denying embodiment. It serves the needs of lonely, stressed, and vulnerable soldiers who remain confused about their relationships with themselves and others. In light of the Christian tendency of sex negativity originating from body negativity, there is little difference between killing and military rape, forced prostitution, and militarized prostitution. All these assaults need a calculated separation between the  Grossman, On Killing, 31.  Thislethwaite, “Militarism in North American Perspective,” 121.

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body and the spirit.81 The separation or the accession of the spirit over the body allows the body to be destroyed. As I quoted Thistlethwaite earlier, militarism is “both a support for and a product of the gnosticizing tendency in Christianity to denigrate the body and sexuality and to exclude them from the realm of the spirit.”82 Thus, in order to realize embodied peace, this separation of the spirit and the body must be rebuilt in Christianity toward “an integration of sensuality and spirituality.”83 Christian Ethicist Marvin Ellison makes a similar claim for sexual justice: we should recognize sexuality as a spiritual power for expressing care and respect through touch.84 His sexual ethic resists not only Christian sex negativity but also killing and the splitting between the body and the spirit in war. Intentional living in the unity between the body and the spirit is a path to experiencing God’s tender and intimate love, as if we saw God face to face and knew God by touching the body of God. For this living, we need a radically new understanding of the body: we are our bodies. Only through the body do we exist, live, experience the sacred, and connect to others. We do not need to leave our rosaries at the church or the house chapel when our bodies go to war, bars, and clubs. Second, compulsory heterosexuality must be overcome in every part of Christian thinking of peace and justice. What R.W. Connell calls “hegemonic masculinity” is fed by compulsory heterosexuality.85 As the dominant ideas and practices of masculinity or the “real man” hegemonic masculinity maintains the hierarchical relationship not only with femininity but also with other forms of masculinity represented by minoritized men (e.g., men of color, gay men, male immigrants, Muslim men, and so on). Hegemonic masculinity, in fact, sustains both the institutionalized military and prostitution. According to Connell, the growing 81  The separation between the body and the spirit becomes a survival strategy for victims of sexual violence, including military prostitution. In order to live life and cope with trauma, the survivors of sexual violence separate their bodies from spirit. The separation between the body and the spirit happens in multiple directions. The separation, however, is not aligned with human nature. Their bodies remember tragic events and react often in destructive ways. This is why rape victims experience symptoms similar to those of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder suffered by those of veterans whose bodies killed other bodies or witnessed the tragic deaths of people; See, Herman, Trauma and Recovery. 82  Thislethwaite, “Militarism in North American Perspective,” 121. 83  Thislethwaite, “Militarism in North American Perspective,” 121. 84  Melvin Ellison, Making Love Just: Sexual Ethics for Perplexing Times (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), 5. 85  R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkely: University of California Press, 2005), 67.

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destructiveness of military technology, the long-term degradation of the environment, and economic inequality are representative trends of the defense of hegemonic masculinity based on patriarchal heterosexual normativity.86 Reconstructing femininities radically free from compulsory heterosexuality but grounded in women’s bodily experiences is one way of dismantling compulsory heterosexuality. We should also envision masculinities that do not subscribe to hegemonic, patriarchal, and compulsory heterosexual masculinity. Third, sexual violence during wartime should not be considered either the byproduct of war or an isolated incident. Instead, sexual violence against women’s bodies should be considered in the broader social context. If society fails to prevent sexual violence during so-called peacetime, this injustice is only exacerbated during armed conflict. Furthermore, as long as violence targets vulnerable populations, such as women, people of color, religious minorities, and sexual minorities, these groups are exposed to various wars against their bodies every day. Hence, as a society, we should arduously stop any form of everyday violence, just as we must stop any war that destroys, kills, rapes, and mutilates human bodies. Fourth, when we think of sexual ethics, we must pay critical attention to the state and the capital that legitimize their power through the complex legal systems and social institutions. Falguni Sheth’s interstitial analysis introduced in the previous chapter is useful for seeing how these systems and institutions have created and maintained necropolitical labor conducted by those who are condemned to death. As it was explained earlier, “interstitiality” methodologically considers the complex nexus of “legal, political, and historical institutions and geopolitical circumstances” that are often invisible but form a significant backdrop that “shap[es] the self-­ understandings and interests” of diasporic and politically vulnerable populations.87 An interstitial approach shifts the analytical focus from the complex intersection of social identities of disenfranchised subjects to the institutional infrastructure. The Korean government has institutionalized the system of camptown prostitution and legally surveilled Western Princesses whose sexuality was intentionally differentiated from other Korean women’s sexualities. Indeed, intersectionality analysis enables us to see the multiple layers of oppression upon Western Princesses: the  Connell, Masculinities, 216.  Falguni Sheth, “Interstitiality: Making Space for Migration, Diaspora, and Racial Complexity,” Hypatia 29 no. 1 (Winter 2014): 75. 86 87

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intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality, and class in heteropatriarchal nationalism. An interstitial approach to camptown prostitution helps us inspect what is not immediately visible. For instance, the political apparatus of the Korean government’s Clean-up Campaign, health policies controlling contagious diseases, including STI, and anti-prostitution law targeted Western Princesses. The nexus of institutionalized political and economic powers has reminded Western Princesses of their social identities and enabled the rest of Korean society to judge them morally. Justice-and-peace-oriented sexual ethics cannot be imagined apart from the transformation of the nexus of political and economic powers bolstered by the legal system. Jeong-mi Park’s critical analysis of the Korean government’s health law and anti-prostitution law that regulated camptown prostitution offered a scholarly resource for the Solidarity Network for Human Rights in the Camptown when the network filed a lawsuit against the Korean government. The birth of the Solidarity Network and their lawsuit are a milestone in the camptown’s peace activism that has focused on just gender and sexual relations and sexual politics in international relations. Different from male-dominated nationalists’ equation of Geum-yi Yun’s death with the nation, the network limns military prostitution as necropolitical labor based on the proletarianization of gender and sexuality. Namely, the network disallows heteropatriarchal national desires from taking over the peace and justice movement. Justice-and-peace-­ oriented sexual ethics articulates and practices our sexual and sensual power as life-political labor.

Epilogue As soon as the Solidarity Network for Human Rights in the Camptown’s press conference was over, it started drizzling. When I said goodbye to the Sunlit Center activists, they asked me when they would see me again. “I will come back next summer,” I answered. They wished me a good and blessed life in the United States. I ran into the National Assembly subway station when drizzling changed to pouring. On September 29, 2022, the Supreme Court of Korea delivered a verdict. The court recognized that the Korean government was partially responsible for controlling camptown prostitution by forcing prostitutes to take VD check-ups and arresting prostitutes who refused to take VD check-ups without due process. The court limited the governmental responsibility only until 1977. One hundred seventeen plaintiffs who participated in the lawsuit could receive

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approximately between $3500 and $10,000 compensation from the government. Although the verdict was far from what the Solidarity Network for Human Rights in the Camptown expected from the court, it was the first to confirm the government’s responsibility for camptown prostitution publicly.88 The lawsuit was a milestone of the network’s almost ten-year collective activism. The network will continue its public activism to restore the dignity of camptown prostitutes in society and to solidify legal protection for them, which are all necessary for camptown women’s body sovereignty. According to the Pentagon, more than 70 years after the end of World War II, there are 174 US bases in Germany, 113 in Japan, and 83 in South Korea. Worldwide, the United States has bases in more than 70 countries.89 Living in “the empire of bases,” how can we US-based feminist ethicists overlook the militarization of society, gender, and sexuality when thinking about sexual ethics? We live in the remains of war ruins, or the world created by one war after another. In a world where no one knows peace free from war, it is challenging to imagine sexual ethics that gives us full freedom to be what we are, whom we love, and how we are related to one another and to the Sacred without (un)intentionally forcing others to sacrifice their freedom and lives. The Sunlit women’s steady healing journey toward peace and justice hints at the unity of sexual freedom and religious freedom that Mary Magdalene might have glimpsed. In the Pacific, I imagine justice-peace-oriented sexual ethics becoming antiwar, antiracist, and anti-capitalist feminist ethics.

Bibliography Alexander, M.  Jacqui. 2005. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham: Duke University Press. Althaus-Reid, Marcella. 2000. Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics. London: Routledge. ———. 2003. The Queer God. London: Routledge. Brock, Rita Nakashima, and Gabriella Lettini. 2013. Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury after War. Boston: Beacon Press. 88  People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, “Meanings of the Lawsuit and Verdict of Camptown Prostitution,” https://www.peoplepower21.org/judiciary/판결&결 정/1916658 89  David Vine, Base Nation: How US Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015), 9.

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Butler, Smedley. 1935. War is a Racket. The Butler Family; Reprint, Port Townsend: Feral House, 2003. Cho, Grace M. 2008. Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Connell, R.W. 2005. Masculinities. Berkely: University of California Press. Ebel, Jonathan. 2015. G.I. Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ellison, Melvin. 2012. Making Love Just: Sexual Ethics for Perplexing Times. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Enloe, Cynthia. 2000. Maneuver: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2004. The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire. Berkley: University of California Press. Farley, Margaret. 2008. Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. New York: Continuum. Grossman, David. 2009. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. New York: Back Bay Books. Herman, Judith. 2015. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence–From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, Rev. ed. New York: Basic Books. Jakobsen, Janet. 2020. Sex Pervert: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics. New York: New York University Press. Jeffreys, Sheila. 2009. The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade. London: Routledge. Kang, Yi-soo. 1999. Prohibition of Public Prostitution and Women’s Movements during the American Military Occupation (Migunjeonggi Gongchang Pyejiwa Sahwibyeonwa). In Social Changes and History of Korea during American Military Occupation (Migunjeonggi Sahwibeyonhwawa Sawhisa), vol. 2, 261–292. Chuncheon: Hanrim University Institute of Asian Cultural Studies, 263–265 (Korean). Kim, Jean K. 2004. Women and Nation: An Intercontextual Reading of the Gospel of John from a Postcolonial Feminist Perspective. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers. Kim, Yon Ja. 2005. A Big Sister in Americatown Screams until Five Minutes before Her Death (Americatown Wang-unni Jukgi Obun Jeonkkaji Aksseuda). Seoul: Samin (Korean). Kim, Nami. 2016. The Gendered Politics of the Korean Protestant Right: Hegemonic Masculinity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kwon, Insook. 2010. Masculinity and Male-on-Male Sexual Violence in the Military: Focusing on the Absence of the Issue. Trans. Daisy Y.  Kim. In Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho, 223–250. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Lee, Na-young. 2006. Kijichon: The Dark Portrait of the Modern History of Korea (Kijichon: Hankun Hyeondaesaui Eodueun Jahwasang). Hwanghae Review 50: 345–355 (Korean). Lee, Jin-kyung. 2010. Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work, and Migrant Labor in South Korea. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Trans. Steve Corcoran. Durham: Duke University Press. Moon, Katherine. 1997. Sex among Allies: Military Prostitution in US-Korea Relations. New York: Columbia University Press. Moon, Seung Sook. 2010. Regulating Desire, Managing the Empire: US Military Prostitution in South Korea, 1945—1970. In Over There: Living with the US Military Empire from World War Two to the Present, ed. Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon, 39–77. Durham: Duke University Press. Pae, Keun-Joo Christine. 2017. A Politics of Empathy: Christianity and Women’s Peace Activism in US Military Prostitution in South Korea. In Women and Asian Religions, ed. Zayn Kassam, 223–240. Santa Barbara: Praeger. ———. 2020. Spiritual Activism as Interfaith Dialogue: When Military Prostitution Matters. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 36 (1): 71–84. Park, Jeong-mi. 2015. Historical Sociology of Korean Policies Concerning Camptown Prostitution (Hankuk kijich’on Seongmaemaeui Yeoksasahwihak). Korean Journal of Sociology 49 (2): 1–33. People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy. Meanings of the Lawsuit and Verdict of Camptown Prostitution. https://www.peoplepower21.org/judiciary/판결&결정/1916658. Puar, Jasbir. 2017. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, 10th Anniversary ed. Durham: Duke University Press. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. 1993. Sexism and God-talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. Boston: Beacon Press. Schaberg, Jane. 2002. The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian Testament. New York: Continuum. Sheth, Falguni. 2014, Winter. Interstitiality: Making Space for Migration, Diaspora, and Racial Complexity. Hypatia 29 (1): 75–93. The Invisible War. 2012. Directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering. New  York: New Video Group. Thistlethwaite, Susan. 1996. Militarism in North American Perspective. In Women Resisting Violence: Spirituality for Life, ed. Mary John Mananzan, J. Shannon Clarkson, Mercy Oduyoye, Elsa Tamez, and Mary Grey, 119–127. Maryknoll: Orbis Books; Reprint, Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2004. ———. 2015. Women’s Bodies as Battlefield: Christian Theology and the Global War on Women. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Vine, David. 2017. Base Nation: How US Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World. New York: Metropolitan Books. Yuh, Ji-yeon. 2002. Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America. New York: New York University Press.

CHAPTER 4

COVID-19 and Anti-Asian Gender-Based Violence

The Shootings On March 16, 2021, Robert Aaron Long, a 21-year-old, white, self-­ proclaimed evangelical man, fired his gun at the workers and clients inside Young’s Asian Massage and Gold Spa in the Atlanta area of Georgia. He murdered eight people, including six Asian/American women. Xiaojie Tan, the owner of Young’s Asian Massage; Delania Yaun, a client at Tan’s shop who was celebrating a special day with her husband; Paul Andre Michels, a handyman at Young’s; and Daoyou Feng, one of Tan’s employees, were the first group of Long’s victims. Long then drove to Gold Spa and killed Yong Ae Yue (유영애), Soon Chung Park (박순정), Hyun Jung Grant (현정 그랜트), and Sucha Kim (김수자). All the victims, except Yaun and Michels, were women of Asian descent who immigrated from China and South Korea.1 When police arrested Long, the murderer blamed his sex addiction for the killing of the spa employees, as if the victims were accustomed to selling sex to him. Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Captain Jay Baker said that Long had “a really bad day”

1  Derek Hawkins et al., “What We Know About the Victims of the Atlanta Shootings,” The Washington Post, March 20, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ nation/2021/03/20/atlanta-shooting-victims/

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. C. Pae, A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43766-3_4

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and, as a result, “this is what he did.”2 Long’s words were taken as a de facto explanation of his crime, which happened amid the uptick in anti-­ Asian attacks in the COVID-19-stricken United States. Major news outlets and Christian pundits connected Long’s crime to evangelical sexual purity culture and anti-Asian hate. The effect of this was to shield the public from the fact that these murders were clear instances of gender-­ based sexual and racist violence. The shootings in Atlanta were not an isolated crime but an instance of systemic violence constructed on the complex intersection of racism, sexism, the American military empire, callous capitalism, and heteropatriarchal Christianity. COVID-19 only conditioned the social environment to violate Asian/American women’s bodies blatantly. To understand why so many Asian/American women were outraged and re-traumatized by Long’s acts of murder and Baker’s casual words of so-called explanation requires critical analysis of anti-Asian gender violence, both in North America and during America’s wars and on US bases in the Asia Pacific region, as root causes of this violence. In its quest to reconstruct an anti-violence feminist theology and ethics, this chapter critically analyzes COVID-related anti-Asian racism through the intersectional lens of gender, sexuality, and class. First, the chapter deliberates on gender-based violence as connected to other forms of oppression, interrogating the impact of war metaphors for COVID-19 on racialized gender violence. Then, following the previous chapter, I explain the prostitution industries around US bases in East and Southeast Asia as the militarized root of the hypersexualization of the Asian female body. This hypersexualization is intertwined with America's long history of anti-­ Asian immigration, marred by a sexualized “yellow peril.” Furthermore, by examining evangelical purity culture as a cause of gender-based anti-­ Asian violence, this chapter demonstrates the interlocking of white Christian nationalism and a model minority myth that devalues poor women’s sexuality in particular. The last part of the chapter proposes a life-centered Christian theology that consciously engages in what I call “body literacy” in every step of doing theology. Life-centered theology emphasizes beauty in ordinary life and celebrates the unity between the body and the spirit, and sexuality and sensuality. As a method, inter-­textual reading of queer 2  Kate Brumback, “Watch: Atlanta Police Hold Briefing on Spa Shooting” PBS News Hour, March 18, 2021, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/watch-live-atlanta-police-holdbriefing-on-spa-shooting

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feminist political theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid’s Indecent Theology and Indigenous feminist scholar and poet Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s “radical resurgence” suggests some models of life-centered theology and transnational solidarity.

Gender-Based Violence and Oppression According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, “Gender-based violence refers to harmful acts directed at an individual based on their gender.” It is rooted in “gender inequality, the abuse of power, and harmful norms.”3 Victims of gender-based violence include cis-gender girls and women, LGBTQ+ people, and gender-nonconforming people. Gender-­ based physical, verbal, sexual, and psychological violence is always structural and political, as “violence” is co-constitutive with other forms of oppression. Helpful here is feminist philosopher Iris Young’s notion of “the five faces of oppression”: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. From a materialist feminist perspective, Young refers to exploitation, marginalization, and powerlessness as “relations of power and oppression” produced by the social division of labor—of who benefits from whom, and who is dispensable.4 Exploitation refers to an ongoing process of transferring “the results of the labor of one social group to benefit another.”5 The gendered face of exploitation has been particularly noticeable during COVID-19. Feminized care work is structured upon transferring workers’ labor to foster others’ lives—such as in nursing homes, hospitals, domestic labor, and childcare. Massage parlors also offer caring work for customers who need to release stress. Marginalization highlights the process of excluding a particular group of people (marginals) from opportunities for meaningful participation in political and economic activities due to their gender, race, sexual orientation, citizenship, disabilities, and other characteristics. Arguably, marginalization is “the most dangerous form of oppression” because lack of opportunity leads to “material deprivation” and even “extermination.”6 Those who had been economically precarious before the pandemic 3  UNHCR: The UN Refugee Agency, “Gender-based Violence,” https://www.unhcr. org/en-us/gender-based-violence.html 4  Iris M.  Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 58. 5  Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 49. 6  Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 53.

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typically experienced increased marginalization during and as a result of the pandemic. Granted, almost seven months after the COVID-19 outbreak, the United States had regained nearly half of the jobs lost during the initial stages of the pandemic. However, mothers of school-age children, Black men, Black Women, Hispanic men, Asian/Americans, younger Americans (ages 25 to 34), and people without college degrees recovered their jobs at a slower rate. Significantly, Black women recovered only 34% of their jobs. Mothers of children ages 6 to 12 recovered fewer than 45% of the jobs lost, while the employment of fathers of children of the same age returned to 70% of its former level.7 A Pew Research Center report shows that in February 2020, right before the nationwide COVID lockdown in the United States, the unemployment rate among Asian workers was 2.5%, noticeably lower than among Hispanic (4.8%) and Black (6.2%) workers. However, in May 2020, the unemployment rate among Asian workers peaked at as high as 20.3%, a rate similar to that among Black (19.8%) and Hispanic (20.4%) workers.8 Presumably, many unemployed Asian workers were immigrants, both documented and undocumented, working in the hospitality business sector, like the victims of the spa shootings in Atlanta. Critically examined through Young’s concept of marginalization, the unemployment rate data collected during the early stage of the COVID pandemic limns who can be eliminated from the workforce more quickly than others and, thus, who routinely live in precarity. Both exploitation and marginalization prompt “powerlessness” among the oppressed because of their lack of decision-making power and exposure to disrespectability and precarity. Young describes this powerless status: “The powerless lack the authority, status, and sense of self that professionals tend to have.”9 Powerlessness illustrates the hierarchical division of labor and stratified class system in capitalist society. Cultural imperialism stems from a dominant group’s universalization of its experiences and perspectives over those marked as Other (racially, economically, and sexually minoritized populations) due to cultural 7  Heather Long, “Virtual School Has Largely Forced Moms, Not Dads, to Quit Work. It Will Hurt the Economy for Years,” The Washington Post, November 6, 2020, https://www. washingtonpost.com/road-to-recovery/2020/11/06/women-workforce-jobs-report/ 8  Rakesh Kochhar, “Unemployment Rate Is Higher than Officially Recorded, More So for Women and Certain Other Groups,” Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org/ fact-tank/2020/06/30/unemployment-rate-is-higher-than-officially-recorded-more-so-forwomen-and-certain-other-groups/ 9  Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 57.

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differences.10 A subordinate group is often socially segregated, and as a result, their experiences are not shared but misunderstood or stereotyped by a dominant group. What W.E.B. Du Bois calls “double consciousness” arises when the oppressed refuse to accept “devalued, objectified, and stereotyped versions of themselves” imposed by a dominant group, desiring to be recognized as “human, capable of activity, and full of hope and possibility.”11 Similarly, since their arrival on the continent, Asians in North America have lived with double consciousness due to the adverse effects of Euro-Christian cultural imperialism. Racial, cultural, and religious differences have marked Asians not simply as different but often as inferior or deviant. Cultural imperialism intersects with violence, a systematic social practice owing in part to violators’ fear of losing their privilege and identities. Violence against targeted groups is mostly intended to damage, humiliate, or destroy them.12 Racial/ethnic minorities, women, gays, lesbians, Arab Muslims, and Jews have embodied or intergenerationally learned knowledge about random and unprovoked attacks on them only because they belong to those groups. Likewise, gender-based violence is systemic and social since it is directed at women and gender-nonconforming people only because of their group identities. As society, everyone knows that violence is inflicted on women and will be inflicted on them again.13 Any women and gender-nonconforming people who are not free from these forms of oppression can be subject to violence at any time. COVID-19 has not only exacerbated all these forms of oppression, but it has also entangled their relationships more tightly than ever before through capitalist heteropatriarchal family values. The victims of the Spa shootings in Atlanta might have experienced all these forms of oppression due to the intersection of their racial, gender, and class backgrounds. Since economically struggling working-class Asian/American immigrant women had been marginalized long before the pandemic, six deaths were surrounded by rumors, secrets, and mysteries, especially concerning their lives at massage parlors. For instance, while alive, Tan endeavored to dissociate her Young’s Massage from the social stigma on the massage industry as a hotbed of illegal prostitution. Her  Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 60.  Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 60. 12  Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 61. 13  Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 62–63. 10 11

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effort shows her desire to be recognized as a respectable business owner in the face of cultural imperialism. In order to highlight random and unprovoked deadly anti-Asian violence against Tan, a news report from the Washington Post emphasized Tan’s efforts, along with her work ethic and relationship with her employees, citing the words of one of her loyal clients and her daughter.14 Until their tragic death, Sucha Kim, Hyun Jung Grant, and Soon Jung Park had taken odd jobs, working multiple jobs simultaneously to support their families. Due to her limited English ability, Kim, who was 69 years old at the time of death, had washed dishes and cleaned office buildings since her immigration to the US in the 1980s.15 Grant, described as a hard-working single mother, hid her job from others, presumably because of the fears of social stigma on Asian-owned massage shops. Once, she had to work a lot, so she had to leave her children with another family for at least one year.16 Park, who was 74 years old, was in a similar situation. Apart from her family in the New York metropolitan area, Park worked in Atlanta, managing a spa and cooking for spa employees.17 After the spa shootings in Atlanta, the media was flooded with new findings about the gunman, Long, ranging from his psychological history to his religious experience and family relations. As usual, however, the public did not know much about the victims of the mass shootings. Part of the reason is that the Gold Spa employees were isolated, eating and sleeping together inside the spa and traveling together back and forth between their homes in the same city and the spa every three days, or every week.18 Working conditions at Gold Spa were deplorable but unknown until the women’s deaths. The spa shooting victims might have experienced physical, verbal, and psychological violence from their 14  Ariana Eunjung Cha, Derek Hawkins, and Meryl Kornfield, “Why We Don’t Know More about the Atlanta Shooting Victims?” The Washington Post, March 18, 2021, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/national/victims-atlanta-shooting/2021/03/18/986eb89c881a-11eb-8a8b-5cf82c3dffe4_story.html 15  Ariana Eunjung Cha et al., “Atlanta Spa Shooting Victims Highlight Struggles for Asian and Asian American Immigrant Women in Low-wage Jobs,” The Washington Post, March 20, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/20/atlanta-spa-shootingvictims-highlight-struggles-asian-asian-american-immigrant-women-low-wage-jobs/ 16  Cha et  al., “Atlanta Spa Shooting Victims Highlight Struggles for Asian and Asian American Immigrant Women in Low-wage Jobs.” 17  Cha et  al., “Atlanta Spa Shooting Victims Highlight Struggles for Asian and Asian American Immigrant Women in Low-wage Jobs.” 18  Cha, Hawkins, and Kornfield, “Why We Don’t Know More about the Atlanta Shooting Victims?”

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employers, clients, or strangers. Their names finally came out to the public only after they were killed. Similar to Sheth’s interstitiality, the concept introduced in Chap. 2, Young’s five faces of oppression limn how social structures cut through social groups constructed upon race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, dis/ability, and citizenship, giving some members in the same social group privilege or disadvantages. For instance, women and elderly Asian/ Americans have been disproportionately victims of COVID-related anti-­ Asian incidents because they were perceived as weaker long before the pandemic.19 However, this does not mean Asian/American men, especially youth, do not experience anti-Asian racism. Their experiences are different and nuanced. Anti-Asian incidents are reported more often in metropolitan areas where large Asian populations are concentrated, and people live close to one another.20 Asian/Americans who live in less populated areas, however, are not shielded from anti-Asian racism. Some Asian/ Americans in these areas experience direct violence against them, micro-­ aggression, social isolation, and marginalization from meaningful participation in community activities and policymaking. It may not be an exaggeration to say that all Asian/Americans experience (different degrees of) cultural imperialism marked by micro-aggression, social exclusion, and invisibility. Yet, Asian/Americans become hypervisible when a social crisis like COVID-19 breaks out, an uptick in anti-Asian violence is reported in the media, terrorist attacks or armed conflict break out in South Asia, or the military operations of China and North Korea appear in the media. Along with the other faces of oppression, both invisibility and hypervisibility are critical elements of the cultural imperialism that make Asian/ Americans vulnerable to violence. To be sure, numbering the five faces of oppression does not quantify oppression, even if we can think of a social group that experiences the multiple faces of oppression. Nevertheless, by critically observing the intersections of oppression, we can comprehend how different social groups face similar, and yet, distinctive forms of oppression and, thus, can pursue political solidarity beyond their immediate interests. Furthermore, Young’s theory of oppression deepens one’s understanding of 19  Aggie Yellow Horse et  al., “Stop AAPI Hate National Report 3/19/20–6/30/20,” Stop AAPI, https://stopaapihate.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Stop-AAPI-HateReport-National-v2-210830.pdf 20  Aggie Yellow Horse et al., “Stop AAPI Hate National Report 3/19/20–6/30/20.”

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gender-­based violence. Gender-based violence should not be considered isolated attacks on woman-identified individuals. As a social group, these individuals are also vulnerable to exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, and cultural imperialism. As I elaborated on Susan Thistlethwaite’s argument in the previous chapter, gender-based violence as “violence against women’s bodies” is the most dangerous threat to the livelihood of women, who might already experience other faces of oppression. Because their bodies are perceived as disrespectable and exploitable, they can also be violated. What the spa shooting victims experienced and what the American public saw in Atlanta was a war. Escalated violence during the pandemic is in part related to the political imagination of the COVID situation as a warlike time.

Militarized COVID-19 and Its Impact on the Asian/ American Body The world’s political leaders invoked war metaphors to combat the COVID-19 crisis, conceiving it as a threat to the collective life of nations. When a crisis emerges, war metaphors are usually compelling enough to quickly get people’s attention to the perceived danger. On April 5, 2020, Queen Elizabeth ended her unusual speech regarding the pandemic with the phrase, “We will meet again.” Her speech evoked the famous 1939 World War II ballad, ‘We’ll Meet Again,’ sung by the British singer Vera Lynn, as if the UK had entered another world war.21 Former US President Donald Trump called himself the war president.22 War metaphors were accompanied by the representatives of sovereignty’s urgent decisions to mobilize nurses and doctors as first responders on the frontline, shut down schools, ban travel, lock down cities, and impose various social and health regulations on its people. When the whole world fights the same war, its

21  Michael Holden, “‘We’ll Meet Again’: Queen Elizabeth Invokes WW2 Spirit to Defeat Coronavirus,” Reuters, April 5, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain-queen/well-meet-again-queen-elizabeth-invokes-ww2-spiritto-defeat-coronavirus-idUSKBN21N0TQ 22  Caitlin Oprysko and Sasannah Luthi, “Trump Labels Himself ‘a Wartime President’ Combating Corona Virus,” Politico, March 18, 2020, https://www.politico.com/ news/2020/03/18/trump-administration-self-swab-coronavirus-tests-135590

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interest goes to who wins the battle and how they win. The death toll could measure a country’s success in winning the war. However, war metaphors for COVID-19 are misleading and even dangerous for at least three reasons. First, publicized war metaphors encourage people to look for embodied enemies while provoking belligerent sentiment in the public sphere. Second, the metaphors reinforce patriarchal gender ideology that glorifies an ethic of care and concentrates medical resources on fighting the virus. Third, poor people’s lives become more precarious during the pandemic, just as any war destroys their lives first. Yet, the digitalized deaths of these people can be considered collateral damage in a warlike situation. Superficially, in the war on COVID-19, the virus is portrayed as an enemy. However, as right-wing politicians and media worldwide occasionally call it the China or Wuhan virus––as if the virus were manufactured in China, like clothes or shoes made in China—the (viral) enemy came to have an East Asian face. In the United States, anti-Asian attacks tripled at the beginning of the nationwide lockdown.23 In addition, the war metaphor frequently divides society into “us” (read as innocent victims of the virus or fighting soldiers) and “them” (read as a threat to public health and social stability). In this war on COVID-19, people become either soldiers fighting for public safety or enemies to the public—no one can be a bystander or a civilian. War metaphors have the power to evoke a belligerent spirit in public and, thus, may encourage people to look for and eliminate embodied enemies. As a result, in March 2021, the non-profit organization Stop AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) Hate reported 3795 anti-Asian hate attacks in the United States.24 A year later, the organization collected data on a total of 11,467 incidents of which 67% consisted of verbal and physical harassment, verbal or written hate speech, and inappropriate gestures.25

23  Ali Rogin and Amna Nawaz, “‘We Have Been through This Before.’ Why Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Are Rising amid Coronavirus,” PBS New Hour, June 25, 2020, https://www. pbs.org/newshour/nation/we-have-been-through-this-before-why-anti-asian-hate-crimesare-rising-amid-coronavirus 24   Stop AAPI Hate, 2020-2021 National Report, https://stopaapihate. org/2020-2021-national-report/ 25  Stop AAPI Hate, Two Years and Thousands of Voices: What Community-Generated Data Tells Us about Anti-AAPI Hate, https://stopaapihate.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/ Stop-AAPI-Hate-Year-2-Report.pdf

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As mentioned earlier, women, non-binary, LGBTQ persons, and elderly people were more vulnerable to anti-Asian racism. War on the Potentially Diseased Body The US government’s militarized public health policy has a long history of targeting Asian/Americans. According to Asian/American historian Erika Lee, between 1910 and 1940, Chinese immigrants had to go through humiliating medical check-ups at Angel Island off the shore of San Francisco. Doctors and nurses searched their bodies for physical defects and looked for “parasitic ‘Oriental’ diseases that were not contagious but were grounds for exclusion if untreated after arrival.”26 Medical professionals’ prejudices about the polluted Chinese body reflected the US government’s lockdown of the San Francisco Chinatown between 1900 and 1905 in response to the outbreak of bubonic plague (black death). Following the 1849 California Gold Rush, Chinatown was repeatedly condemned for its filth and bad smells, which were believed to breed disease.27 This adverse prejudice resulted from blatant anti-Asian racism at the turn of the twentieth century, when Western empires aggressively expanded their military and economic powers over Asia, which was perceived as an exploitable land of heathens and barbarians. Adopting the European invention of eugenics, American missionaries, diplomats, and travelers to China described the “Mongolian” race as barbarians and primitive humans close to animals.28 Chinese, as well as other Asians, had been racialized long before the first influx of Asian migrants arrived on the shore of North America in the late nineteenth century. California local writers had depicted Chinese migrant workers through popular stereotypes, such as Chinese with their hair braids and distinctive clothing, commenting on their effeminate, childlike appearance, their “flat and dull faces with ‘slanting fishlike eyes’ narrowed by ‘Mongolian eye folds.’”29 One may find it astonishing that the nineteenth-century description of the East Asian appearance is still prevalent in twenty-first century America and is used to harass and denigrate people of Asian descent. The Chinese body, marked 26  Erika Lee, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 109. 27  Guenter Risse, Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 1. 28  Risse, Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco’s Chinatown, 6. 29  Risse, Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco’s Chinatown, 6.

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as racially, culturally, and religiously inferior, enabled the American public to morally ridicule a Chinese person as a “queer little specimen of petrified progress with a natural propensity for conflict, violence, crime, and prostitution.”30 The racialization of Chinese and other Asians is based on cultural imperialism, which subjected all Asian migrants to exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, and violence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The filthy, smelly, and disease-vulnerable Chinatown was, in fact, manufactured by anti-Chinese hate, California capitalists who reaped profits from Chinese labor, and California’s Alien Land Laws, which prohibited non-US citizens (read as Asians) from owning land or real estate. White land capitalists took advantage of Alien Land Laws by maximizing the number of lots in Chinatown. Public health historian Guenter Risse argues that, “these absent and predatory landlords were largely responsible for Chinatown’s derelict appearance, density, and unsanitary conditions.”31 Hence, the San Francisco authorities’ militant and masculinist approach to locking down the entire Chinatown cannot be adequately understood without interrogating anti-Asian racist political and economic structures. San Francisco city authorities physically locked down Chinatown to quell public anxiety over the bubonic plague. Without clear evidence, local political regimes and public health professionals all suspected Chinatown was responsible for a bubonic plague outbreak. Residents in Chinatown woke up to a police fence that separated them from the rest of the world. Soon, people of non-Chinese descent could leave the quarantined Chinses district. During the quarantine, health care professionals wanted to test a newly developed bubonic plague vaccine on the Chinese body. Militant and masculinist strategies to quarantine, contain, and evict Chinese/ Americans were possible because they had been dehumanized. To a certain extent, real estate developers expected Chinese/Americans to leave the Chinatown district during the bubonic lockdown so that they could gentrify the area on a clean slate.32 This exemplifies what Canadian journalist Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism,” when a small group of capitalists finds the opportunity to reap lucrative profits in times of social crises 30  Hubert H.  Bancroft, “Mongolianism in America,” in Essays and Miscellany (San Francisco, 1890), 309; quoted in Risse, Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco’s Chinatown, 6. 31  Risse, Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco’s Chinatown, 7. 32  Risse, Plague, Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco’s Chinatown, 8–9.

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and natural disasters, as if God created a clean slate to build up a new world.33 While most of the mainstream US media brought up the Spanish flu during World War I as a precedent of a COVID-19 pandemic, public policies to contain and eliminate coronavirus reminded Asian/Americans of San Francisco City’s fight against bubonic plague more than one hundred years ago.34 Moral Injury of Caretakers As South Korean researchers argue, the war metaphor justifies the exploitation of civil servants and first respondents.35 As a result, moral injury and post-traumatic stress disorder become inevitable for these health care workers. Studies of moral injury became popularized in Christian theological studies, thanks to scholars who critically researched US veterans’ lives after America’s various wars. Both moral injury and PTSD are found among combat veterans, while war fatigue or numbness to war is common among civilians. Moral injury, as a concept, was first developed by psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, who has treated Vietnam War veterans living with deep sorrow and feelings of guilt. Moral injury occurs when there has been a betrayal of what is morally right either by a person in legitimate authority or by oneself, often in a high-stakes situation such as active combat.36 Feminist theologians Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Lettini describe moral injury as “the violation of core moral beliefs” resulting from reflection on “memories of war or other extremely traumatic conditions.”37 When soldiers negatively reflect on the transgression of 33  Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2008), 33–34. 34   There are many news articles discussing the similarities and differences between COVID-19 and the Spanish flu of 1918. One example is the Smithsonian Magazine’s report: Elizabeth Gamillo, “COVID-19 Surpasses 1918 Flu to Become Deadliest Pandemic in American History,” Smithsonian Magazine, September 24, 2021, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-covid-19-pandemic-is-considered-the-deadliest-in-americanhistory-as-death-toll-surpasses-1918-estimates-180978748/ 35  Saerom Kim et al., “Gender Analysis of Covid-19 Outbreak in South Korea: A Common Challenge and Call for Action,” Health Education and Behavior vol. 47 no. 4 (2020): 525–530, https://doi.org/10.1177/1090198120931443 36  See Jonathan Shay, “Moral Injury,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 31, no. 2 (2014): 182–91, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036090 37  Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Lettini, Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury After War (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013), 20

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their core moral beliefs, such as protecting the weak (i.e., children, women, elderly people, etc.) during wartime, they feel they no longer live in a reliable meaningful world and can “no longer be regarded as decent human beings.”38 Moral injury results in deep guilt, shame, anger, or distrust in one’s moral capacity. As morally injured people cannot trust their own ability to make ethically sound decisions, as well as other people’s and authorities’ moral capabilities, their sense of humanity and respect for human society dissipates. Addiction to alcohol and drugs becomes a coping mechanism for many of them. People living with moral injury may express uncontrollable anger and use violence against others, including their families, and in the worst case, kill themselves and others. As the COVID pandemic progressed, many scholarly papers and news articles illuminated the alarming rate of psychological, emotional, and physical stress on health care workers and their moral injury. One study shows that estimates of the prevalence of moral injury in health care workers responding to the COVID pandemic ranges from 32% in the US to between 20 and 41% in China; the rate rose to 46% globally in September 2020.39 Health care workers, now considered fighters on the frontline, work in morally injurious situations where they have to make “difficult decisions related to life and death triage or resource allocation” or believe that a patient’s life might have been saved under different circumstances.40 Additionally, workers may feel betrayed when they witness “what they perceive to be unjustifiable or unfair acts of policy” and guilty about surviving when others are dying or infecting people close to them.41 As a result, morally injured health care workers experience deep anger, guilt, and disillusion with the government, public health authorities, and health care management. According to US research based on the data collected seven months after the peak of COVID-19, moral distress among COVID-19 “frontline” health care workers was elevated, increasing the risk for moral injury. Moral distress refers to “psychiatric sequelae that can  Brock and Lettini, Soul Repair, xv.   Siobhan Hegarty et  al., “‘It Hurts Your Heart’: Frontline Health Care Worker Experiences of Moral Injury During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” European Journal of Psychotraumatology 13, no. 2 (2022): 2–3, https://doi.org/10.1080/20008066. 2022.2128028 40  Patricia Watson et  al., “Moral Injury in Health Care Workers,” US Department of Veterans Affairs, PTSD: National Center for PTSD Studies, https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/treat/cooccurring/moral_injury_hcw.asp 41  Watson et al., “Moral Injury in Health Care Workers.” 38 39

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arise when individuals involved in stressful/traumatic situations are constrained from doing what they believe is right.”42 Of the frontline health care workers who participated in the survey, 66.8% of 786 reported moderate-­or-greater levels of moral injury-related guilt, mostly family or work-related guilt.43 In the UK, a group of health care workers interviewed by public health researchers expressed their feelings of being betrayed by the government and the hospital management and their inability to do work morally. Some also tried to avoid moral dissonance.44 I suspect that, instead of emotionally supporting health care workers, war metaphors intensify moral injury they suffer as if they worked on the battlefield. Like soldiers in combat, “frontline” health care workers in the COVID-­ time conducted necropolitical labor for the sake of fostering the lives of others. They were surrogates of the nation. On behalf of the sovereign nation responsible for protecting its people from danger, health care workers directly worked with people who had contracted COVID. While saving and treating patients, health care workers were and still are risking their own lives. If the body bags of those who died of COVID displayed the spectacle of necropolitics, health care workers’ bodies covered with masks, goggles, vinyl gowns, and headcovers represented necropolitical labor. In fact, many Asian/Americans died while carrying out necropolitical labor. According to the September 2020 report published by the National Nurses United, the largest union of registered nurses in the United States, at least 1718 health care workers, including registered nurses, died of COVID-19 and related complications. Among them, at least 213 registered nurses died: 67 of these nurses, or 31.5%, were Filipinos, who make up only 4% of the registered nurses in the US; and 38 registered nurses who died of COVID-19 and related complications (17.8%) were Black,

42  Ian Fischer et  al., “Downstream Consequences of Moral Distress in COVID-19 Frontline Health Care Workers: Longitudinal Associations with Moral Injury-Related Guilt,” General Hospital Psychiatry 79 (2022): 158. 43  Ian Fischer et  al., “Downstream Consequences of Moral Distress in COVID-19 Frontline Health care Workers,” 159–160; Health care workers expressed their resentments that they did not have professional knowledge or skills about treating COVID-19 properly, could not take care of their own families, and could not spend time with their family, especially aging parents and young children. 44  Hegarty et al., “It Hurts Your Heart,” 2–3.

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who make up only 12.4% of the registered nurses in the US.45 The National Nurses United’s data limns which health care workers worked on “the frontline” in the US. Although its data does not indicate the gender of the deceased nurses of color, most were presumably female. In addition, health care workers who witnessed their colleagues’ deaths may suffer from moral injury. Since health care professionals are not easily replaceable, their losses (both to death and to moral injury) will infringe on the public health system for a long time.46 An ethic of care at home and healthcare facilities can be violent enough to risk caretakers’ lives. In search of alternative meanings of care and of care work that truly heal caretakers and those for whom they care, feminist theologians should continue to analyze how heteropatriarchal ideologies romanticize and undervalue care work, and which groups of people are forced to conduct care work for others and for society. War on Vulnerable Populations War metaphors for COVID-19 caused the resurge of nationalism across the globe. Although the impact of COVID-19 was transnational, sovereign nations relied on patriotic nationalism to combat the virus. Many countries secured their borders from outsiders, choosing isolationism over collaboration. The best example of collectivized self-interested nationalism is the competition over COVID vaccines, life-saving ventilators, and other essential medical supplies that treat those infected with severe symptoms. The COVID war victimized third-world countries that could not compete with industrialized countries in the neoliberal global medical supplies market. The global poor, whom neoliberal capitalism considers “surplus,” and thus disposable, were and still are the most suffering population in the war on COVID-19 (and the continued war on various diseases). 45  National Nurses United, “Sins of Omission: How Government Failures to Track COVID-19 Data Have Led to More than 1,700 Health Care Workers’ Deaths and Jeopardize Public Health,” September 2020, https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/sites/default/ files/nnu/documents/0920_COVID19_SinsOfOmission_Data_Report.pdf 46  In March 2021, the death toll of health care workers reached more than 3200, including 329 registered nurses, who were forced to work without the personal protective equipment they needed to do their jobs safely. See National Nurses United, “Sins of Omission: Updated,” March 2021, https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/sites/default/files/nnu/ documents/0321_COVID19_SinsOfOmission_Data_Report.pdf

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In January 2022, only about 5% of the population in low-income countries were vaccinated.47 As of April 15, 2023, about 24% of populations in low-income countries had received necessary doses of COVID vaccines in comparison to almost 100% in the United Arab Emirates and 70% in the United States.48 The global poor could access vaccines only after the surplus vaccines were available in industrialized countries in North America, Europe, and East Asia. In April 2023, economically developed countries have vaccinated over 40% of their populations and successfully reached the goal set by the World Health Organization. As a result, the economically developed world rapidly returns to pre-COVID-time. Nevertheless, we should watch the afterlives of COVID (or the unending pandemic) among the globally disenfranchised. The war rhetoric “we are in this together” erases the real faces of the dying. Those who are physically and metaphorically dying from the virus or exasperating social inequality are predominantly people of color, Indigenous people, prostitutes, migrant laborers, domestic workers, homeless people, undocumented immigrants, refugees, people with disabilities, and poor senior citizens.49 Children and youth in need are faceless and voiceless victims, too. The virus is not the only cause of COVID death and the debilitation of the global poor; the neoliberal global market economy constructed upon white heteronormative patriarchal family ideologies is also causing death. Along with anti-Asian hate, domestic and family violence, gender violence, and femicide have all increased across the globe since the outbreak of COVID-19. As a result, many feminist scholars and activists have called gender violence itself a “pandemic”—indeed, the oldest pandemic of all. 47  Dany Bahar, “Is the World Now Paying the Price of Not Doing Enough to Help Developing World COVID-19 Vaccination Efforts?” Brookings Institute, January 7, 2022, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2022/01/07/are-rich-countriessufficiently-helping-the-developing-world-in-its-vaccination-efforts/ 48  Our World in Data, “Share of People who Completed the Initial COVID-19 Vaccination Protocol,” https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-people-fully-vaccinated-COVID?co untr y=BGD~BRA~IND~IDN~MEX~NGA~PAK~PRT~RUS~SGP~ARE~USA~O WID_WRL~High+income~Low+income 49  Old age can be considered a form of disability in a capitalist society. From a Marxist feminist perspective, older people are marginalized because the labor market cannot or does not use them just as people with severe disabilities are not used. Those whom the labor market does not use should prove their usefulness, otherwise marginalization of these people is exacerbated, and they are not recognized as fully human but as burdensome or surplus by capitalist society.

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According to one study, in Argentina, where the rate of femicide is extraordinarily high during regular times, 86 femicides were perpetrated during the early months of 2020, of which 24 occurred during the COVID plague. In Turkey, 18 women were killed during the COVID lockdown in the country, most in their homes.50 The masculinized war metaphor for COVID, however, prioritizes eliminating the virus and minimizing the spread of infection. It obscures all other societal problems, including domestic and gender violence. Women’s reproductive and sexual health, including safe abortion and access to contraceptives, pregnancy, and child delivery, prenatal and post-partum care, and routine check-ups to prevent breast cancer and cervical cancer, are all limited by COVID policies. Sex workers, either prostitutes or those who work in diverse sex industries, were victimized during the COVID time. With COVID, the precarity and invisibility of their life escalated in at least three major areas: (1) in many countries where sex work is considered illegitimate, sex workers were excluded from their governments’ COVID relief funds and struggled with economic hardship, (2) social stigma and surveillance of sex workers increased as if they had been responsible for spreading COVID-19, and (3) lack of access to personal protection equipment (PPE), health care for sexually transmitted diseases, and a social safety net (e.g., house and food security and legal status especially for migrant workers) became exacerbated. 51 Since studies of sex work should be contextualized, sex workers might have experienced these challenges differently across the globe. However, almost everywhere, COVID-19 threatened the lives of sex workers more than before, whether they worked or not.

Sexualized Anti-Asian Racism, US Militarism, and Evangelical Purity Culture Many (Asian/American) Christians responded to the tragic shootings in Atlanta in relation to anti-Asian racism, the hypersexualization of Asian women, and evangelical purity culture. Let us critically interrogate these 50   Shalva Weil, “Gendering-Coronavirus (Covid-19) and Femicide,” The European Sociologist 45, no. 1 (2020), https://www.europeansociologist.org/issue-45-pandemicimpossibilities-vol-1/gendering-coronavirus-covid-19-and-femicide 51  Rani Singer, Natasha Crooks, and Amy K.  Johnson, “COVID-19 Prevention and Protecting Sex Workers: A Call to Action,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 49 (2020): 2739–2741, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-020-01849-x

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three aspects to understand the historical, political, economic, and moral complexities surfacing in the Atlanta shooting incidents. Origins of Sexualized Anti-Asian Racism Anti-Asian racism had existed in North America long before any modern nation was conceived on the continent. European  Americans have perceived the Asia Pacific (and its people) as infused with a “yellow peril,” as if unidentified threats of moral decadence, diseases, war, violence, and non-Protestant religion were ready to invade their world. At the turn of the twentieth century, the first massive influx of Asian immigrants to the United States supplied cost-effective (read: cheap) labor on sugar plantations, in transportation infrastructure, and in manufacturing. In the meantime, the series of Asian exclusion acts (e.g., the 1882 Exclusion Act) prevented Asians from immigrating to and becoming naturalized in the United States, where Asian labor was nonetheless legally exploited. The United States justified the Asian exclusion acts, albeit all revoked in 1965, by demonizing Asians.52 The process of demonization was related to the sexual prejudice against Asians (i.e., Chinese) along with the unsanitary conditions (of Chinatown) discussed earlier. For instance, in the nineteenth century, all Chinese women were believed to be prostitutes who threatened Americans with disease and interracial sex.53 The US public prejudice that the Chinese brought a sexual yellow peril with them is related to the unequal gender ratio between Chinese men and women. According to Asian  American historian Judy Yung, in 1850, there were only seven Chinese women in San Francisco, compared to 4018 Chinese men.54 Why were there so few Chinese women compared to Chinese men in the US? China’s patriarchal cultural values, 52  The series of anti-immigration laws based on nationality targeting Asians include the 1882 Chinese Act; the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement, which curtailed Japanese and Korean immigration; the Immigration Act of 1917 that restricted Asian Indian immigration; the 1924 Oriental Exclusion Act, which terminated all labor immigration from mainland Asia; and the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act, which restricted Filipino immigration to the US Citizenship through naturalization was denied to all Asians from 1924 to 1943; See Chandra Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 68–69. 53  Lee, America for Americans, 9. 54  Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 32.

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financial considerations, and the US anti-Chinese legislation prevented Chinese women from joining the early Chinese immigration to the US.55 While their husbands were away in foreign countries, Chinese wives attended to their families and tended land, waiting for their husbands to return with wealth. In addition, the patriarchal Confucian culture in China rarely allowed women to travel by themselves. “Chinamen” were already in debt to buy passage to the United States and other parts of the world. It was financially burdensome for Chinese migrant workers to bring their families to the United States. Later, some Chinese migrant workers did accumulate wealth and worked in the trade business between the US and China. These merchants, a new Chinese bourgeois class, enabled their wives and children to sail to the US from China. However, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act limited the number of Chinese immigrants—virtually no Chinese could enter the United States. Only a small number of Chinese merchants’ wives were allowed to come to the US to join their financially stable husbands, but only after they proved they were not prostitutes in China and would not get involved in prostitution in the US.  Ironically, the bound feet of Chinses women, a cultural practice that had been criticized by many Westerners, proved the women’s noble status, moral integrity, and sexual innocence at US ports.56 The imbalance in the gender ratio, the highly masculinized environment in the mining industry, and the political turmoil and poverty in China conditioned the environment for illegal prostitution in the San Francisco Chinatown and the American West. Kidnapped or sold girls in China were smuggled into the US by “tongs” or “snakeheads” who controlled brothels, sex trafficking, drugs, and gambling in Chinatowns in San Francisco and Los Angeles.57 Illegal prostitution in Chinatown was a lucrative business. For instance, between 1852 and 1873, the Hip Yee Tong, the Chinese gang, which started sex trafficking in San Francisco, smuggled 6000 women and made an estimated $200,000 profit from trading women alone.58 As one can imagine, Chinese prostitutes, who 55  Yung, Unbound Feet, 31–34. For the last six decades of the nineteenth century, at least 2.5 million Chinese men, including 25,000 forced laborers in the Americas, had migrated to foreign countries for work after China lost the Opium Wars to the British Empire in 1839–1842. 56  Yung, Unbound Feet, 24. 57  Lyanne Yuan, “China’s Lost Women in The Far West,” History Net, July 25, 2019, historynet.com/Chinas-lost-women-in-the-far-west/ 58  Yuan, “China’s Lost Women in the Far West.”

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were as young as 14, lived lives miserable beyond the five faces of oppression. Many were caged, drugged, and prostituted endlessly until they died. As tongs bribed local authorities, Chinese prostitutes could not claim any legal right or protection. Chinese prostitution was rampant until the 1880s, but “merchant wives predominated as the favored Chinese immigrant women throughout the Exclusion period (1882–1945).”59 By the early twentieth century, the Chinese prostitution industry declined, partly due to the moral purity movement led by Protestant women across the United States. The Protestant women, inspired by the Social Gospel Movement, actively protested prostitution and rescued prostitutes.60 Chinatown prostitution particularly interested these white Protestant missionary women, who raided Chinese brothels with the aid of police and rescued young Chinese prostitutes. In San Francisco, rescued girls stayed at the Presbyterian Mission Home, where they were proselytized to Christianity, trained for industrial or domestic employment, and taught Chinese and English.61 The home rescued approximately 1500 Chinese prostitutes between 1877 and 1897.62 A significant number of rescued Chinese women married Chinese Christian men and began living new lives in the US, while some returned to China. Those who could not follow the rigid rules at the mission house chose to return to prostitution.63 Protestant missionary women’s zeal to rescue Chinese girls from sex trafficking and forced prostitution and transform them into the image of ideal Christian women worked like a two-edged sword. On the one hand, the Protestant mission home was the only shelter available to abused Chinese women, and Protestant missionary women were faithful allies for these vulnerable women. On the other hand, as Yung points out, the Protestant mission home (i.e., the Presbyterian Mission Home) disrespected rescued Chinese prostitutes’ agencies and Chinese culture altogether. As Protestant missionaries often manipulated the law and exaggerated gender oppression in Chinatown to rescue and proselytize Chinese prostitutes, they increased anti-Chinese sentiment in society.64 In the early twentieth century, in California and along the West Coast,  Yung, Unbound Feet, 24.  Yung, Unbound Feet, 35. 61  Yung, Unbound Feet, 35–36. 62  Yung, Unbound Feet, 35. 63  Yung, Unbound Feet, 36. 64  Yung, Unbound Feet, 36–37. 59 60

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concerns about public immorality in Chinese communities still centered on Chinese prostitutes. However, on the East Coast, where Chinese women were invisible and absent from the public, the press, political leaders, and social reformers paid attention to white working-class women who lived in Chinatown neighborhoods as prostitutes, companions, and wives to Chinese workers.65 As a result, rumors about the sexual slavery of white women mushroomed in the public and among various women’s organizations, such as the National American Woman Suffrage Association.66 At the turn of the twentieth century, Protestant missionary women—white upper- and middle-class elite women—did not recognize that their cultural imperialism oppressed Chinese immigrants. Hence, to rescue yellow women from yellow men and barbaric culture, they further alienated Chinese men as well as infringed on the civil rights of disenfranchised Chinese immigrants. While Chinese prostitution was maintained upon the complex intersection of international and domestic politics and economic structures, all these complicated stories of Chinese prostitution were reduced to a single narrative: the Chinese were sexually dangerous. The Asian female body, as equated with prostitution and sexual corruption, is still alive in the twenty-first-century United States. Not only Chinese brothels in the nineteenth century, but also the expanding military presence of US military bases in the Asia Pacific over the past two centuries, are mainly responsible for the hypersexualization of Asian women. We should be keenly aware that American soldiers have gone to Asia with their racial prejudice against Asians. This prejudice is at the same time sexual. As the previous chapter noted, since World War II, prostitution industries around US bases have been the staple of the US military empire in East and Southeast Asia. American soldiers’ encounters with local Asian people happened mainly in what was known as the Rest and Recreation (R & R) business, primarily supplied by Asian women’s sexual labor. America’s wars in Korea and Vietnam accelerated the Rest and Recreation business system. One such example is found in Thailand. During the Vietnam War, American soldiers on R&R (or what the troops called I&I, intoxication and intercourse) from Vietnam first appeared in

65  Mary Ting Yi Lui, “Saving Young Girls from Chinatown: White Slavery and Woman Suffrage, 1910–1920,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 18, no. 3 (2009): 395–396, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20542730 66  Lui, “Saving Young Girls from Chinatown,” 396.

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the northeastern part of Thailand.67 Soldiers soon began frequenting the growing red-light districts of Bangkok, such as Patpong and Soi Cowboy.68 As the Thai economy experienced a substantial boost from the US currency, the development of the country depended on “the sex industry as a source of foreign revenues.”69 After the war in Vietnam, foreign tourists from Europe and East Asia replaced American and other soldiers. If American soldiers appeased their fear and anxiety in the war by buying exoticized Thai women’s bodies in a haven, foreign tourists would satiate their sexual desires by buying these women’s services, including sex shows based on tourists’ preconditioned ideas about exotic Eastern women and sexuality.70 The Thai prostitution industry exemplifies the intimate tie between military prostitution and sex tourism, along with the intricate linkage between global capitalism (e.g., the investment of Thai and Western capital in the sex business) and both the domestic and international politics affecting Thailand.71 During the Cold War, East Asian women who immigrated to the US through marriages with American servicemen were perceived as prostitutes, wild and dangerous women who allegedly tempted young and innocent American men. Many Asian military brides during the first half of the Cold War period had indeed worked in the R & R business, although American soldiers met their East Asian wives on their bases, in hospitals, and in local shops as well.72 To be sure, it is illogical to reduce military prostitutes’ moral characters to their sexualized labor without considering that economically struggling Asian countries systematized military prostitution to produce foreign currency revenues. For its part, the US military has prostituted Asian women to control STI among soldiers, support military morale, boost soldiers’ masculine ego, and appease soldiers’ fears and

67  Rita Nakashima Brock and Susan Thistlethwaite, Casting Stones: Prostitution and Liberation in Asia and the United States (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1996), 58. 68  Alyson Brody, “Prostitution in Thailand: Perceptions and Realities,” in International Approaches to Prostitution: Law and Policy in Europe and Asia, ed. Geetanjali Gangoli and Nicole Westmarland (Bristol, UK: Bristol University, 2006), 191–192. 69  Brock and Thistlethwaite, Casting Stones, 58. 70  Brody, “Prostitution in Thailand,” 193. 71  Keun-joo Christine Pae, “Spiritual Activism as Interfaith Dialogue: When Military Prostitution Matters,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 36, no. 1 (Spring, 2020): 75. 72  See Ji-yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America, New York: New York University Press, 2004.

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anxieties.73 Moreover, commercialized prostitution around US bases then and now helps the United States avoid possible diplomatic conflict caused by soldiers’ rape of local women. Massage parlors connected to prostitution in many towns in the United States, especially those close to military bases, have a historical and structural root in this tradition of US military prostitution in Asia. A documentary film, The Women Outside, shows these connections.74 Outside the bars and clubs in Jacksonville, Florida, drunken young American soldiers jollily said that Filipinas, Koreans, Japanese, and other Asian girls were available there. Feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe urged the viewers to scrutinize what was happening in the US military empire because we could see the same women here (i.e., in Jacksonville) and there (i.e., on US bases in Asia). According to the film, 80% of the marriages between American soldiers and Korean women have ended in divorce, and many divorcees re-­ entered prostitution in the US.  For instance, the New  York Police Department raided Asian-owned massage parlors and arrested illegal sex workers who were notably all once married to American soldiers. It should be noted that brothels, sex trafficking, and sexual slavery still exist in Asian/American communities, especially among Chinese, Korean, and Thai communities. However, these issues of gender-based sexual oppression, including exploitation, marginalization, and powerlessness, are not unique to Asian/American communities. Many women from Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa fall victim to sex trafficking in the United States. Many migrant women from these regions are also exploited at sweatshops in large cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, and Atlanta. Yet, for almost two centuries, Asian/ American communities have struggled with the social stigma of being hotbeds for prostitution or the sexual yellow peril. At the turn of the twenty-first century, when the global community aggressively fought against human trafficking, which was often interchangeably used with the term sex trafficking, local police routinely raided massage parlors, bars, and clubs in vibrant Asian/American communities. 73  Keun-joo Christine Pae, “The Prostituted Body of War: US Military Prostitution in South Korea as a Site of Spiritual Activism,” in George Pati and Katherine C. Zubko, ed. Transformational Embodiment in Asian Religions: Subtle Bodies, Spatial Bodies. New  York and London: Routledge, 2020, 187–205, here 189. 74  The Women Outside: Korean Women and the US Military, directed by Hye Jung Park and J.T.  Takagi, New  York, NY: Third World Newsreel, 1995, https://video.alexanderstreet. com/watch/the-women-outside-korean-women-and-the-u-s-military

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Journalist Anthony DeStefano’s extensive research on the US policy on human trafficking shows that, more often than not, local authorities did not distinguish sex traffickers from business owners who ran (illegal) sex businesses or cab drivers who worked for escort services.75 Some Asian migrant sex workers were tricked into prostitution and forced to surrender their passports. According to DeStefano, however, many Asian prostitutes (i.e., Chinese, Koreans, and Thai) knew that they would work in prostitution when brothel owners sponsored their passage to the United States. These women chose their sex work in the US and had freedom of mobility, even if limited after pimps kept their passports.76 Like the nineteenth-­ century Protestant missionary women’s rescue mission in Chinatowns, the American public lumps all Asian/American women working in the sex industry (i.e., bar, club, karaoke, massage parlor, etc.) into the category of victims of sex trafficking. To combat sex trafficking, we must see the political-­economic complexities of the sex business in Asian/American communities. A stereotypical image of a vulnerable or innocent Asian female victim enslaved in a sex-obsessed monstrous Asian/American culture does not help prevent sex trafficking. Additionally, some Asian/ American women choose to sell sex “temporarily” to save enough money to open economically sustainable businesses such as massage shops and nail salons.77 The hypersexualization of the Asian female body engenders two simultaneous but opposed images: one is a sexually loose and seductive temptress, and the other is an innocent victim of a sexual yellow peril (i.e., Asian male sex traffickers, barbaric and misogynistic Asian culture, etc.). Evangelical Purity Culture Since Robert Long was identified as an evangelical man who blamed his sex addiction for shooting workers and clients at massage parlors, scholars 75  Anthony DeStefano, The War on Human Trafficking: US Policy Assessed (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 2007), 92–93. 76  DeStefano, The War on Human Trafficking, 87. 77  DeStefano, The War on Human Trafficking, 90; According to DeStefano, many migrant sex workers in New York City appeared to be regular sex workers rather than victims of trafficking. Furthermore, the Asian sex worker culture, particularly in the Korean, Chinese, and Thai communities, showed little sign of the oppressive conduct. For many Asian sex workers, local police authorities were an actual threat to them as they could be arrested, jailed, and deported (87; 91).

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and Christian leaders have pointed to evangelical purity culture as one of the reasons behind gun violence against the Asian/American women in Atlanta. This purity culture approves of sex only within institutional monogamous heterosexual marriage, condemning sex workers as sinners who do not deserve social sympathy when they die tragically. However, pointing our fingers at evangelical purity culture without comprehending its complex history and political-economic structure misleads many people. I want to highlight two critical points when analyzing evangelical purity culture in gender-based sexual violence: (1) the political agenda behind evangelical purity culture, and (2) the moral judgment on victims of violence. If (1) is related to white heteropatriarchal Christian nationalism, (2) is concerned with Asian/American community leaders’ appeal to a model minority myth or what Althaus-Reid mockingly calls “decent theology.” First, American purity culture has more than a century-long history, from Protestant missionaries’ zeal to save Chinese women from brothels in the nineteenth century to contemporary Christian movements encouraging American adolescents to pledge their virginity to God, their families, and future spouses. Sara Moslener’s critical study of evangelical purity culture in various historical junctures in the US demonstrates that purity culture has constantly drawn “the ideological connections between sexual immorality and national security.”78 These ideological connections include several cooperating impulses: “evangelical political activism, deep anxiety over gender roles and changing sexual mores, fear of moral decay, apocalyptic anticipation, and American nationalism.”79 For purity advocates, sexual immorality is a cause not only of the moral and political decline of the United States as a global hegemon, but also of the eschaton. Evangelical purity culture has always been racial as well as sexual—deeply concerned about not only sexual purity but also racial purity. Since its earliest days, the purity movement has upheld antigay and anticommunist rhetoric, which has idealized “the white middle-class, heterosexual, nuclear, Christian family as the foundation of American national strength.”80 If nineteenth-century purity advocates dealt with the fear of declining Anglo-­ Saxon privilege, twentieth-century bible-believers were worried about 78  Sara Moslener, Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence (Oxford and New York: Oxford University, 2015), 4. 79  Moslener, Virgin Nation, 5. 80  Moslener, Virgin Nation, 3.

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nuclear destruction and communist invasion, and later Protestant evangelicals had deep concerns about the “sexual revolution,” along with lingering Cold War concerns.81 Evangelical purity culture has never been simply a countercultural movement in the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. Instead, purity advocates have diligently organized political power to press their political agenda, ranging from opposition to interracial- and gay-marriage to the outlawing of abortion. To fulfill their political goals, purity organizations have particularly targeted adolescents who are perceived as vulnerable to sexual corruption or the influence of the sexual revolution in the US.  They try to shape the sexual morality of American youth based on their heteropatriarchal Christian teachings and simultaneously mold their minds in accord with conservative politics, especially on matters of women’s reproductive rights and marriage. If evangelical purity culture were considered a political force, the Atlanta spa shootings would not be viewed as an isolated incident carried out by a morally and psychologically struggling evangelical loner. Asian/ American-owned massage parlors are framed as hot spots for illegal prostitution. Some parlors may run prostitution businesses, but most do not. In both public prejudice and the circle of the evangelical purity movements, the Asian spa industry is singled out as a sinful space. Furthermore, due to its racial and sexual character, the Asianized massage and spa industry evokes Cold War reminiscence in the American public. Hence, it can be categorized as a threat to national security (white nationalism) in the eyes of evangelical purity “fundamentalists” who advocate an intimate connection between sexual (im)morality and national security. However, we should not be deceived by Long’s claim that he was an evangelical man struggling with sex addiction. This white male perpetrator hijacked the word “evangelical” to earn public sympathy and to justify his shootings. Suppose that Long truly struggled with sex addiction and decided to eliminate the source of sexual corruption. In that case, he could have attacked any racial/ethnic persons—male or female—in sex industries such as the escort business, clubs, and bars, instead of deliberately driving to Asian-owned spas and massage parlors in two different locations. Yet, he purposefully attacked people at Asian massage parlors because Asian spas have been morally judged in the US, and workers and owners there are disenfranchised due to their racial, gender, sexual, and  Moslener, Virgin Nation, 3.

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class markers. For this reason, evangelical purity culture is in part responsible for the marginalization of the Asian/American massage business, thus creating the conditions for a person like Long to take lives there unremorsefully. Second, if it uses a single moral standard dependent on individual sexual purity, evangelical purity culture can shift public sympathy from victims to perpetrators and put victims of gender-based sexual violence under scrutiny, asking whether they deserve public sympathy or (God’s) punishment. While the victims of the spa shootings were silent, the white male killer’s words dominated the story of the tragedy and, at first, falsely identified the Asian female victims as prostitutes far from sexual purity. Due to the alleged connection between massage parlors (and their Asian female victims) and prostitution, the American public, including Asian/American church leaders, emphasized the uptick in COVID-related anti-Asian hate over gender-based violence or misogyny when publicly condemning the shootings. Asian/American communities stressed that the victims were responsible mothers, hard-working immigrants, and respectful members (citizens and authorized immigrants) of the United States, like any respectable American citizens. In other words, they all belonged to a model minority! All these traits of a model minority attributed to particularly Asian/American female victims manipulate heteropatriarchal moral values congruent to evangelical purity culture—as if the sexual status of a person’s occupation determines whether they deserve public sympathy. We need to reexamine the model minority myth critically with regard to evangelical purity culture. The model minority myth imposed upon Asian/Americans highlights their capacity to be respectable Americans, fully assimilated into American culture, as they respect American values such as patriotism, honesty, hard-work, a heteropatriarchal nuclear family-­ oriented lifestyle, the importance of education, financial stability, and self-­ reliance. Many scholars have produced a plethora of literature that proves how a model minority myth has damaged Asian/American communities and their relationships with other racial minorities by consolidating the racial stratification in the US. Asian/Americans whose lives do not resemble various forms of success (especially economic success) created by the public image of a model minority feel ashamed and eventually marginalized. In light of the model minority myth, the failures of people of color are understood solely as the result of their lack of work ethic (e.g., laziness, lack of willpower, etc.) rather than structural racism, sexism, poverty, and immigration law. Thus, a model minority myth may be another name for

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meritocracy which emphasizes that one’s mobility up the social ladder relies on the person’s merits and capabilities apart from family, wealth, or social background.82 The myth often prevents the American public, including Asian/ Americans, from seeing economic and educational disparities among Asian/Americans. For instance, on a surface level, the poverty rate among Asian/Americans is lower than the national average, 10% (US-born Asians 9% and foreign-born Asians 11%) versus 13% as of 2019. However, poverty rates vary among Asian subgroups: while 9% of Indian/Americans live in poverty, 25% of Mongolian/Americans live below the Federal poverty line. In 2017, people from Asia made up 14% of unauthorized immigrants, and the majority of these immigrants came from China, India, the Philippines, and Korea. Ironically, these four subethnic groups of the Asian race in the US represent a model minority. Additionally, while homeownership is often considered the first step toward the so-called American dream, the homeownership rate among Asian/Americans was lower than the national average, 59% versus 64% as of 2019.83 All these data suggest that Asian/Americans are too diverse to be lumped into the single category of a model minority. Asian/Americans’ lived experiences vary according to their countries of origin, ethnic groups, religious affiliations, residential locations, education, and occupations. The model minority stereotype has its historical root. From 1943 to 1965, when immigration laws were liberalized, the United States instituted a quota system for Asian immigrants. The system allowed only 82  Two Asian scholars’ critical study of meritocracy in Asia gives a clue concerning why Asian/Americans, particularly East and Southeast Asian Americans of Confucian cultural influence may subscribe to the model minority myth. According to Chang-Hee Kim and Yong-Beom Choi, the idea of meritocracy has received much attention since British sociologist Michael Young first coined the term in 1958. Meritocracy has increasingly been recognized as a positive system in Western societies, and the ideology has been tightly coupled with the notions of capitalism and egalitarian values, which are fundamental to the concept of American dream. Recently, a number of scholars argue that the initial concept of meritocracy primarily emerged in Asia first, indicating an antecedent to the meritocratic practices of Western societies. They argue that the concept of merit initially started in China and came to the West via Confucian texts: See Chang-Hee Kim and Yong-Beom Choi, “How Meritocracy Is Defined Today?: Contemporary Aspects of Meritocracy,” Economics and Sociology 10, no. 1 (2016):112–21, https://doi.org/10.14254/2071-789X.2017/10-1/8 83  Abby Budiman and Neil G.  Ruiz, “Key Facts about Asian/Americans, a Diverse and Growing Population,” Pew Research Center, April 29, 2021, https://www.pewresearch. org/short-reads/2021/04/29/key-facts-about-asian-americans/

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professionals with postsecondary education, technical training, and specialized experiences to immigrate to the US from Asia.84 In addition, a handful of international students who earned higher degrees at major US colleges and universities settled in the US after their education and founded Asian/American communities nationwide. As a result, these highly educated Asian professionals started to replace the yellow peril stereotype with a model minority stereotype. When influenced by purity culture, the model minority myth can be an oppressive force, distinguishing those who deserve social benefits and support from those who do not. US policymakers and their supporters have often used individual sexual morality to name who deserves social benefits. Analogizing Black single mothers to Mary, the Mother of Jesus, Black feminist ethicist Traci West argues that the 1996 Welfare Reform restricted social benefits for these single mothers based on politicians’ moral judgment on the mothers’ sexual behaviors.85 Right-wing politicians and purity Christians have portrayed Blacks as sexually irresponsible Welfare Queens who try to reap social benefits from fatherless children. However, what these mothers desire is a temporary helping hand so that they will be self-­ sufficient soon enough to raise their children on their own, certainly not unsolicited moral judgment or so-called tough lessons on personal responsibility.86 The footprints of evangelical purity culture can be traced in many parts of American social policies and even social movements. Just as Korean nationalists erased Geum-yi Yun’s gender and sexuality and equated her body with the Korean nation to protest America, antiracist activists ignored the gender, sexuality, and occupations of the victims of the Atlanta spa shootings while presenting it as a spectacular display of anti-Asian violence. In particular, Korean American Christian leaders could not move away from what Nami Kim calls “minority nationalism”: taking “the singularity of race as an operating principle” as a cause of the social movement, such as antiracism work.87 As the victims remained only with their Asian bodies, protests against anti-Asian racism after the  Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 69.  Traci West, Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women’s Lives Matter, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), chapter 3, Kindle edition. 86  Traci West, Disruptive Christian Ethics, chapter 3, Kindle edition. 87  Nami Kim, “The Confines of ‘Antiracism’ Work in the Intersectional Realities of ‘AntiAsian’ Violence,” in Embodying Antiracist Christianity: An Asian American Theological Resource Book for Antiracism, ed. K.  Christine Pae and Boyung Lee (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). 84 85

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shooting incident did not engage the facts that many low-wage earning women in the spa industry regularly experience violence and exploitation; Blacks, Latinx, and Indigenous people have long been exposed to militarized violence; and many women, especially, women of color, have lived with fears and the dangers of sexual violation. The Atlanta spa shootings are gender-based violence interlocked with racist hate. Yet, Asian/ American Christian leaders could not actively engage in gender, class, and sexuality discourses because the victims’ gender and class backgrounds, as well as Asian massage parlors’ public images, are far from the model minority stereotype and the purity values in heteropatriarchal Christianity (i.e., evangelical purity culture). Instead, with a desire to appeal to American “mainstream” culture, these leaders chose to practice “decent theology” that conforms to heteropatriarchal norms in Christian theology, even when accentuating liberation for the oppressed. How can we, liberative transnational feminist theologians and ethicists, disrupt the “decent” practice of conforming to heteropatriarchal norms in society and the Christian Church? What follows is an “indecent proposal” to disrupt gender-based violence, sexualized anti-Asian racism, and war rhetoric concerning a pandemic and social crisis.

Radical Resurgence of Indecency: A Making of Transnational Feminist Solidarity How can people of faith radically reimagine a Christian theology with the liberative power to transform death, debilitation, and fear? Passing through COVID-19, I argue that we need not a surge of militant nationalism but a “radical resurgence” of the Jesus’ solidarity movement grounded in interstitial integrity. A radical resurgence of the Jesus movement is my theologically indecent proposal for transnational feminist solidarity, overcoming death-bound social practices and war metaphors around COVID-19. I borrow the term “radical resurgence” from Nishnaabeg poet, scholar, and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson from First Nation, Canada. Radical resurgence requires “a deeply critical reading of settler colonialism and Indigenous response to the current relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state.”88 Adding “radical” to a resurgence movement, 88  Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resurgence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 48.

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Simpson attempts to bring back resurgence from neoliberalism that celebrates imperialist nostalgia for destroyed and forgotten Indigenous culture and spirituality.89 Simultaneously, a radical resurgence confirms the body sovereignty of Indigenous people because the white settler colonial government of Canada has severely destroyed, raped, exploited, and killed the collective body of Indigenous people. Resurgence is not about celebrating cultures demolished by settler colonialism or merely retrieving what has been lost in history. Instead, a radical resurgence is “visioning, thinking, acting, and mobilizing” around Indigenous systemic alternatives that respect ancestors, Two-spirit people, non-binary gender hierarchy, nature, and non-human nations.90 Gender and sexuality must be centered in a resurgence movement because gender-based violence has been the deadly tool of white settler colonialism. Indigenous knowledge for a radical resurgence movement teaches interconnectedness among all beings—ancestors, sovereign nations of the natural world (e.g., trees, animals, air, water, and earth), tribal nations, and people in revolutionary movements against neo/colonialism, heteronormative patriarchy, and neoliberal capitalism. In this understanding of interconnectedness, Indigenous activists in radical resurgence pursue solidarity with those in other resurgence movements, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, Black feminism, and various decolonizing movements across the globe.91 Simpson’s proposal for a radical resurgence resonates with transnational feminism introduced in Chap. 2. Transnational feminists respect local knowledge while diverse forms of localized knowledge synergize with one another and radically reformulate feminist praxis for global justice.

89  Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 48–49. Imperialist nostalgia is colonizers’ willful forgetfulness of what and how they destroyed, and, simultaneously, their effort to construct a “fantastic hegemonic imagination” about the colonial time from colonizers’ romanticized views on colonized land, culture, religion, and people. Fantastic hegemonic imagination, as the term suggests, is not grounded in historical facts but repeated stories from a dominant group. Fantastic hegemonic imagination also gives a clue to the formation of cultural imperialism. Simpson did not use the terms, imperialist nostalgia or hegemonic imagination, but these two concepts are helpful in understanding why she wants to take back a resurgence movement from neoliberal capitalism. For hegemonic imagination, see Emilie Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 7–9; for imperialist nostalgia, see Brock and Lettini, Soul Repair, 104. 90  Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 49. 91  Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 50.

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We can read Simpson’s radical resurgence with Althaus-Reid’s Indecent Theology because of Althaus-Reid’s emphasis on gender and sexuality in doing theology and revolutionary method to rediscover God outside of the heterosexual closet. Indecent Theology is a radical resurgence of “what has been excluded from theology,” such as sexual metaphors and sexual understandings that can inspire revolutionary praxis for global justice.92 The revolutionary vision and radical commitment to global justice arise from divorcing the old way of doing theology while embracing “theology as a sexual act.”93 Again, Indecent Theology debunks the male desires and heteropatriarchy deeply embedded in so-called systematic theology that delimits solidarity with the poor only in terms of “homosociability or made in His image and likeness.”94 Hence, those considered outside God’s image, such as sex workers, LGBTQ+ people, women of color, and Indigenous people, may be excluded from the band of the poor and solidarity imagined by liberation theologians. How would Indecent Theology move us to the radical resurgence of a transnational solidarity movement for global justice and disrupt gender-­ based violence during COVID and beyond? My theo-ethical answer to this question is threefold. First, transnational feminist solidarity is always in the process of making, as new epistemologies add the concrete and materialist knowledge of sexualized and gendered oppression. This knowledge may not reveal new realities of the poor or gender-based violence but rather help us conscientize what we have not seen before. For instance, the naked and broken body of Jesus on the cross exemplifies the sexualized death of the poor rather than the holy death. The poor man, who challenged the relations of imperial ruling, in this case, the relationship between the Roman Empire and the Indigenous in the first century Palestine, was stripped of dignity at his death. Through the sexual stories of Jesus, we can unearth the sexual and gendered realities of the poor hidden under the COVID rhetoric—“We are in this together.” Jesus’ solidarity with the poor is not merely metaphoric or spiritual but material and physical. Slowly dying on the cross, Jesus materialized the Roman Empire’s necropower. Even for some theologians, the bleeding, naked 92  Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 45. 93  Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 124. 94  Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 90.

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body of Jesus shows the raw face of state-sanctioned sexual abuse—victims can be both males and females.95 What we can see through Jesus’s body now includes sexualized violence and death, along with the hope and wisdom of the Jesus community that enabled them to overcome the trauma of their beloved teacher’s death and continue to live with hope. Indeed, this wisdom and hope are found among many BIPOC communities. Through the critical lens of gender and sexuality, the annunciation story may sound different, too. Jesus’ mother, Mary, says yes to the angel (Gabriel), the stranger, who appears in her room in the middle of the night.96 Young Mary may share a precarious life with many sex workers who say yes to strangers, again and again, to survive despite the dangerous possibility of inviting COVID-19, sexually transmitted diseases, and even death to their bodies. Second, transnational feminist solidarity is messy and chaotic because sexual stories of women, sexual minorities, Indigenous peoples, and the global poor are messy and traumatized by heteropatriarchal relations of ruling, and, thus, fragmented, if not compartmentalized. Our work for solidarity is not to erase messiness or unify these people for a commonly shared political goal. Instead, we navigate the fragmented stories that have survived imperial persecution. We repeatedly stitch them together to remember how gender-based violence has broken the bodies of globally disenfranchised women across diverse geographic and historical locations, and to resurge and retell the stories of their resistance and survival. These collective stories hold pieces from Rahab, who sold her sex to support her family and finally her life; the migrant woman Ruth, who used her sexuality to survive in a new land; Mary Magdalene, whose allegedly prostituted body has been glorified and condemned by church authority for centuries; street workers in Bangkok, who make money through sexual acts to support their brothers’ ordination in Buddhism; migrant sex workers around US military bases in South Korea who have children in their home countries to support, and many others. Like transnational feminist solidarity, making justice is a messy job. It is a messy work to stitch fragmented and compartmentalized sexual stories together without losing their particularities or lumping them into the universalized story of misery. Therefore, we should consciously trace the survival skills and wisdom that the poor have 95  See Jayme R. Reaves, David Tombs, and Rocío Rigueroa, eds. When Did We See You Naked: Jesus As a Victim of Sexual Abuse (London, UK: SCM, 2021). 96  Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 93.

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transgenerationally and transnationally accumulated so that we can resurge and contextualize them in our own time. What brings radical resurgence movements together is shared methodologies: a critical analysis of the global power structure at the intersection of race, gender, class, and sexuality, interrogation of the imperial operation of neoliberal capitalism, and creative retrieval of survival wisdom and struggles, namely the intersectionality and the interstitiality analysis. These methodologies enable us to feel interconnected to one another, to refuse to accept the status quo, and to (re)imagine another world deeply rooted in the survival wisdom of the global poor. Through shared methodologies involved explicitly in gender and sexuality, women in similar contexts across the globe feel connected not only in experiences of structural violence but also in the struggle for liberative justice. Finally, how can we navigate solidarity’s messiness in the theological space? Indecent Theology’s emphasis on the embodied experiences of the poor may create a space where messiness and chaos are valued and navigated patiently and consciously. Althaus-Reid’s retrieval of the Eucharist through sexual metaphors shows how to navigate the messiness of sexual stories and be united with God passionately and intimately. Although the decent church teaches the Eucharist as a space of solidarity, where participants create a community of one body by sharing bread and wine, the production of bread and wine is “hierarchical and profitable,” excluding and exploiting others.97 If we see bread and wine on the communion table through the lens of a class struggle and the exploitation of the earth, the fetishism of bread and wine only reveals our desire for an imperial God. The whole ritual for the Eucharist becomes militaristic and hierarchical: a priest becomes a high commander who orders the congregation to perform precise acts and words to worship an imperial God. The militaristic, confirmative, and uniformed Eucharist creates a false image of solidarity: solidarity is exercised based on similarities and conformities (e.g., we love our neighbors because they look like us and act like us). Simultaneously, this type of the Eucharist detaches us from the passionate and intimate love God has shown us. However, Althaus-Reid argues that just as every biblical text carries with it a subversive version, the Eucharist also bears “intertextuality or intersexuality with God who becomes our bodies and shares our complex sexualities.”98 Here, God becomes chaos in the smell  Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 91–92.  Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 92.

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of our bodies, fluids, and hardening muscles when we make love.99 Through sexual metaphors, we can imagine how to feel God in unexpected times and places, passionately love God as if God were our bodies, and share God with others without harming and exploiting them or possessing God. Sexual metaphors, not war metaphors, can help us see practical hope in the time of a pandemic. A deep sense of love based on the awareness of interconnectedness manifests better through sexual metaphors, the Erotic, and aesthetic God, just as Alexander exclaims again—“we are connected to the Divine through our connections with each other.”100

In Search of Life-Affirming Theology Between the Ordinary and the Sacred So far, arguing that war metaphors for our responses to COVID-19 only accelerate racist gender-based violence, I have analyzed anti-Asian gender-­ based violence with a focus on the spa shootings in Atlanta. Seen through the interlocking of race, gender, sexuality, class, and war, the spa shootings which happened during the height of COVID-related anti-Asian violence demonstrate the complex origins of the incident: sexualized anti-Asian immigration, US military prostitution in Asia, the evangelical purity culture of white nationalism, and a model minority myth. Military analogies to COVID-19 generate various forms of oppression at diverse places, such as the moral injury of health care workers. In the meantime, nurses of color are exposed to higher mortality rate while attending to COVIDinfected patients. In the context of anti-Asian gender-based violence, I have reimagined a radical resurgence of Indecent Theology that may theologically inspire transnational feminist solidarity and give new meanings to Christian stories. Bringing this chapter to a close, I propose the following Christian feminist praxis in search of life-centered anti-­violence feminist activism. First, “body literacy” in reading theology and social issues is necessary to condemn gender violence, whether at the level of everyday politics or of global power relations. Though COVID-19 is a new pandemic, the social inequalities exacerbated during the pandemic are not. As a society,  Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 125–126.  M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 208. 99

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we should scrutinize the relations of heteropatriarchal society and power that perpetuate gender inequalities during so-called peacetime and reinforce these inequalities during a crisis. This scrutiny requires what I call “body literacy.” How poor women’s bodies are treated, viewed, sexualized, and (dis)respected should be at the center of anti-violence theological inquiry. Gender-based violence takes various guises, but all are intertwined with the five faces of oppression. Physical literacy unpacks the complex layers of structural oppression behind gender violence so that we can name and dismantle it when it happens. Second, body literacy requires a new way of doing theology, primarily through gender and sexuality. How to frame sexual stories of the poor and rethink God through these stories is a justice issue because the stories can harm and devalue the marginalized. Sexual stories and sexual exploitation of poor women are known, indeed often hypervisible. However, they are notoriously undervalued. As Althaus-Reid argues, the devalued sexuality of the marginalized signifies the social silence of their impotence.101 Silence breeds public prejudices concerning poor women’s sexuality, just as Asian women working at massage parlors are considered prostitutes. Public secrecy and silence around massage parlors forced the victims of the shootings to be silent about their work. How can theology break this silence? Justice-oriented sexual readings of biblical narratives could be a way to break this silence around the social devaluation of poor women’s sexuality. For instance, we can read the story of Mary, the mother of Jesus, juxtaposed with the victims of the Atlanta shootings. How would Mary feel when she said “yes” to the stranger who appeared in her bedroom at night? Why does the patriarchal church fantasize about Mary’s virginity in the secrecy of her bedroom? Let us put these questions to the work of masseuses that involve intimate physical contact with clients’ bodies, such as touching, applying pressure, and rubbing. Since these acts are often performed on half-naked clients in private rooms, their labor can easily be perceived as sensual and even sexual. In the meantime, masseuses’ labor can relieve clients’ stress and anxiety through physical contact. Here, various theological imaginations may emerge: the unity between sensuality and sexuality, the intimate relationship between the body and the spirit, the mysterious connection between two strangers (e.g., masseuse and client), the vulnerability shared between the strangers, and sacred ritual. For some people, like Yaun and her husband, whom  Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 136.

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Long attacked at Young’s Asian Massage, massage is a means to celebrate their special time together. Theological imagination in response to the couple may highlight the sacred in the ordinary, just as Mary encountered the sacred in her ordinary bedroom. However, violence deliberately destroys life’s ordinariness. Gender-based violence denies victims’ rights to ordinary life, filled with labor, sleep, joys, tears, friendship, and sharing meals. I should emphasize Thistlethwaite’s words again: “The existential crisis of the human condition is violence, not a body/soul dualism and its attendant dualism of sin/grace.”102 Hence, violence should be considered “the ultimate insult to God’s work in creating human life and the world.”103 Nothing can justify violence against women’s bodies. Any effort to justify gender violence can be compared to the justification of Jesus’s horrific death on the cross. Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker argue that the patriarchal church has justified war, violence, and the hierarchical power system by praising crucifixion as a model of supreme love shown by a self-sacrificial God.104 Since crucifixion was the most humiliating way for a person to die in the Roman Empire, even the family members of the crucified refused to speak about it. According to Brock and Parker’s study, the early Christian church community did not, in fact, glorify the crucified Jesus but the life created by God in paradise. This paradise exists in this world where God, all saints, and Christians on earth are in loving relationships and communion.105 Although they were traumatized by the unspeakable death of their beloved Jesus, the early church community reassembled themselves by practicing living in paradise.106 Hence, Jesus did not give us (Christians) everlasting life, did not triumph over death, and did not save us from (sexual) sin through his own death. Instead, God-­given life, replete with grace and love, has always been here with us since God created the world. Jesus’s life exemplifies life in paradise on earth, recognizing beauty in the ordinary life of daily activities and taking ethical responsibilities to

102  Susan Thistlethwaite, Women’s Bodies as Battlefield: Christian Theology and the Global War on Women (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 4. 103  Thistlethwaite, Women’s Bodies as Battlefield, 4. 104  Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2008), Kindle edition. 105  Brock and Parker, Saving Paradise, Kindle edition. 106  Brock and Parker, Saving Paradise, kindle edition.

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embody life in paradise.107 In times like the COVID-19 crisis, when life’s precarity becomes normalized, and a theological language of victory over war is invoked, life-affirming theology is vital to heal our bodies and spirits from fear of uncertainties and violence.

Bibliography Alexander, M.  Jacqui. 2005. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham: Duke University Press. Althaus-Reid, Marcella. 2000. Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics. London/New York: Routledge. Bahar, Dany. 2022. Is the World Now Paying the Price of Not Doing Enough to Help Developing World COVID-19 Vaccination Efforts? Brookings Institute. January 7. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-­front/2022/01/07/are-­ r i c h -­c o u n t r i e s -­s u f f i c i e n t l y -­h e l p i n g -­t h e -­d e v e l o p i n g -­w o r l d -­i n -­i t s -­ vaccination-­efforts/. Bancroft, Hubert H. 1890. Mongolianism in America. In Essays and Miscellany. San Francisco. Brock, Rita Nakashima, and Gabriella Lettini. 2013. Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury After War. Boston: Beacon Press. Brock, Rita Nakashima, and Rebecca Parker. 2008. Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire. Boston: Beacon Press. Kindle edition. Brock, Rita Nakashima, and Susan Thistlethwaite. 1996. Casting Stones: Prostitution and Liberation in Asia and the United States. Minneapolis: Fortress. Brody, Alyson. 2006. Prostitution in Thailand: Perceptions and Realities. In International Approaches to Prostitution: Law and Policy in Europe and Asia, ed. Geetanjali Gangoli and Nicole Westmarland, 185–208. Bristol: Bristol University. Brumback, Kate. 2021. Watch: Atlanta Police Hold Briefing on Spa Shooting. PBS News Hour, March 18. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/watch-­live-­ atlanta-­police-­hold-­briefing-­on-­spa-­shooting. Budiman, Abby, and Neil G.  Ruiz. 2021. Key Facts about Asian/Americans, a Diverse and Growing Population. Pew Research Center, April 29. https:// www.pewresearch.org/short-­r eads/2021/04/29/key-­f acts-­a bout-­a sian-­ americans/. Cha, Ariana Eunjung, Derek Hawkins, and Meryl Kornfield. 2021a. Why We Don’t Know More about the Atlanta Shooting Victims? The Washington Post,

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Klein, Naomi. 2008. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador. Kochhar, Rakesh. Unemployment Rate Is Higher than Officially Recorded, More So for Women and Certain Other Groups. Pew Research Center. https://www. pewresearch.org/fact-­tank/2020/06/30/unemployment-­rate-­is-­higher-­than-­ officially-­recorded-­more-­so-­for-­women-­and-­certain-­other-­groups/. Lee, Erika. 2019. America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States. New York: Basic Books. Long, Heather. 2020. Virtual School Has Largely Forced Moms, Not Dads, to Quit Work. It Will Hurt the Economy for Years. The Washington Post, November 6. https://www.washingtonpost.com/road-­to-­recovery/ 2020/11/06/women-­workforce-­jobs-­report/. Lui, Mary Ting Yi. 2009. Saving Young Girls from Chinatown: White Slavery and Woman Suffrage, 1910–1920. Journal of the History of Sexuality 18 (3): 393–417. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20542730. Mohanty, Chandra. 2003. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press. Moslener, Sara. 2015. Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence. Oxford/New York: Oxford University. National Nurses United. 2020. Sins of Omission: How Government Failures to Track COVID-19 Data Have Led to More than 1,700 Health Care Workers’ Deaths and Jeopardize Public Health. September 2020. https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/sites/default/files/nnu/documents/0920_COVID19_ SinsOfOmission_Data_Report.pdf. ———. 2021. Sins of Omission: Updated. March 2021. https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/sites/default/files/nnu/documents/0321_COVID19_ SinsOfOmission_Data_Report.pdf. Oprysko, Caitlin, and Sasannah Luthi. 2020. Trump Labels Himself ‘a Wartime President’ Combating Corona Virus. Politico, March 18. https://www.politi c o . c o m / n e w s / 2 0 2 0 / 0 3 / 1 8 / t r u m p -­a d m i n i s t r a t i o n -­s e l f -­s w a b -­ coronavirus-­tests-­135590. Our World in Data. Share of People who Completed the Initial COVID-19 Vaccination Protocol. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-­people-­ fully-­vaccinated-­COVID?country=BGD~BRA~IND~IDN~MEX~NGA~PAK ~PRT~RUS~SGP~ARE~USA~OWID_WRL~High+income~Low+income. Pae, Keun-joo Christine. 2020, Spring. Spiritual Activism as Interfaith Dialogue: When Military Prostitution Matters. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 36 (1): 75–93. ———. The Prostituted Body of War: US Military Prostitution in South Korea as a Site of Spiritual Activism. In Transformational Embodiment in Asian Religions: Subtle Bodies, Spatial Bodies, ed. George Pati and Katherine C. Zubko, 187–205. New York/London: Routledge.

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Reaves, Jayme R., David Tombs, and Rocío Rigueroa, eds. 2021. When Did We See You Naked: Jesus As a Victim of Sexual Abuse. SCM: London. Risse, Guenter. 2012. Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rogin, Ali, and Amna Nawaz. 2020. ‘We Have Been through This Before.’ Why Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Are Rising Amid Coronavirus. PBS News Hour, June 25. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/we-­have-­been-­through-­this-­ before-­why-­anti-­asian-­hate-­crimes-­are-­rising-­amid-­coronavirus. Shay, Jonathan. 2014. Moral Injury. Psychoanalytic Psychology 31 (2): 182–191. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036090. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resurgence. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Singer, Rani, Natasha Crooks, and Amy K. Johnson. 2020. COVID-19 Prevention and Protecting Sex Workers: A Call to Action. Archives of Sexual Behavior 49: 2739–2741. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-­020-­01849-­x. Stop AAPI Hate. 2020-2021 National Report. https://stopaapihate.org/ 2020-­2021-­national-­report/. Stop AAPI Hate. Two Years and Thousands of Voices: What Community-Generated Data Tells Us about Anti-AAPI Hate. https://stopaapihate.org/wp-­content/ uploads/2022/07/Stop-­AAPI-­Hate-­Year-­2-­Report.pdf. The Women Outside: Korean Women and the US Military. 1995. Directed by Hye Jung Park and J.T. Takagi. New York: Third World Newsreel. https://video. a l e x a n d e r s t r e e t . c o m / w a t c h / t h e -­w o m e n -­o u t s i d e -­k o r e a n -­w o m e n -­ and-­the-­u-­s-­military. Thistlethwaite, Susan. 2019. Women’s Bodies as Battlefield: Christian Theology and the Global War on Women. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Townes, Emilie. 2006. Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. UNHCR: The U.N.  Refugee Agency. Gender-based Violence. https://www. unhcr.org/en-­us/gender-­based-­violence.html. Watson, Patricia, et al. Moral Injury in Health Care Workers. US Department of Veterans Affairs, PTSD: National Center for PTSD Studies, https://www.ptsd. va.gov/professional/treat/cooccurring/moral_injury_hcw.asp. Weil, Shalva. 2020. Gendering-Coronavirus (Covid-19) and Femicide. The European Sociologist 45 (1). https://www.europeansociologist.org/issue-­45-­ pandemic-­i mpossibilities-­v ol-­1 /gendering-­c oronavirus-­c ovid-­1 9-­a nd-­ femicide. West, Traci. 2006. Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women’s Lives Matter. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle edition. Young, Iris M. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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CHAPTER 5

The Memories of Killing and Interfaith Spiritual Activism

The Remains of the War Ruins July 27, 2023, marks the 70th anniversary of the Korean Armistice Agreement. For the past 70 years, Koreans in the Korean Peninsula and Koreans in diasporas have fought this war in their memories, in their visceral feelings (e.g., affects), and in their relationships with one another. South Korean politics and social struggles, as well as US-Korea relations, have been constructed on the remains of the Korean War ruins. The Korean War, or more accurately America’s war in the Korean Peninsula, may prove what Vietnamese American scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen says: “[A]ll wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”1 However, the Korean War has been fought not only in memories but also in materialized conflict. As South Korean sociologist Doong-Choon Kim argues, the Korean War is a microscope for understanding tragic political events in modern Korea, such as the 5.16 Military Coup D’état, led by the dictator Jung-hee Park in 1961, and the bloody quelling of the Gwangju People’s Uprising by another military dictator, Doo-hwan Chun, in 1980, along with class struggles, gender struggles,

1  Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 4.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. C. Pae, A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43766-3_5

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and political divisions in the country.2 As a microscope, the Korean War magnifies the United States’ active roles in the war and in the militarized moments of political turmoil in South Korea. Through the Korean War, we can see the similar patterns of many wars that the US has fought for the sake of democratic nation-building in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other places.3 Despite the fact that the Korean War was and is still very much America’s war, the war remains “forgotten” by many Americans. Although it is the longest war in America’s history, the Korean War is famously known as “the Forgotten War” in the US. When a war is intentionally forgotten, it inevitably gives birth to ghosts––unspoken memories, trauma, haunting, and visceral feelings. Ghosts of war haunt not only those who directly experienced it, but also those who bear witness to it, like me who grew up listening to many ghost stories fostered by the Korean War. Even now, the Korean War ghost stories from my childhood overlap with the written records of people’s testimonies about the Korean War marked by wrongful death, massacre, torture, and maiming, as if the palimpsest of the war were unfolded before my eyes. Like ghosts, erased but not fully deleted, memories of the war hover over the Korean War record. Perhaps this is why the Korean War refuses to remain only in memories even 70 years after the cease fire in the Korean Peninsula. This chapter is about the Korean War, more specifically, memories of massacres of civilians during the hot war (1950–1953). To demonstrate that the Korean War was America’s war, I examine massacres of Korean civilians carried out by the US armed forces through the lens of race, gender, sexuality, and Christianity. However, it should be noted that all the warring parties, North Korea, South Korea, the United States, and China, 2  Dong Choon Kim, War and Society: What Does the Korean War Mean to Us? (Jeonjaenggwa Sahwi: Urieigei Hankuk Jeonjaengeun Mueotieotna) (Paju, South Korea: Dolbeigei, 2016), E-book edition (Korean). 3  In response to the 60th anniversary of the Korean Armistice Agreement, American historian James Write wrote an article for the Atlantic Magazine, saying, “Korea established a pattern that has been unfortunately followed in American wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. These are wars without declaration and without the political consensus and the resolve to meet specific and changing goals. They are improvisational wars. They are dangerous.” Wright’s article is written thoroughly from an American perspective with deep concerns about the deaths of American soldiers and the absence of democratic decision making of America’s war. James Wrights, “What We Learned from the Korean War,” The Atlantic, July 23, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/what-welearned-from-the-korean-war/278016/

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committed unspeakable war cruelty against and mass killings of Korean civilians. In some cases, Koreans used the most horrendous violence, which one can only imagine in a slasher movie, against other Koreans. Due to the intensity of the violence, the memories of the dead and maimed bodies of the war are always fragmented and incoherent, which challenges me to delineate how to speak about the silenced memories of the war overcoming a politics of death. In search of answers to this question, I borrow M. Jacqui Alexander’s notion of time as a palimpsest to emphasize that time is neither linear nor vertical. Thus, memories do not reside only in the past but also flash back from and forward to the future and present, especially in America’s war stories. At the same time, I theo-ethically contemplate how the memories of mass killings can inspire spiritual activism for peace, which, in turn, helps heal people living with the memories of death. In other words, on the other side of war memories lives not only deep sorrow, helplessness, grief, or Han but also people’s deep yearning for peace.4 Toward the end of the chapter, I critically reflect on how religion can inspire a new praxis to overcome a politics of killing, the core practice of any war. More specifically, I elaborate on a politics of love as a form of feminist spiritual activism, informed by an imagined dialogue between feminist theologian Dorothee Soelle and Buddhist nun Sister Chan Khong. These two women’s non-violent peace activism and visions for global peace and justice highlight empathy with sufferers (i.e., history’s victims) as a powerful tool to heal “us” from the ungrievable memories of war and to move “us” toward peace. Beyond the Korean War, feminist spiritual activists can be in global solidarity with people who live with particular memories and effects of war, just as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson articulates an Indigenous radical resurgence movement in solidarity with other resurgence movements led by Black, Iindigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities across the globe.5 It should be noted that feminist interfaith activism as constructed in this chapter may not serve as a direct remedy for the never-ending Korean War. Just as I use the Korean War as a site to show the war’s brutality and its legacy, I delineate interfaith activism as a 4  Han is a Korean word for deep sorrow, unfulfilled hope, and grief usually caused by injustice. Han has been an important source for Korean Minjung theologians, who take the lived experiences of the Korean Minjung (commoners) and their survival wisdom as sources for a liberation theology of Korea. 5  See the previous chapter.

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present praxis for healing from past wars and for resisting future wars in palimpsestic time.

A Politics of Killing War is about killing not only human beings but also non-human environment. Classic war theorist Carl von Clausewitz defines war as “nothing but a duel on an extensive scale … therefore, an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will (emphasis added by the author).”6 No matter how the state embellishes the noble cause of war or articulates the rules of engagement, war ultimately takes the means of killing to fulfill sovereignty’s will. Postcolonial theorist Achille Mbembe bluntly supports Clausewitz’s classic definition of war: “War is, after all, a means of achieving sovereignty as much as a way of exercising the right to kill.”7 According to Mbembe, to be sovereign is to “exert one’s control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.”8 Hence, sovereignty does not wage war or militarize its population for the sake of fostering life or security. Rather, to eliminate certain populations for its interest, sovereignty declares war, and justifies the need for an institutionalized military. Sovereignty not only kills the targeted population but also maims them. The maimed population may eventually succumb to death, debilitated and marginalized from society. What Jasbir Puar calls “the right to maim” is “a right expressive of sovereign power that is linked to, but not the same as, ‘the right to kill’.”9 Maiming is “a source of value extraction from populations that would otherwise be disposable” and leads to further perpetuation of debilitation.10 Sovereignty maims many populations beyond the enemy—soldiers, civilians, military prostitutes, and those who challenge its legitimacy. The maimed bodies are not included in body counts (i.e., the number of dead people during the military operation), but this does

6  Carl von Clausewitz, On War: All Volumes (New York: Charles River Editors, 2013), chapter 1, Kindle edition. 7  Achilles Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steve Corcoran (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 66. 8  Mbembe, Necropolitics, 66. 9  Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, and Disability (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), xviii. 10  Puar, The Right to Maim, xviii–xix.

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not mean that they are alive, and thus, sovereignty can escape the moral condemnation for excessive killing. Clausewitz, Mbembe, and Puar all point to “a politics of killing” as the core practice of any war. Clausewitz’s argument for the nature of war is still true: war takes up the physical force, not moral force, and instinctive hostility and hostile intentions motivate people to go to war.11 The languages of love, protection, peace, sacrifice, and security seem void when we face mass killings and genocide in a war zone. Since a politics of killing has been normalized in history, it is difficult to discern where to begin telling the stories of killing. Among the countless stories of killing during wartime, this chapter tells of mass killings of Korean civilians. I chose the stories of the Korean War not simply because of my cultural and ethnic heritage but also because of the long silence about tens of thousands of civilians whose lives have been considered ungrievable. Silence has bred secrecy around the civilians killed by “our” soldiers (US–Korean allies) which has fostered social and ideological divisions and hatred in South Korean society. North Korea has used this silence to fortify communist dictatorship under the Juche ideology (self-reliance) of its founder, Kim Il-sung, while, based upon this silence, the United States has portrayed itself as the self-sacrificial fighter for freedom and democracy. Living in both South Korea and the United States, I inhale the presence of the Korean War and exhale the memories of the hot part of the war. How to speak about unspeakable and ungrievable death is a theological endeavor precisely because Christianity has been built upon the stories about Jesus whose death was too shameful to grieve publicly in the first century Roman Empire. According to Korean American feminist theologian Wonhee Anne Joh, from the Roman Empire’s perspective, the slow, tortuous killing on the cross was a form of death that “extracted the maximum surplus value in producing terror for all.”12 Hence, for Joh, the tortuous death of Jesus is not an individual event but a collective subjectivity, as crucifixion caused lasting trauma to those who witnessed the event. Joh’s critical reflection on the cross as the affective site of the memories about state-sanctioned killing illuminates the Korean War’s effects on Koreans and Americans who bear witness to the war. Mass killings and  Clausewitz, On War, chapter 1, Kindle edition.  Wonhee Anne Joh, “Affective Politics of the Unending Korean War,” in Religion, Emotion, Sensation: Affect Theories and Theologies, eds. Karen Bray et al. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 100. 11 12

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massacre during the Korean War have transnationally and transgenerationally haunted those who live with the effects of the war. However, we also need to contemplate how the Jesus community embraced his death and healed one another after the tragic event which the previous chapter contemplated. To be sure, the memories of Jesus have not ended with hopelessness, unhealed trauma, or silenced grief, but continue to reveal the deeper mysteries about the power of life. As mentioned in Chap. 3, US camptown prostitution is the affective site of the Korean War, where the memories of the war and the on-going war clash. It may not be an exaggeration to say that mass killings, genocide, and military prostitution are the staple of the US military empire in East Asia. However, military prostitution is not the only sexualized dimension of America’s wars in Asia. In any war, feminizing, racializing, and sexualizing enemies proceeds before mass scale of killing breaks out. Thus, the politics of killing must be scrutinized through the interlocking of race, gender, and sexuality in order to comprehend wartime mass killings and genocide as well as sexually and racially reproduced images of killings in popular memories.

The Korean War: A Brief History In the summer of 2017, I started extensively researching mass killings and genocide during the Korean War, relatively under-researched areas of Korean War studies. The escalated tension between the Trump administration and North Korea, led by Kim Jong-un, was scary enough for me to think about the second hot war in the Korean Peninsula. Former President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un exchanged hostile words, as if active war were imminent. Trump declared that the US would unleash “fire and fury” against North Korea if the regime threatened the US. In return, Kim said that it would be the US who would be met by “fire and fury.”13 The rhetoric of “fire and fury,” whether Trump intended or not, evoked the prominent image of the Korean War, and simultaneously brought the possibility of nuclear warfare into the world. The

13  Peter Baker and Choe Sang-Hun, “Trump Threatens ‘Fire and Fury’ Against North Korea if It Endangers US,” The New York Times, August 8, 2017, https://www.nytimes. com/2017/08/08/world/asia/north-korea-un-sanctions-nuclear-missile-unitednations.html

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never-ending Korean War could have ended with the total destruction of the world. Trump’s rhetoric of “fire and fury” reflects America’s long-standing military doctrine of “shock and awe” and scorched-earth operation. In order to paralyze enemies’ perception of the battlefield and destroy their will to fight, the shock doctrine advocates the overwhelming use of military power (e.g., airstrikes, saturation bombing, etc.) and spectacular display of forces. If Clausewitz had been alive during the Korean War, he would have seen how his war theory was materialized by the United States in the Korean Peninsula. Toward the end of the Korean War, major cities in North Korea were destroyed almost completely. When the late Korean American theologian Jung Yong Lee, who had left his mother and younger brothers in Pyeongyang in 1951, saw American warplanes dropping countless bombs into Pyeongyang, he lost hope of seeing his family again.14 US saturation bombing destroyed major cities in North Korea: 75% of Pyeongyang, 80% of Hamheung, 100% of Sinanju, and 80% of Wonsan.15 What brought fire and fury to the Korean Peninsula in 1950–1953? The full-blown Korean War broke out in a complex international political context. Korea had been colonized by Japan from 1910 to 1945. Immediately after the victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), Japan had represented Korea in diplomatic relations and finally annexed the country in 1910, dethroning Gojong, the last emperor of Korea. Japanese colonial rule over Koreans was brutal, as Korea offered raw resources, ranging from natural resources to human labor, including physical and sexual labor, for Japan’s imperial desire to rule over the entire Asia Pacific from the Philippines to Hawai’i. In 1943, during the height of World War II, President Franklin D.  Roosevelt, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, and Prime Minister 14   Jung Yong Lee, “A Life In-Between,” in Journeys at the Margin: Toward an Autobiographical Theology in American-Asian Perspective, ed. Peter Phan and Jung Young Lee (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1999), 24 and 30; His mother and younger brothers survived. In 1991, he visited his hometown in North Korea and briefly reunited with his brothers. Unfortunately, his mother had passed away some years after the Korean Armistice Agreement. Lee’s critical reflection on his life as a North Korean refugee in South Korea and later immigrant in the US influenced his famous theology, a theology of marginality. 15  Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York: A Modern Library Chronicles Books, 2011), 160.

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Winston Churchill discussed the fate of Korea at the Cairo Conference. The plan was to grant independence to Korea in due course after a period of trusteeship under the Allied Powers. Subsequently, in February 1945, at the Yalta Conference, Stalin agreed to join the Allied Forces in the Pacific theater of World War II.  When Japan surrendered to the Allied Powers right after the US atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet Union rapidly expanded its power over Manchuria, close to North Korea, successfully disarming Japanese soldiers. The Soviet expansion in East Asia concerned the US.  As a result, Truman suggested to Stalin that the occupation of Korea be shared, divided along the 38th parallel. Stalin agreed in order to concentrate the Soviet power on the control of Eastern Europe that had escaped from Nazi Germany. The US could secure its power in East Asia, protecting Japan from falling into the hands of the Soviet Union.16 Delayed independence, along with the divided Korean Peninsula, did not sit well with Koreans, who had lived in a unified country on the peninsula since the late seventh century. Furthermore, as many Korean expatriates, including Kim Koo, Syngman Rhee, Park Hon-yong, and Kim Il-sung, who led the Korean independence movement, returned to Korea from various countries such as China, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan, postcolonial Korea soon entered the swirl of political conflict among various parties. Despite their ideological differences, Korean political leaders were nationalists, who pursued a unified Korea.17 Unfortunately, the heightened Cold War prolonged the division of the Korean Peninsula. Finally, in 1948, Kim Il-sung, aided by the Soviet power, successfully established the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in northern Korea, while Koreans in the south elected Syngman Rhee as their first president, who would subsequently found the Republic of Korea under US surveillance.18 During the US military occupation of South Korea (1945–1948), various violent conflicts among different political groups and people’s protests against the US military government erupted. One of the most tragic events was the people’s uprising in Jeju Island off the southern coast of the Korean Peninsula. On April 3, 1948, a group of local Jeju communists 16  The history of postcolonial Korea is adapted from Sheila Miyoshi Jager, Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 13–14. 17  Kim, The Korean War and Society, 48. 18  Jager, Brothers at War, 13–14.

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(i.e., the South Korean Labor Party in Jeju) and residents attacked the houses of the most notorious members of the Northwest Korean Youth Association, who had terrorized the lives of Jeju people. The attackers intended to punish unjust rulers and, at the same time, to resist the agenda of the US military government and Korean right-wing politicians to establish a South Korean-only government. However, the Jeju People’s Uprising, known as Jeju 4.3, was met by US-South Korean joint forces with a “scorched earth operation” that wiped out one tenth of the Jeju population through 1954 even after the end of the Korean War.19 Some Korean War scholars see Jeju 4.3. as the beginning and the end of the Korean War due to the level of brutality and massive scale of the military operations on the island. The full-blown Korean War broke out when the North Korean army crossed the 38th parallel at 4:00 AM on June 25, 1950, a rainy summer Sunday. By September of that year, North Korea had taken over Seoul and pushed the South Korean-US defense line to Busan, the southeastern tip of the Korean Peninsula.20 The US responded to the North Korean invasion quickly. However, Washington policy makers and President Truman did not interpret that North Korea’s attack could be “part of a continuum in Korea’s own local efforts at reunification and decolonization.”21 In the larger context of Cold War politics, North Korea was seen merely as the proxy of Stalin who was perceived to be expanding Soviet power in Asia. “Korea” was insignificant to the United States, but to prevent Soviet expansion, it was crucial for the rest of the world. Since McCarthyism devoured ordinary Americans’ hearts and minds, the United States had to play its role as crusader to defend free market democracy. The US intervened in the war first by bringing the case of the Korean War to the United Nations. While the Soviet Union was absent at the U.N. Security Council meeting, the United States urged the UN to enter the Korean War to

19  Keun-joo Christine Pae, “Faith-based Popular Resistance to the Naval Base in Gangjeong of Jeju: Transforming Militarized US-Korea Relations for Peace and Justice,” in Critical Theology against US Militarism in Asia: Decolonization and Deimperialization, ed. Nami Kim and Wonhee Anne Joh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 205. 20  S.L.A.  Marshall, The Military History of the Korean War (New York: Franklin Watts, 1963), 18. 21  Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010), 147.

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defend South Korean civilians. A UN resolution for a “police action” turned into a “de facto US operation in Korea.”22 Under the banner of the UN, the US forces took over Seoul from North Korea in September 1950 and pushed the North Korean People’s Army to the border with China. North Korean soldiers, who were left behind in South Korea, engaged in guerilla warfare, which would later cause civilian massacres by American and South Korean troops, especially in mountain areas. Soon, the Chinese Communist Forces entered the Korean War and defeated the United Nations allied army at Chosin Reservoir on November 27, 1950.23 In December 1950, the US Marines conducted the epic operation, “the Heungnam evacuation.” Over a hundred thousand men in the X Corps, Americans and South Koreans, and more than 90,000 refugees were evacuated from the Port of Heungnam on the Northeast coast of North Korea and successfully and safely shipped to Geoje and Jeju, southern islands in South Korea, while Chinese Communist Forces blocked all land roads toward the south. Stories about the cargo ship Meredith Victory that could hold about 60 people are particularly famous. Sympathizing with refugees at the port, Captain LaRue and his crew loaded 14,000 people and arrived at Geoje Island on Christmas Day, 1950. Meredith Victory became known as the “Ship of Miracles” and the Heungnam evacuation as the miracle of Christmas.24 However, shortly after the miracles (January 4, 1951), Seoul fell into the hands of North Korea and its Chinese allies.25 After China entered the Korean War, President Truman declared a national emergency on December 16, 1950, claiming that if the goal of communist imperialism were achieved, Americans would no longer  Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire, 148.  The Battle of Chosin Reservoir composed the significant part of America’s memories of the Korean War. “The Chosin Few” refers to American soldiers who fought in the battle because only a small number of soldiers survived. The US X Corps and Republic of Korea I Corps reported 10,495 casualties during the fighting around Chosin, and the brutal cold added another 7388 Marines to the list as non-battle casualties. 19,202 Chinese soldiers might have perished. 28,954 non-combat casualties are estimated by historians. See National Medal of Honor Museum, “‘The Chosin Few’–Remembrances,” https://mohmuseum. org/chosinreservoir/#:~:text=The%20US%20X%20Corps%20and,losses%20were%20significant%20as%20well. 24  Jager, Brothers at War, 138. 25  The progress of the Korean War is adapted from Jager, Brothers at War, 129–171; For the brief Korean War Chronology, see US Army Center of Military History, “The Korean War Chronology,” https://history.army.mil/reference/korea/kw-chrono.htm#phase03 22 23

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worship their God or enjoy God’s blessings of freedom. He urged Americans to make every possible sacrifice for America’s triumph over communism, specifically in the Korean Peninsula.26 Truman understood the Korean War as America’s war and equated America’s destiny with that of Korea. Furthermore, he interpreted Christian triumph as America’s physical and ideological victory over communism. In March 1951, Seoul was recaptured by the U.N. allied army. The Korean War fell into a stalemate along the 38th parallel until the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed. Since the end of 1951, when the two sides agreed on the demarcation line, it was no longer a war to win but “a stalemated war of the trenches, the most forgotten part of the forgotten war.”27 However, the trench war was not peaceful at all. Prior to 1951, the US military’s mission was to take over North Korea. After the retreat from North Korea in 1951, the mission became “inflicting enough pain on communist forces” to bring them to the negotiation table; namely, the US enacted a strategy of attrition and body counts.28 Mass killings and massacre of civilians by US airstrikes and saturation bombing concentrated between 1951 and 1952. On July 27, 1953, the North Korea—China allies and the United Nations, led by the US reached the armistice agreement after two-year negotiation. It confirmed the current Demilitarized Zone between North and South Koreas for an indefinite time. The Korean War physically ended reluctantly where it had begun.29

26   Harry Truman, “Proclamation 2914––Proclaiming the Existence of a National Emergency, December 16, 1950,” The American Presidency Project, UC Santa Barbara, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-2914-proclaimingthe-existence-national-emergency 27  Richard Peters and Xiaobing Li, Voices from the Korean War: Personal Stories of American, Korean, and Chinese Soldiers (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 40–41. As the Korean War became a war of trenches, casualty figures declined and the American public became less interested in the war in Korea, while all UN soldiers found the war to be very real. 28  Scott Sigmund Gartner and Marissa Edson Myers, “Body Counts and ‘Success’ in the Vietnam and Korean Wars,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History vol. xxv no. 3 (1995): 386. 29  Bruce Cumings, revisionist historian of the Korean War, states: “In this small peninsula, the United States mobilized one third of its army, one fifth of air force, and most Pacific Fleets along with more than 20 million soldiers including Japanese and UN allied soldiers. Spending excessive military budget and supplies, the United States used all kinds of military strategies which could not be found in any part of the military history. What they earned, however, were the death of their soldiers and surrender”. Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 298.

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For the United States, the Korean War was the opportunity to congeal its Cold War logic. The Korean War catalyzed a “Cold War consensus,” setting a precedent for “how the United States would interpret and intervene in civil wars and anticolonial movements in Asia and elsewhere.”30 Furthermore, the consolidated US—South Korea relations became the constitution of Korean America as “an imperial and gendered racial formation.”31 The war scattered Koreans internally and globally, especially to the United States. No matter how hard America has tried to forget about its less-than-successful military operation in the Korean peninsula, the very presence of Korean America inside the United States has always reminded the American public of the war. At the same time, the US military’s presence in South Korea makes the Korean War always present to Koreans. Trump and Kim Jong-un’s fire and fury ended at the US–North Korea summit in Singapore on June 12, 2018, but the Korean War is still going on physically and in people’s memories. What remains is how to talk about the pile of bodies destroyed by fire and fury, not only in Korea, but in Vietnam, Guam, the Americas, Europe, and elsewhere.

A Palimpsest of Genocide How can we retrieve the traumatic memories of the genocide carried out by American troops during their Forgotten War? As I will deliberate more in the later part of this chapter, storytelling is an important tool in creating empathetic understanding of people’s suffering caused by war. “How” to tell the story is as crucial as “what” and “whose” stories to tell. Here is where I borrow the idea of a “palimpsest” from transnational feminist scholar M.  Jacqui Alexander. According to Alexander, “time is neither vertically accumulated nor horizontally teleological.”32 Hence, she frames time as a palimpsest, “a parchment that has been inscribed two or three times, the previous text having been imperfectly erased and remaining therefore still partly visible.”33 A palimpsest brings the past into the present and the future, and the future into the present and the past  Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire, 150.  Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire, 150. 32  M.  Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditation on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham: Duke University, 2005), 190. 33  Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 190. 30 31

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simultaneously. It leads one to consciously look at what has been erased, what has been rewritten on the text, and what traces will remain. The concept of a palimpsest enables us to look at the fragments and remains of the war more consciously, so that we can grasp the partialities of mass killing in the remains of the war ruins. The palimpsestic stories of killing from the Korean War appear familiar and unfamiliar, historically specific and transcendental, visible and invisible, and after all, ambiguous. Massacres The Korean War officially claimed 1.5 million people’s lives, although arguably as many as four million people might have been killed, and seven million people maimed by the war. Mass killings, massacre, or what Korean Sociologist Dong Choon Kim calls, “genocide” characterize the Korean War.34 Despite the official denial of the United States, the US attacks on Korean civilians started at the beginning of the war. One of the early civilian massacres happened at Nogeunri, in the central part of South Korea, between July 25 and 29, 1950. The Nogeunri massacre was not widely known to the public until 1999, when the Associated Press started uncovering the US army orders to shoot approaching refugees. The press also released interviews with the Korean survivors of the massacre and the Seventh Calvary veterans who were ordered to shoot the refugees.35 At the beginning of the Korean War, the US and South Korean troops could not stop the North Korean advancement, while countless refugees passed through the US–South Korean lines. The US Eighth Army was worried about the possible presence of North Korean spies among the refugees. On July 25, 1950, one month after the outbreak of the Korean War, the US Eighth Army announced “the Stop Refugee Order” that considered “any refugees leaving the war zone as the enemy.”36 Defeated in Daejeon, the US Seventh Calvary troops retreated to Youngdong, seven miles north of Nogeunri.37 On July 25, 1950, the 34  Dong Choon Kim, “Forgotten War, Forgotten Massacres–the Korean War (1950–1953) as Licensed Mass Killings,” Journal of Genocide Research 6 no. 4 (2004): 529. 35  Grace M. Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008), 59–60. 36  Gi-cheol Shin, The People Are Not Enemies (Gukmineun Jeoki Anida) (Seoul, Korea: Hertz9, 2014), 216–17 (Korean). 37  Nogeunri is also written No Gun Ri or Nogun village, as “ri” in Korean refers to as a village.

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troops evacuated nearby villages, gathered about 600 refugees, and herded them to Hagari, where the refugees spent the night by a stream. The next morning, the refugees discovered that the American soldiers had disappeared. Some of the refugees went back to their villages while the majority of them continued to walk southward. On July 26, 1950, the refugees again met American soldiers who ordered them to walk along the railroad tracks. Soon, US warplanes started shooting the refugees, instantly killing more than 100 people. The survivors hid inside the twin underpass of the railroad which still remains.38 For the next three days, American soldiers would gun down about 300 civilians hidden inside of the underpass.39 The Nogeunri massacre was neither the beginning nor the ending of American troops’ genocide of Korean civilians. More than 60 cases of mass killings involving US troops were reported in the aftermath of the news of Nogeunri. A week before the massacre at Nogeunri, about 100 refugees were killed by napalm and machine gun fire when they tried to cross the river at Cheongwon, not far from Nogeunri. In early August and September 1950, a few weeks after the Nogeunri massacre, about 800 refugees were killed in Pohang by bombs simply because they stayed near the military line.40 Similar stories of civilian massacres by US soldiers are found across Korea. On December 1, 2005, more than 50 years after the Korean Armistice Agreement, the Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission (KTRC) was founded and succeeded the work of the Korean Truth Commission on Civilian Massacres, which had been organized in September 2000. By the end of 2008, KTRC received 11,000 cases of wrongful death or massacre since Korea’s independence. Of these, 9461 were cases of civilian massacre during the Korean War. The KTRC investigated 3269 cases of wrongful death or massacre. In the meantime, hundreds of bodies were exhumed at the 154 burial grounds across the Republic of Korea.41 Besides direct shootings, America’s use of napalm brought massive destruction to the lives of Koreans. The US army used 32,357 tons of napalm. Of this, 4313 tons were dropped during “Operation Strangle”

38  The twin underpass of the railroad with many bullet marks is now the symbol of many massacres during the Korean War. 39  Shin, The People Are Not Enemies, 217. 40  Shin, The People Are Not Enemies, 214–219. 41  Cumings, The Korean War, 201–202.

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between August 1951 and June 1952.42 Operation Strangle refers to the carpet bombing of North Korea carried out by the US whenever the truce talks between North Korea/China and the United States/United Nations were at a stalemate. Korea was the testing site for napalm, a newly developed weapon of mass destruction at that time. Several years later, based on its testing and observation of napalm in Korea, the United States used napalm more systematically along with Agent Orange during the Vietnam War to scorch jungles and forests where Vietcong guerillas were believed to be waiting in ambush. During the Rolling Thunder Operation in Vietnam alone, the US dropped 34,261 tons of napalm bombs.43 Napalm spreads jellied gasoline everywhere when it explodes, turning the bombing area into a “hell of fire.”44 Thus, napalm could not target specific military or industrial facilities but scorched the areas where possible human and non-human targets resided. Photos taken by American soldiers during the Korean War proved that the majority of napalm bombs were dropped on small rural villages filled with hay-roofed houses.45 Although the United States justified its use of napalm even in small villages for dismantling enemy lines or killing communists waiting in ambush, they knew that they were killing civilians. American soldiers often received the order to kill refugees even after they reported no presence of enemies to military authorities.46 In the early 1950s, Korea rarely had established military facilities, national infrastructure, or industrial complexes the US forces could target. Nonetheless, US warplanes still dropped bombs on every standing building. For instance, after the war, there were no standing buildings in Pyeongyang or in Wonsan in North Korea.47 Grace Cho argues that the Nogeunri massacre evokes the future My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968.48 The Nogeunri massacre is also the palimpsest of the genocide of American Indians at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890. On that day, the US Seventh Cavalry, the same regiment later responsible for the Nogeunri massacre, slaughtered as many as 300 mostly

42  Gi-jin Kim, The Korean War and Civilian Massacres: The First Testimony of the US Secret Documents (Seoul, Korea: Pureum Yeoksa, 2005), 152–153 (Korean). 43  Kim, The Korean War and Civilian Massacres, 153. 44  Kim, The Korean War and Civilian Massacres, 154. 45  Kim, The Korean War and Civilian Massacres, 154. 46  Kim, The Korean War and Civilian Massacres, 156. 47  Cumings, The Korean War, 160. 48  Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora, 57–58.

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unarmed and defenseless Lakota men, women, and children.49 Since the present moment of militarized violence happens too quickly to be perceived, it is accessible to conscious experience only through its palimpsests. The trauma of militarized violence can traverse the boundaries of time and space from Wounded Knee through Nogeunri to My Lai only to open temporalities in which past and future collide. Race, Gender, and Sexuality of Massacres I have argued a few times in previous chapters that soldiers have great resistance to killing other human beings. So, one may wonder why American soldiers acted with such a high level of cruelty toward ordinary Koreans in the war while they claimed to protect Korean civilians from communist enemies. In the broader context of Cold War politics, the prevention of Soviet expansion was more critical for the US than the protection of Korean civilians. The protection and liberation of Korean civilians were the rhetoric to justify US intervention in the Korean War. Furthermore, in the context of Cold War politics, mass killings committed by American soldiers were related to the combination of their deep racism against Koreans (East Asians) and the relative isolation of the incidents. The racialization and feminization of Koreans allowed massacres to happen, just as in any war and armed conflict, the racial and sexual otherizing of enemies proceeds the escalation of violence. The Korean War was the first war in which the United States participated in nation-building in a postcolonial third world country without understanding the country’s historical complexities or its people’s desires. A lack of knowledge of Korea and unwillingness to learn about the country inevitably led Americans to treat all Koreans as potential communists by calling them “Reds.” Through an American eye, Koreans were “gooks” without history. America’s accumulated racism throughout the Pacific War was unleashed in Korea. At the same time, the US government controlled the Western media tightly at the peak of McCarthyism. As a result, ordinary American citizens rarely knew what really happened on the Korean Peninsula and did not question US responsibility for civilian deaths.50

49  Winona LaDuke, The Militarization of the Indian Country (Lansing, MI: Makwa Enewed, 2013), 8. 50  Kim, “Forgotten War, Forgotten Massacre,” 531.

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Furthermore, killing in the Korean War was sexualized. During the first few months of the war in 1950, 875 women were reported raped by US soldiers stationed in Seoul.51 No one knows how many women were raped by GIs or Korean soldiers. Since Korean Confucianism highly values female chastity, many rape cases might have gone unreported. Rape victims might have been killed by their rapists or committed suicide. Female family members of (alleged) communists or female communists were especially vulnerable to sexual violence. For instance, during Jeju 4.3, Korean police officers habitually used sexual violence against women, mostly family members of alleged communist men, who hid somewhere in mountains away from death threats. Korean policemen raped and whipped naked women, regardless of these women’s ages, marital statuses, and pregnancies. Several records state that Korean soldiers and policemen penetrated naked women, including visibly pregnant women, with guns and knives.52 All these cases of torture and killing perpetrated by Korean policemen in Jeju were possible because of the US Military Forces in South Korea condoned their misbehaviors to win the war against communists.53 Additionally, during the Korean war, the Korean government and the US military systematically ran brothels in designated areas to control sexually transmitted infection and keep up morale among soldiers. Although public prostitution became outlawed in Korea in 1947, the Korean government adopted the Imperial Japanese institution of “comfort stations” during the Pacific War to serve UN Allied Forces and Korean soldiers in the name of “protecting respectable women and rewarding soldiers for their sacrifice.”54 Prostitution for American soldiers stationed in Korea was  Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora, 67.  Heo Hojoon, 4.3: 19470301–19540921 (Seoul, Korea: Hyehwa 1117, 2023), 280–82; Journalist Heo Hojoon intentionally titled his book concerning Jeju 4.3 with numbers. 19470301 signifies March 1st, 1947, when Jeju citizens’ peaceful march in celebration of Korea’s March 1st Independence Movement ended with US military occupiers’ shootings that killed three people, including a school-age boy and a woman with small children. These victims were onlookers who had not participated in the march. 19540921 means September 21, 1954, when the Korean government officially declared the end of its scorched earth and wiping out operations in Jeju. Heo argues that Jeju 4.3. began on March 1st, 1947, and ended on September 21, 1954. 53  Heo, 4.3, 42. 54  Seungsook Moon, “Regulating Desire, Managing the Empire: US Military Prostitution in South Korea, 1945–1970,” in Over There: Living with the US Military Empire from World War Two to the Present, ed. Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 41. 51 52

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systematized after the Korean War and it has further spread the hypersexualized images of Korean women among Americans who I interrogated in previous chapters. Regardless of their political ideologies, if they had any, all Korean women during the War were treated as Reds, female enemies, who were sexually available to or to be conquered by American soldiers. Military prostitution is not different from military rape. As I argued in previous chapters, based on the patriarchal assumption that male soldiers’ sex drives are uncontrollable, politicians secretly look for safe commercialized sex both to avoid diplomatic conflict caused by military rape and to control sexually transmitted disease among the soldiers. In the meantime, systemic rape against enemy women has been the most insidious tactic to instill fear among enemies and destroy the culture and land of the targeted population because women have been considered the carriers of culture, people, and land through their procreative power. Wartime genocide, mass killing, and massacre are accompanied by the systemic rape of women whose bodies turn into battlefields as we have seen in various wars in Germany, Rwanda, the Republic of Congo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and elsewhere. In the case of the Korean War, the rape of local Korean women by American soldiers and the use of military prostitution were intertwined with the soldiers’ fear and anxiety along with the otherization of the Korean women as enemies. The women’s bodies were used to appease the soldiers’ fear in the war and were perceived as warriors’ booty. Race, gender, and sexuality are critical in analyzing wartime massacre. During the Korean War, civilian massacres were possible because American troops otherized Koreans racially and sexually. Even the term “Red” is a quasi-racist term to dehumanize communists.55 Once civilians are racially and sexually otherized, they become targets to be eliminated. Genocide as a Colonial Legacy The mass killings of civilians during the Korean War were a behavior of military brutality learned from colonialism. Considering America’s long history of genocide of American Indians, one would find a parallel between massacre in Korea and that in the United States. Like European settlers in North America, American soldiers in Korea identified with the conquerors rather than with the protectors of civilians. A similar logic applies to the Korean soldiers who mercilessly killed their fellow Koreans labeled as  Kim, “Forgotten War, Forgotten Massacre,” 531.

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Reds. For instance, Deok-sin Choi, the commander of the Eleventh Division of the Army of the Republic of Korea, initially devised the mission of exterminating guerillas while serving in Chinese General Chiang Kei Shek’s corps. Choi’s army indiscriminately killed several thousands of unarmed civilians, including babies, women, and elderly people, during the operation entitled “Keeping the Position by Cleansing the Fields.” This operation, which was labeled as the “three-cleans-all” operation (kill all, burn all, loot all), had been developed by Japanese imperial forces fighting against anti-Japanese leftist rebels in China.56 The horror of civilian massacre did not end with the Korean War. Fifteen years later, Korean troops entered the Vietnam War and used the same tactic of the “three-cleans-all” against Vietnamese civilians.57 Villages were burnt down and looted out. Women were raped before being killed. Even now, many Vietnamese remember the cruelty of Korean soldiers and commemorate the dead as if their ghosts have lived among the living.58 It might not be a coincidence that during the Vietnam War, South Korea was ruled by the military dictator Jung-hee Park, who had been a soldier of the Japanese Imperial Army, fighting against Korean nationalists and Chinese leftist rebels against Japan in Manchuria. His regime was willing to send troops to Vietnam and condone Korean soldiers’ atrocities against civilians. All these stories of massacre cannot be retrieved linearly because future, present, and past wars collapse in the narratives of killing. This insight gives us the reason that we have to stop any war before it begins because war solves nothing but only to perpetuates the vicious cycle of mass killing. The pile of dead bodies left behind a massacre is the spectacular display of sovereignty’s necropower. Labeling Koreans as Reds, American troops controlled the mortality of the Korean population. War and genocide also leave maimed and psychologically wounded bodies. Hence, as Puar argues, the opposite of biopolitics is not necropolitics manifested through death, but also the maiming that further perpetuates “debilitation,” the status of moving toward neither life nor death.59 The dead bodies left by genocide, mass killing, and massacre may provoke immediate reactions among  Kim, “Forgotten War, Forgotten Massacre,” 532.  Kim, “Forgotten War, Forgotten Massacre,” 534. 58  See Heonik Kwon, Ghosts of War in Vietnam (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 59  Puar, Right to Maim, xviii. 56 57

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bystanders. However, maimed bodies that have escaped death but might eventually succumb to death are often neglected after the event of armed conflict, even though maimed bodies are the living palimpsest of genocide. As a matter of fact, “debilitation” was the collective experience of the survivors and their family members of massacres during the Korean War, regardless of who killed their families (i.e., American soldiers, South Korean soldiers, North Korean soldiers, civilian neighbors, etc.). However, since the victims/survivors of massacre carried out by American soldiers were collectively labeled as Reds, they had been “debilitated” to speak about their experience publicly. The Red label had insidiously weakened the Korean public’s moral capacity to interrogate the countless deaths of civilians during the Korean War until the early 2000s. Since maiming often has longer effects than death itself, genocide and massacre should be understood more broadly as including not only sovereignty’s right to kill but also its right to maim the population.

Christian Triumphalism and Rescue Mission What does Christianity, the religion that supposedly promotes peace and justice, have to do with mass killing in Korea? Before moving toward interfaith spiritual activism for peace, I want to point out Christianity’s ideological influence on unlimited killing during wartime as well as its complex location in the Korean War. The massacres of civilians committed by American troops in Korea is linked to the American version of Christian triumphalism, specifically intertwined with anticommunism in the early Cold War. As an ideology, Christian triumphalism, by definition, is “an appeal to the victory over sin, evil, and death by Jesus Christ,” and the conviction that “Christians share this victory with Christ.”60 The Christian rhetoric of triumphalism translates into America’s mission as God’s chosen nation to save the world. During the Korean War, this rhetoric was visible when President Truman declared a national emergency on December 9, 1950, in response to China’s entry into the Korean War, as this chapter discussed earlier. Since World War II, the United States has been an economic and military hegemon in world politics, participating in almost every armed conflict across the globe. America’s global wars would have been impossible 60  Emilie Townes, Womanist Ethics and Cultural Production of Evil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 90.

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without ordinary American citizens’ patriotic support. The understanding of patriotism of many Americans has been cast in religious terms: America is God’s chosen nation to be the example to the world.61 The dangerous side of Christian triumphalism infused with American politics is that ordinary Americans refuse to see the complexities of America’s global wars but fall into simple solutions: killing and maiming enemy populations. Even a preemptive war is possible for the sake of triumph.62 However, Christianity had a complex relationship with the Korean War. While Christian social ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr (reluctantly) supported the Korean War in order to contain communism in East Asia, after China entered the Korean War, many American Christians protested the war in Korea.63 The American public became especially infuriated with the news of the death of 140,000 American soldiers during the Korean War.64 Truman became unpopular. In November 1952, before the Presidential Election, 70% of America’s Protestant denominations collectively supported Dwight Eisenhower over Truman because of the Truman administration’s failure to end the war in Korea.65 Relatively unknown, anti-Korean War movements were active in the US. In December 1950, Chicago citizens prayed for peace for twelve hours, along with Christian and Jewish leaders who preached about peace for twelve hours.66 They all demanded the immediate end of the war in Korea. In August 1950, the American Women for Peace led a national pilgrimage of 1000 women to Washington, D.  C., to demand a ban on atomic weapons and an end to the Korean War.67 Subsequently, in December 1950, the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the National Council of Churches (NCC) of the United States started demanded that the Truman administration ban the use of atomic bombs in Korea and engage in a truce talk with North Korea. Until the end of the Korean War, many American Protestant leaders 61  Martin L. Cook, “United States I,” in Religion in the Military Worldwide, edited by Ron Hassner (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 182. 62  America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have strong characters of preemptive wars. In 2017, Trump also mentioned the possibility of a preemptive war against North Korea. 63  See Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles and Scribner’s Sons, 1952; reprint, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008). 64  Jeong-ran Yoon, The Korean War and Protestantism (Seoul, Korea: Hanul Academy, 2015), 129. 65  Yoon, The Korean War and Protestantism, 130. 66  Yoon, The Korean War and Protestantism, 130. 67  Suzy Kim, “The Origins of Cold War Feminism During the Korean War,” Gender and History vol. 31 no. 2 (2019): 466.

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emphasized the importance of changing people’s hearts and minds for peace instead of using the weapons of mass destruction and war. Thus, they were critical of the excessive anticommunism propaganda of conservative Catholics, Protestants, the Truman administration, and the Eisenhower administration.68 In the meantime, Christian fundamentalists began comparing the WCC to anti-Christian communism. Carl McIntire and his organization the American Council of Christian Churches were staunch anticommunist Christian fundamentalists who could not separate Christian faith from anticommunism. Under McIntire’s leadership, Christian fundamentalists in Europe and the United States organized the International Council of Christian Churches in opposition to the WCC, arguing that the WCC was interested only in modernizing the gospel instead of focusing on the true messages of the scripture.69 McIntire organized American Christian fundamentalists to be a political force and pressured the Truman administration to take a stronger anticommunist stance in Korea.70 When the Korean Armistice negotiation came to a close in 1953, along with Senator John McCarthy, McIntire and ACCC made a concerted effort to expose “communist sympathizers” among liberal clergy.71 For McIntire, rescuing Christians in China and Korea depended on a US victory over communist China and North Korea. Again, anticommunism was the Cold War version of Christian triumphalism and American exceptionalism in McIntire’s theology. Although the Cold War forced global Christian churches to understand political and ideological conflict among nations theologically, they did not remain only in theological debates. They were also busy sending out care packages, medical supplies, food, clothing, and money to Korea through Christian relief organizations. Christian evangelical groups, such as the World Vision, the Holt Children’s Service, Compassion International, and the Christian Children’s Fund were invested in rescuing Korean War orphans from poverty, malnutrition, disease, and death. Korean War orphans played critical roles in the Korean War and afterwards. First, by publicizing American soldiers taking care of war orphans to the public, the  Yoon, The Korean War and Protestantism, 131–132.  See International Council of Christian Churches, https://iccc-churches.org 70  Markku Ruotsila, Fighting Fundamentalist: Carl McIntire and the Politicization of American Fundamentalism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015), 110–112. 71  Ruotila, Fighting Fundamentalist, 113. 68 69

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US could establish an image of benevolent empire and gentle patriarch. Second, Christian charities both in the US and South Korea could expand their revenues by appealing to sympathetic Christians. Third, the Korean War initiated transnational adoption, and certainly, American evangelical families have actively adopted children first from Korea, and then from many other countries. Fourth, Korean War orphans were symbols of US-Korea relations based on shared blood. For American and Korean evangelicals, these children were the living proof of communist cruelty and, simultaneously, of Christian salvific love.72 One may experience difficulty in reconciling these two different Americas—on the one hand, the US that labeled Koreans as gooks and Reds and killed them; on the other hand, the US that showed sympathy toward and made an extensive effort to rescue war orphans, some of whose parents might have been killed by GIs or were fathered by GIs. The Korean War created the opportunity for Korean Christians, a religious minority group, to seize social and political power. Protestantism became one of the major religions in Korea through the Korean War and Korea’s anticommunist regimes afterwards. The expansion of Protestantism in Korea has always been political. Syngman Rhee, the first president of the Republic of Korea, was a Presbyterian who appealed to his Protestant faith and anticommunist message when trying to persuade the US military government to support his seizure of power. During the truce negotiation, Rhee manipulated the Korean National Council of Churches (KNCC), mostly led by North Korean Christian refugees, to protest a truce in order to secure his presidency after the war.73 Korean Christians were divided over the armistice as were Christians in the US, not only because of Rhee’s political manipulation but also because of the diverse views of American missionaries on ending the war and defeating communism. Yet North Korean Christian refugees identified themselves with anticommunism which would later become the mainstream position in Korean Protestantism. What traces can we see on the palimpsest of the US and Korean Protestant churches’ complex relations with the Korean War? Tentatively, I argue that if in the past America has known its wars through 72  See Yoon, The Korean War and Protestantism, 165–202; and Susie Woo, Framed by War: Korean Children and Women at the Crossroads of US Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 86–111. 73  Yoon, The Korean War and Protestantism, 157–160.

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triumphalism, now the American public should interpret those wars differently. In other words, the massacre of, and sexual violence against civilians and enemies should not be considered collateral damage of the triumph. America has carried out its global wars at the cost of the unbearable suffering of civilians, especially in the third world. At the heart of Christianity, as many liberation theologians and ethicists argue, is God’s justice, peace, and liberation. These values are the opposite of sovereignty’s right to kill and maim. The American public, especially American Christians, should not allow the smallest part of the Christian doctrine of triumphalism to take over Christianity or America’s foreign policy. A similar moral demand applies to Korean Christians.

Toward a Politics of Love Genocide, massacre, and mass killing of civilians, sexual violence against enemies, and “rescuing” orphans have left many traces on the palimpsest of America’s wars in Asia. These palimpsests can connect the survivors and bystanders of genocide and massacre transgenerationally and transnationally and who can, in return, create a power of resistance to sovereignty’s right to kill and maim. The future Christian study of war should read historically specific genocide/massacre stories across the world more holistically, interrogating how their palimpsests communicate with one another across time and space. In search of transnational and transgenerational solidarity for global peace, I propose feminist spiritual activism as a counter-narrative to a politics of killing. Feminist spiritual activism is to be considered at three stages: first, empathy through the feminist storytelling method; second, interconnectedness with independence; and third, the shared political goal of peace as a guideline for interfaith resistance to militarism. These three stages correspond to my imaginative dialogue between Dorothee Soelle and Sister Chan Khong. Dorothee Soelle was a German feminist theologian who theologized human suffering, caused by unjust social structures such as war and callous capitalism. Her childhood memories of World War II motivated her to denounce war and militarism and to appreciate non-violent peace activism found in various religious traditions. As I briefly introduced in Chap. 2, Sister Chan Khong is Zen Master Thich Nhat Hahn’s beloved disciple. With Nhat Hanh, she was involved in the Buddhist peace movement in South Vietnam before the Vietnam War, the anti-Vietnam War movement

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during the war, and the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees, known as “Boat People.” Although Soelle and Chan Khong might not have met in person, their faith-based peace activism shares similar visions and strategies. Empathy and a Storytelling Method Women’s experiences of militarized violence such as military prostitution, wartime rape, and genocide should be stopped. So, in what ways can these experiences inform interfaith dialogue for peace? In other words, how can we read the palimpsestic stories of women’s resistance to militarism, denouncement of military rape and military prostitution, and courageous activism for peace? These questions lead me to revisit a storytelling method integrated into Dorothee Soelle’s and Sister Chan Khong’s peace activism. The storytelling method used by Dorothee Soelle and Sr. Chan Khong has two purposes: (1) to empathize suffering with the sufferers; and (2) to invite empathic empowerment from Christian and Buddhist mystics, teachers, and peace activists. These particular aspects of the storytelling method allude to human experiences of suffering as the ground for interfaith dialogue for peace. The stories of human suffering reveal the brutality of war and subsequently create counter-narratives to stories that glorify war. Stories of concrete human beings who have survived wartime massacre, maiming, and sexual violence expose the realities of militarized suffering and thus create an interfaith dialogue without reducing human beings of flesh and blood into the grand narratives of war or the doctrines of war and peace (i.e., America’s military triumph over communism in the Korean Peninsula and its military presence in South Korea for peace and security in East Asia). By listening to others’ stories, we actively respond to human suffering rather than become numb to suffering.74 Therefore, not only the pile of dead bodies left behind the war but also the survivors’ will to live, reveal human suffering and, more importantly, the power of life itself. Second, the storytelling method does not attempt to find commonality or universality among people with diverse religious backgrounds and experiences. Instead, from a feminist perspective, the method highlights the particularities and diversity of people’s experiences of suffering and liberation. For instance, the suffering of Korean women caused by the Korean War is not perfectly aligned with that of Vietnamese women whose bodies remember rape and massacre during the Vietnam War. These two  Dorothee Soelle, Suffering (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1975), 154.

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groups of women, however, can empathetically understand each other’s suffering. Their stories can be read together as the palimpsest of America’s wars in Asia. Recently, the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan visited Vietnam and met the female survivors of rape by Korean soldiers during the Vietnam War. Through multiple meetings with Vietnamese female survivors, the Council searched for possible reconciliation between Vietnam and Korea, the Korean government’s official apology for its soldiers’ systemic rape of Vietnamese women, and reparations for the victims. Although their perpetrators and war contexts are different, both Korean and Vietnamese women denounced military rape by sharing their stories of suffering and their survival wisdom.75 Third, the storytelling method can create a space where religiously diverse people empathetically embrace one another’s suffering and experience healing and transformation. Through this process, those who participate in interfaith dialogue may experience Dorothee Soelle’s notion of the “mystical sense of becoming one,” namely that, “difference is acknowledged but not absolutized in the destruction of community.”76 Interdependence Both Soelle and Sr. Chan Khong could practice “empathy” thanks to their contemplation of interconnectedness, interdependence, or inter-being among all living beings. However, a heartfelt understanding of interconnectedness needs feminist constructive criticism. According to Gloria Steinem, Talking about interdependence is almost dangerous for women because it is easy to believe that connectedness, the empathy we treasure is so easy to confuse dependence, empathy sickness. We know others’ feelings better than our feelings. It is bred so much in us. How important it is that we

75  Sujin Park, “The Korean Council for the Women Forcefully Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan Apologizes to Vietnamese Women for Korean Soldiers’ Raping Women during the War in Vietnam,” Hangyeorei Newspaper, September 14, 2017, https://www. hani.co.kr/arti/society/society_general/811073.html 76  Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 262.

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c­ elebrate independence first. We can’t get to interdependence until we experience independence.77

Soelle and Sr. Chan Khong put their spiritual understanding of interdependence into interfaith peace activism. And yet, they articulate independence of human beings as their discerning will to practice their respective religious teachings of resistance to war and militarism. The Buddhist teaching of interconnectedness enables Sister Chan Khong to take an active part in peace activism with Christians rather than only talking about religious dogmas, which would not save the dying people in Vietnam. For her, religions are interdependent with one another for their existence, enlightenment, human suffering, and ultimately peace of the world. Sr. Chan Khong accentuates that religious peace comes through interfaith peace activism. As Christians and Buddhists work together for peace, they practice their respective religious teachings of love and compassion as well as experience the deeper meanings of those teachings living here and now. Her activist approach to interfaith dialogue initially comes from her experience of Buddhist-Christian conflict that escalated in postcolonial Vietnam.78 Soelle’s articulation of resistance to violence as the heart of mysticism grew out of her interfaith dialogue. Taking Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching of interconnectedness seriously, Soelle emphasizes that the root of violence is the “dissociation of the I.”79 Therefore, violence is overcome when the belief in the I is expanded and transposed until one finally lives “recognizing oneself in everything.”80 This particular quote from Soelle can apply to the social healing of survivors. If genocide and massacre debilitate the survivors and society, as bystanders or perpetrators, to speak about their experiences and to denounce militarized violence, “recognizing oneself in everything” may enable them to overcome the fear and silence fed by military power and to refuse to remain in a state of 77  Gloria Steinem, “From Independence to Interdependence,” Omega Institute Women’s Leadership Conference, 2004, retrieved from https://www.eomega.org/videos/ from-independence-to-interdependence?itm_source_h=search&itm_source_s=search&itm_ medium_h=tile&itm_medium_s=tile&itm_campaign_h=searchcr&itm_campaign_ s=searchcr 78  Chan Khong, Learning True Love: Practicing Buddhism in a Time of War (Berkeley, CA: Parallax, 2006), 77–79. 79  Soelle, The Silent Cry, 263. 80  Soelle, The Silent Cry, 263.

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­ ebilitation. For the practice of “recognizing oneself in everything” debild itates the military tactic of dividing “us” from “them,” and “victims” from “perpetrators,” which can help both survivors and perpetrators see how their lives have been haunted by the same politics of killing but in different ways. The radical recognition of the I in everything erases the separation between bystanders and victims, too. We can see the recovery and expansion of the “I” when the survivors of the massacre at Nogeunri came forward to the public. In 1999, Chon Chun-ja spoke with the Associate Press and subsequently appeared on the front page of The New York Times.81 Chon showed the scars on her belly, wounded by American soldiers’ gunshots. How could she break her fear and silence? Perhaps she saw herself in all suffering beings as she courageously started telling her story with her words. Art Hunter, one of the soldiers who was ordered to shoot refugees at Nogeunri, has been haunted by the images of two old people, a man and a woman hovering above his bed, ever since he stood at the underpass railroad.82 Finally, he came out to speak about what happened at Nogeunri in the summer of 2000. Historian Bruce Cumings notes that Hunter has been haunted by the truth of Nogeunri and unable to reconcile his killing of civilians with his mission to protect and save them.83 Can Chon and Hunter see each other in their “I”? It is difficult but not impossible. Both Chon and Hunter overcame fear and shame and left different traces on the palimpsest of America’s wars. Yang Hae-suk did the same. In the documentary film, Korea: The Never-Ending War broadcasted by PBS when Trump and Kim Jung-un verbally exchanged fire and fury, Yang, in her 80s, told viewers stories about how she lost her eye in the railroad underpass when American soldiers shot people, including her uncle, mother, and other family members. When her eye was shot, she felt something burn and saw her eyeball fall from the socket. She took her eye out to survive.84 Her maimed body testifies to the massacre at Nogeunri while her storytelling expands “I” to the viewers of the film. The expansion of “I” in everything is understood better through Sister Chan Khong and Soelle’s emphasis on the power of interconnectedness as  Cumings, The Korean War, 167.  Cumings, The Korean War, 166. 83  Cumings, The Korean War, 170. 84  Korea: The Never-Ending War, directed by John Maggio (Arlington, Virginia: PBS, 2019). 81 82

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resistance to the dualistic boundary between us and them as well as the oppressed and the oppressors.85 This does not mean that we ignore oppression or blindly forgive oppressors. We must name and analyze oppression. Naming and resisting oppression come from one’s inner power, one’s discerning will not to cooperate with the existing world’s status quo. In addition, empathy with sufferers is the Bodhisattva path or an active form of resistance against “apathy to suffering.”86 Soelle writes that through empathy, one mystically experiences the oneness of joy and suffering which shines forth from the agony present in many experiences of suffering free of numbness.87 In order to resist the destructive power of suffering, one must nurture inner peace and strength, which is possible through one’s faith. This active action can be continuously renewed and refreshed if we courageously let other people’s suffering flow into our hearts and vice versa; we must let their hope and dream flow into our hearts even in the midst of suffering and vice versa. The process of courageously embracing others’ suffering challenges us to rememorialize and retell the suffering of history’s victims (e.g., victims of genocide and wartime massacre) who left the fragments, whispers, and palimpsests of the ruins of war.

Feminist Spiritual Activism: A Politics of Love These two religious women’s spirituality and peace activism lead me to propose feminist spiritual activism as an active form of a politics of love. Feminist spiritual activism first assumes that one’s inner peace and global peace through social transformation are not mutually exclusive. Therefore, religious faith and dialogue for peace do not function, as Soelle says, “within a depoliticized, privatized piety.”88 In our excessively militarized world led by the United States, feminist spiritual activism resists privatized and commercialized spirituality, which only aims to make one feel only good about oneself without being aware of the suffering present in millions of people’s lives. Feminist spiritual activism makes one feel agonized by others’ suffering but simultaneously allows one to experience joy and inner-peace, for instance, through resisting militarized violence, the cause of human suffering and deep solidarity with others. For this reason,  Chan Khong, Learning True Love, 82–92; Soelle, Suffering, 178.  Soelle, The Silent Cry, 104. 87  Soelle, The Silent Cry, 106. 88  Soelle, The Silent Cry, 2001. 85 86

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interfaith dialogue must be aware of and agonized by women’s distinctive suffering caused by military violence and yet it also must send out a global invitation to joy and inner-peace in resistance to militarism. Second, feminist spiritual activism rooted in interconnectedness approaches peace in a holistic way. Peace is present among us when we attempt to eliminate the roots of oppression, such as patriarchal militarism, which denies women’s full humanity. Peace is also present when we practice living harmoniously with others and sharing meals at the Eucharistic table despite our differences. Both Christian and Buddhist feminists understand that women’s true liberation comes only when the roots of oppression are eradicated. Here, we may consider that Christian and Buddhist feminist solidarity for peace. Solidarity is not based upon the assumption of an enforced commonality of oppression, but on the shared political goal to eradicate the roots of oppression without being consumed by oppression as well as deep yearning for wholeness in the world broken by war and violence. Both Soelle and Sister Chang Khong show that solidarity does not come from our same experiences of suffering, but rather from empathy with sufferers, awakening in the joy and mystery of life, and our choice to eradicate oppression by healing the world broken by militarized violence. Interfaith dialogue which is attentive to women’s particular suffering from military violence should utilize the power of empathy so that people of different faiths can share the political goals and visions of peace. For this, we should continue to analyze gendered assumptions within interfaith dialogue for peace and their impact by asking how this dialogue will affect the relationships between women and men globally or locally or on both levels.89 A gender conscious approach to interfaith activism for peace is important in the face of Christian triumphalism. Christian triumphalism is a highly masculinized ideology, marked with aggression, competition, and rationality. In contrast, empathy-based interfaith peace activism invites vulnerability into our lives by sharing one another’s suffering and navigates the uncertain future (not victory) through shared wisdom. Hence, religious feminists continue to challenge their respective traditions to overcome the gender biases embedded in religious teachings and practices. Gender-based military violence such as military rape and prostitution is intertwined with women’s status in their respective societies and 89  Modified from Cynthia Enloe’s gender impact analysis; see Cynthia Enloe, Globalization and Militarism: Feminists make the Link (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 13.

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cultures. Once war breaks out, discrimination and dehumanization of women escalate, unless we filter sexism out of our religions, societies, and interfaith dialogue. Finally, feminist spiritual activism as a politics of love can be manifested through multiple forms, just as Dorothee Soelle and Sister Chan Khong utilize narratives, poetry, silent meditation, peace rallies, eating consciously, and living peacefully with others in their interfaith peace activism. The various religious forms of celebrating life can create further activism against the destructive power of militarism.

Conclusion Analyzing civilian massacres through the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and Christianity during the “hot” Korean War, this chapter has contemplated how interfaith peace activism or a politics of love can overcome a politics of death manifested by war. How to retrieve the traumatic memories of racialized and sexualized massacre, and how to resist war are the main theological points that this chapter has made. If Mbembe’s idea of “necropolitics” or “sovereignty’s right to kill” and Puar’s notion of “right to maim” help us analyze wartime killing and maiming, Alexander’s framing of time as a “palimpsest” offers the theoretical lens to retrieve and holistically read the memories of war. An imagined interfaith dialogue between Christian feminist theologian Dorothee Soelle and Zen Buddhist peace activist Sister Chan Khong suggests a feminist praxis of peacemaking, or a politics of love, and resistance to war and militarism. This activism includes the practices of storytelling and empathy based on awakening to interconnectedness and “I” in everything. Today, feminist spiritual activism is necessary because of the amount of violence, and thus suffering, affecting so many people worldwide. I hope interfaith feminist spiritual activism or a politics of love will bring concrete hope for peace in the lives of many people who live with memories of war and make their suffering visible before it is too late. Closing this chapter, I reflect on ghosts born out of America’s wars. On April 28, 2004, CBS’s 60 Minutes II broadcasted the disturbing images from the prison facilities at Abu Ghraib: smiling male and female American soldiers posed for picture around stripped Iraqi prisoners, who were in

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various positions exposing their genitalia.90 Since then, there have been numerous scholarly articles, books, and films analyzing the “ghosts” of Abu Graib. Particularly, HBO’s documentary film, Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, critically investigates what changed average American soldiers into torturers and how the Abu Ghraib scandal undermined America’s credibility as a global defender of freedom. Soldiers interviewed in the film unequivocally testified that the war in Iraq and the prison facilities at Abu Ghraib turned them into monsters and robots that lost the senses of morality they had in the outside world. However, monsters and robots were ‘manufactured’ when the Bush administration blatantly rejected the Geneva Conventions and other restrictions, including the prohibition of torture of prisoners of war, which should have been applicable to Al-Qaeda. The administration refused to implement the Geneva Conventions in Afghanistan and Iraq only because Al-Qaeda was a terrorist group.91 While Abu Ghraib still haunts many Americans, they may not know about North Korean soldiers stripped in front of armed GIs. When North Korean soldiers were captured during General McArthur’s famous Incheon operation, benchmarked the Normandy operation  during the World War II, they were forced to parade stark naked by Americans. News correspondents called this parade a “parade of shame.”92 But whose shame? Similar to the questions raised by the film Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, historian Cuming questions who should feel ashamed—America’s shame or North Korea’s shame?93 If we consciously look at the palimpsest of America’s wars, racializing and sexually shaming enemies did not suddenly happen at Abu Ghraib in 2003 but had left the trace at Incheon, the port city west of Seoul in 1950. Ghosts of Abu Ghraib are also ghosts of the war in Korea (perhaps also in Vietnam, Wounded Knees, Auschwitz, Golgotha, and many other places). These ghosts evoke shame, guilt, sorrow, and fear among the living. May these ghosts be liberated from all war memories someday!

90  Michael Clemens and Christopher Graveline, The Secrets of Abu Ghraib Revealed (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), ix. 91  Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, directed and produced by Rory Kennedy, Films On Demand. 2007, https://fod.infobase.com/PortalPlaylists.aspx?wID=238316&xtid=39151 92  Cumings, The Korean War, 82–83. 93  Cumings, The Korean War, 83.

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Bibliography Alexander, M.  Jacqui. 2005. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditation on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham: Duke University. Baker, Peter, and Choe Sang-Hun. 2017. Trump Threatens ‘Fire and Fury’ Against North Korea if It Endangers US. The New  York Times, August 8. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/08/world/asia/north-­k orea-­u n-­ sanctions-­nuclear-­missile-­united-­nations.html. Chan Khong. 2006. Learning True Love: Practicing Buddhism in a Time of War. Berkeley: Parallax. Cho, Grace M. 2008. Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Clausewitz, Carl Von. 2013. On War: All Volumes. New  York: Charles River Editors. Kindle edition. Clemens, Michael, and Christopher Graveline. 2007. The Secrets of Abu Ghraib Revealed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Cook, Martin L. 2014. United States I. In Religion in the Military Worldwide, ed. Ron Hassner, 181–195. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cumings, Bruce. 1997. Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History. New York: W. W. Norton. ———. 2011. The Korean War: A History. New  York: A Modern Library Chronicles Books. Enloe, Cynthia. 2007. Globalization and Militarism: Feminists make the Link. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Gartner, Scott Sigmund, and Marissa Edson Myers. 1995. Body Counts and ‘Success’ in the Vietnam and Korean Wars. Journal of Interdisciplinary History xxv (3): 377–395. Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. 2007. Directed by Rory Kennedy, Films On Demand. https://fod.infobase.com/PortalPlaylists.aspx?wID=238316&xtid=39151. Heo, Hojoon. 2023. 4.3: 19470301–19540921. Seoul: Hyehwa 1117. International Council of Christian Churches. https://iccc-­churches.org. Jager, Sheila Miyoshi. 2014. Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea. New York: W. W. Norton. Joh, Wonhee Anne. 2019. Affective Politics of the Unending Korean War. In Religion, Emotion, Sensation: Affect Theories and Theologies, ed. Karen Bray et al., 85–109. New York: Fordham University Press. Kim, Dong Choon. 2004. Forgotten War, Forgotten Massacres–the Korean War (1950–1953) as Licensed Mass Killings. Journal of Genocide Research 6 (4): 523–544. Kim, Gi-jin. 2005. The Korean War and Civilian Massacre: The First Testimony of the US Secret Documents. Seoul: Pureum Yeoksa (Korean).

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Kim, Jodi. 2010. Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Kim, Dong Choon. 2016. War and Society: What Does the Korean War Mean to Us? (Jeonjaenggwa Sahwi: Urieigei Hankuk Jeonjaengeun Mueotieotna). Paju: Dolbeigei. E-book edition (Korean). Kim, Suzy. 2019. The Origins of Cold War Feminism During the Korean War. Gender and History 31 (2): 460–479. https://doi.org/10.1111/ 1468-­0424.12433. Korea: The Never-Ending War. 2019. Directed by John Maggio. Arlington: PBS. Kwon, Heonik. 2012. Ghosts of War in Vietnam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LaDuke, Winona. 2013. The Militarization of the Indian Country. Lansing: Makwa Enewed. Lee, Jung Yong. 1999. A Life In-Between. In Journeys at the Margin: Toward an Autobiographical Theology in American-Asian Perspective, ed. Peter Phan and Jung Young Lee, 23–39. Collegeville: The Liturgical Press. Marshall, S.L.A. 1963. The Military History of the Korean War. New  York: Franklin Watts. Mbembe, Achilles. 2019. Necropolitics. Trans. Steve Corcoran. Durham: Duke University Press. Moon, Seung Sook. 2010. Regulating Desire, Managing the Empire: US Military Prostitution in South Korea, 1945—1970. In Over There: Living with the US Military Empire from World War Two to the Present, ed. Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon, 39–77. Durham: Duke University Press. National Medal of Honor Museum. ‘The Chosin Few’–Remembrances. https:// mohmuseum.org/chosinreservoir/#:~:text=The%20US%20X%20Corps%20 and,losses%20were%20significant%20as%20well. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. 2016. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Niebuhr, Reinhold. 1952. The Irony of American History. New York: Charles and Scribner’s Sons; reprint, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pae, Keun-joo Christine. 2016. Faith-based Popular Resistance to the Naval Base in Gangjeong of Jeju: Transforming Militarized US-Korea Relations for Peace and Justice. In Critical Theology against US Militarism in Asia: Decolonization and Deimperialization, ed. Nami Kim and Wonhee Anne Joh, 199–216. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Park, Sujin. 2017. The Korean Council for the Women Forcefully Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan Apologizes to Vietnamese Women for Korean Soldiers’ Raping Women during the War in Vietnam. Hangyeorei Newspaper, September 14. https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/society/society_general/ 811073.html.

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Peters, Richard Peters, and Xiaobing Li. 2004. Voices from the Korean War: Personal Stories of American, Korean, and Chinese Soldiers. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Puar, Jasbir. 2017. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, and Disability. Durham: Duke University Press. Ruotsila, Markku. 2015. Fighting Fundamentalist: Carl McIntire and the Politicization of American Fundamentalism. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Shin, Gi-cheol. 2014. The People Are Not Enemies (Gukmineun Jeoki Anida). Seoul: Hertz9. Soelle, Dorothee. 1975. Suffering. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ———. 2001. The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Steinem, Gloria. 2004. From Independence to Interdependence. In Omega Institute Women’s Leadership Conference, retrieved from https://www.eomega.org/ videos/from-­independence-­to-­interdependence?itm_source_h=search&itm_ source_s=search&itm_medium_h=tile&itm_medium_s=tile&itm_campaign_ h=searchcr&itm_campaign_s=searchcr. Townes, Emilie. 2006. Womanist Ethics and Cultural Production of Evil. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Truman, Harry. Proclamation 2914––Proclaiming the Existence of a National Emergency, December 16, 1950. The American Presidency Project. Santa Barbara: University of California. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-­2914-­proclaiming-­the-­existence-­national-­emergency. US Army Center of Military History. The Korean War Chronology. https://history.army.mil/reference/korea/kw-­chrono.htm#phase03. Woo, Susie. 2019. Framed by War: Korean Children and Women at the Crossroads of US Empire. New York: New York University Press. Wrights, James. 2013. What We Learned from the Korean War. The Atlantic. July 23. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/what-­we-­ learned-­from-­the-­korean-­war/278016/. Yoon, Jeong-ran. 2015. The Korean War and Protestantism. Seoul: Hanul Academy.

CHAPTER 6

The Diasporic Body of Jesus: A Feminist Ethic of Diasporas

Diasporas in Feminist Theological Consciousness The term “diaspora” arouses unexplainable sorrow, feelings of antagonism, and nostalgia for something lost or forgotten forever among the displaced. Homelessness, uprootedness, and tragedies paint the images of people in diasporas, especially if they are forced to leave their homes and familiar territories. In our contemporary world, diaspora is often associated with the forced “dispersion” of people because of war, violence, construction of US bases, poverty, political corruption, and climate change. Although I am a diasporic subject, it took me a long time to picture myself in the global diaspora (i.e., the Asian diaspora) because I left my home in Korea by choice and have frequently visited home since then. As my days in the United States turned to years, I became disillusioned with the “better” options that this country may have for a person like me who is marginalized and invisible. In addition, I realized that my resettlement in the United States was tied to US-Korea relations and US foreign policy. From a Buddhist perspective, what I have chosen (effect) is already conditioned by the larger global politics (cause). My cultural, social, and racial marginalization stems from transpacific migration—physical, emotional, geopolitical, and metaphorical uprootedness. Like many diasporic subjects, I have lived in-between and betwixt spaces, negotiating multiple legal institutions, the political climate in various places, foreign policies, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. C. Pae, A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43766-3_6

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different cultures, inter and intra-religious diversity, and racial politics “here” and “there.” Here and there have been interchangeable in my life. Even if I physically live in the United States, Central Ohio in particular, my home still seems to lie over “there” on the east coast of South Korea. I have never overcome feelings of alienation or not-belonging “here” (the US). Simultaneously, I do not belong there, either. Although I insist on my spiritual, cultural, physical, and even political belonging to South Korea (there), Korean society pushes me to the margin. My children and I are pejoratively called “black-haired foreigners” in Korea who may take advantage of Korea’s universal healthcare system and social welfare. A physical, social, and cultural distance between South Korea and me eventually awakened me to a diasporic consciousness. Discomfort from the discrepancy between a physical home and a spiritual/metaphoric/symbolic home is part of my everyday life. At the same time, I see a new world or horizon emerging from a mysterious space of transformation, in-­ between space, nepantla or the borderland, the spaces of interstices.1 Where can I trace God, the Divine, or the Sacred in my migration stories, along with those of many diasporic subjects? How can a diasporic subject live without losing her sense of personhood or the meaning of life? Vietnamese American Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi begins her book Archipelago of Resettlement with the Vietnamese mythology of creation: According to Vietnamese mythology, Vietnam was born out of the consummation of water and land. Âu Cơ , the mountain fairy, fell in love with Lạc Long Quân, the sea dragon king. Together they produced a hundred human children, Bách Việt. But Âu Cơ longed for the mountains, and Lạc Long Quân longed for the sea, and so they separated, dividing their children across the lands and waters of Vietnam.2

The Vietnamese are the children of land and ocean who have been divided and resettled in different lands and islands across various oceans. The Vietnamese folktale holds a glimpse of the Divine. After America’s war in Vietnam, Vietnamese refugees resettled in Guam, the US, Australia, and even Israel beyond the Pacific Ocean. Their stories of resettlement convey the complex international politics behind every diasporic subject. At the 1  Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, edited by AnaLouise Keating (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 28. 2  Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Archipelago of Resettlement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022), 1.

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same time, these stories of survival wisdom express Divine mysteries that can be accessed only through legends and folktales. Although I am not Vietnamese, I strangely see myself among the children of Âu Cơ and Lạc Long Quân, divided and dispersed all over the world, and Jesus becoming the collective body of these children. Perhaps, once I am awakened to diasporic consciousness, I could see myself in someone else’s diasporic stories and vice versa, or I experience the power of storytelling and glimpse Jesus in these stories. This chapter ponders two interrelated questions: (1) how Jesus can be imagined as the collective subjectivity of diasporas without romanticizing diasporas, and (2) how diasporic subjects hold their integrity living in multiple institutions, cultures, and fragmented spaces. These two questions are inseparable from Christian transnational feminist ethics of diasporas because ethics is a series of questions about how one should live. The (imagined) life of Jesus often gives a model of life to many people, including his followers in first-century Palestine and our contemporary world, mystics, and non-religious folks. The two questions require critical analysis of diasporas, spiritual contemplation on life in the diaspora, and renewed ways of imagining Jesus, the Divine, and the Sacred. As the biblical narrative of the resettlement of Jesus implies, the resettlement of one group can mean the dispersion of another group or political competition and conflict between resettled groups and indigenous populations. When Jesus’s family was temporarily relocated to Egypt to escape King Herod’s death threat, Herod killed thousands of baby boys under two-years of age in and around Bethlehem. (Gospel of Matthew 2:16). Similarly, for indigenous Hawaiians, Asian immigration to Hawai’i in the early twentieth century and onward meant another chapter of settler colonialism. Another example of the complex ways the dispersal of one people intrudes upon an indigenous population is that between 1977 and 1979, 366 Vietnamese refugees were granted asylum and later citizenship in Israel, the first case of the Israeli government granting citizenship to non-­ Jewish subjects.3 The foundation of the state of Israel meant resettlement for many  Jews in the diaspora for survival but forced displacement for indigenous Palestinians, who still demand the right to life with dignity. The resettlement of Vietnamese refugees in Israel-Palestine resulted from the entanglement between America’s war in Vietnam and the US support

3

 Gandhi, Archipelago of Resettlement, 7.

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for Israel, particularly in the period from 1967 to 1975.4 1967 signifies the Six-Day War between Israel and Arab countries. Through the war, Israel was able to occupy the entirety of Jerusalem and take the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt. In 1975, Saigon fell into the hands of North Vietnam. Gandhi raises the critical question of whether the archipelago of Vietnamese resettlement in Guam, where the US military processed more than 112,000 Vietnamese refugees during the first six months after the fall of Saigon, the United States, where the largest Vietnamese population resides outside Vietnam, and Israel-Palestine show divisions among refugees and indigenous populations or possibilities of decolonizing transnational solidarity.5 Namely, do the dispersed children of Âu Cơ and Lạc Long Quân embody indefinite divisions or yearn for unity and creative relationalities among themselves and with other indigenous populations? If all these uncomfortable, unromantic, and complicated stories of diasporas were considered, one might wonder how a diasporic subject can live with integrity or practice interstitial integrity without maiming or harming other diasporic and indigenous populations. Even Jesus’s story may be unable to answer that, as his diasporic story began with the deaths of innocent babies. Nonetheless, I theo-ethically and critically meditate on diasporas. My meditation begins with the typologies and biblical meanings of diasporas. Then, while traveling imaginatively through different borders, historical moments, and spaces, I deliberate on border crossing, colonial and imperial diasporas, and the meanings of “home” where a diasporic consciousness arises. This chapter imaginatively, interreligiously, and interspiritually weaves diverse stories and images of diasporas from the US-Mexican border, Japan, South Korea, the Pacific Ocean, and Southeast Asia, searching for a liberative diasporic consciousness. Such a liberative diasporic consciousness would help us see Jesus as the collective subjectivity of diasporas who inspires all his followers and disciples to live in diasporas.

4 5

 Gandhi, Archipelago of Resettlement, 22.  Gandhi, Archipelago of Resettlement, 2–3, 7.

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Framing Diaspora Martin Bauman’s short essay “Exile” differentiates “exile” from “diaspora.” While both terms have biblical origins in Jewish experiences of displacement, “exile” refers to forced geopolitical and physical displacement generally caused by a nation-state.6 In addition, exile is seldom associated with “religious connotations or sentiments,” such as a soteriological imagination that God will call all of God’s dispersed children on earth and save them.7 This observation suggests that a diaspora discourse moves beyond the physical and political displacement expressed by the word “exile.” If “exile” throws critical light on people’s lived experiences of displacement often by a nation-state, “diaspora” includes the spiritual, emotional, cultural, and symbolic interpretations of those experiences and their transnational and intergenerational impact. In this chapter, with some cautions, I use diasporic language more inclusively, applying it to populations outside their original homelands. More specifically, my understanding of diasporas relies on the four basic features of a diaspora articulated by Robin Cohen, one of the early diasporic studies scholars: diasporic subjects are (1) members of a defined group who have been dispersed to many destinations at the same time or over different periods; (2) they construct a shared identity not simply based on race/ethnicity but rather, culture, language, religion, historical memories, and so on; (3) they still somewhat orient themselves to an original ‘home’; and (4) they demonstrate an affinity with other members of the group dispersed to other places.8 To help people understand the complexities of a diaspora (indeed, no definition of a diaspora would be sufficient), Cohen further deliberates on six typologies of diasporas: victim, labor, imperial, trade, deterritorialized, and incipient. As the name suggests, a victim diaspora is usually formed by “a calamitous dispersal, a rupture of ordinary life so profound that its relocation becomes inscribed into the subsequent collective memory of the group.”9 The relocation of war refugees represents this type of diaspora. Also,

6  Martin Bauman, “Exile,” in Diasporas: Concepts, Intersections, Identities, edited by Kim Knott and Seán McLoughlin (London, UK: Zed Books, 2013), 23. 7  Bauman, “Exile,” 23. 8  Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (London, UK: Routledge, 2022), 1. 9  Cohen, Global Diasporas, 11.

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gender and sexual minorities who left their homelands due to religious, legal, and sexual persecution can represent a victim diaspora. For instance, in 2009, Kyung-hwan Kim, a gay Korean pacifist, became the first Korean granted refugee status in Canada based on one’s sexual identity and conscientious objection to war. The Canadian government acknowledged the possibility of physical, sexual, and psychological violence against Kim if he served in the military in Korea, where 21-month compulsory military service is assigned to all able-bodied Korean men.10 Since the institutionalized military is the core of heteropatriarchal Korean sovereignty, Kim was defamed as a betrayer of the country as soon as his news hit the Korean media. The public threw homophobic slurs at him.11 However, the Korean public missed that Kim was already displaced within a Korean sovereignty constructed upon heteropatriarchal militarism. Long before he left the country voluntarily and involuntarily, he had lived a diasporic life in his own country because of his queer identity and political views. While most people focus on Kim’s queerness in his diasporic story, I wonder whether his pacifism can be separated from his sexual orientation. Any male pacifists in an excessively militarized country could be viewed as “queer” who denounce  their masculinities  and masculinized social values to be proved through their military service. To live faithfully with what he believes in (pacifism), Kim also had to leave Korea, where the compulsory military system does not respect conscientious objection to war. Since Kim, a few other gay Koreans have applied for asylum in Australia and Canada. Thus, Kim began a Korean queer diaspora, or rather, a queer diaspora has emerged in the Korean diaspora, thanks to Kim. Interestingly, in 2011, the Korean government granted asylum to two gay men from Pakistan and Nigeria, respectively, because Muslims and their respective governments could prosecute them if they were sent back to their home countries.12 As long as male diasporic subjects don’t

10  Lee Hyo-sik, “Gay Korean Gets Refugee Status in Canada,” The Korea Times, December 15, 2011, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2021/11/113_100898.html 11  I have not found any scholarly approaches to Kyung-hwan Kim’s diasporic case in English or in Korea. However, when I accessed various types of the Korean media that reported Kim’s asylum case in Canada, many readers responded to news reports with homophobic slurs. 12  Andrew Wolman, “Asylum for Persecuted Homosexuals in the Republic of Korea,” Forced Migration Review 22 (2013), https://www.fmreview.org/sites/fmr/files/ FMRdownloads/en/sogi/wolman.pdf

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interfere with Korea’s heteropatriarchal military system, they can stay in Korea. Labor and trade diasporas signify political and economic power differentials among diasporic subjects, as the former usually represents indentured laborers’ experiences, while the latter describes ethnic entrepreneurship. An imperial diaspora is “formed by settlers abroad to protect trade, exploit resources and local labor, and consolidate the power of an expanding empire.”13 A deterritorialized diaspora shows the formation of postcolonial, hybridized, and fragmented identities of diasporic subjects such as the Caribbean peoples (i.e., Black Atlantic diasporas). Deterritorialized diasporas indicate no-fixed homelands but the movements of culture, religion, ideas, peoples, and goods that form the diasporic identity rather than the physical or idealized home of ancestors.14 Finally, incipient diasporas refer to a group of migrants, including indentured laborers and refugees, who have assimilated or substantially integrated into their settlement societies instead of returning to their homelands.15 An individual and an ethnic group may experience multiple forms of diasporas simultaneously and change the character of their diasporas. For example, at the turn of the twentieth century, the first mass transpacific migration of East Asians represented a labor and trade diaspora. However, Asian American studies scholars point out that transpacific migration is inseparable from the historical intimacy between the Japanese and US empires. The indentured Koreans in the Americas at the turn of the twentieth century can be categorized as a labor diaspora. Still, they were victims of poverty and the Japanese annexation of Korea, similar to the Irish diaspora during the potato famine in the nineteenth century (victim diaspora). Furthermore, as discussed in a previous chapter, Korean American sociologist Grace M. Cho argues that the Korean diaspora has been haunted by the transpacific migration of Western Princesses (yanggongju), who have sexually catered to American soldiers stationed in Korea since World War II.16 The collective memories of the Korean War (1950–1953) associated with shame, guilt, and trauma, which Western  Cohen, Global Diasporas, 12–13.  Cohen, Global Diasporas, 14–15. 15  Cohen, Global Diasporas, 15–16. 16  See Grace Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008), 130–132. 13 14

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Princesses embody, are deeply ingrained in the Korean diaspora, particularly in the transpacific space.17 However, the Korean War was not a calamitous event that suddenly dispersed Koreans to foreign territories but instead displaced them internally. Nonetheless, due to the deep trauma caused by the Korean War, the collective memory of the war is inscribed in the Korean diaspora. Cohen’s typology of diasporas is useful, like a map for navigating diasporic consciousness in the complexities and heterogeneity among diasporic subjects and their lived experiences.

Vulnerability of Transnational/ Transborder Crossing Maria Mesa, a 39-year-old Honduran mother of five, had walked for months to get to the US–Mexican border in Tijuana. Taking five children with her on the foot journey from Central America to North America, Mesa desired to reunite with her husband living in Louisiana in the US.18 Mesa’s family was part of the so-called Central American caravan who fled political turmoil, armed conflict, and abject poverty in their home countries (a victim diaspora). Yet, the term “caravan,” which originated from groups of North African and Western Asian merchants traveling through deserts (a trade diaspora), may not limn the dispersion of Central and South Americans whose survival is precarious here and there. Indeed, they do not travel to trade goods. Kyung-Hoon Kim is a South Korean photographer for Reuters, living in Tokyo, Japan. In 2018, he and other Reuters photography staff started journeying with caravans from Mexico City to the San Ysidro Crossing linking Tijuana, Mexico, to San Diego, United States. In November 2018, Kim captured a photo of Mesa and her five-year-old twin daughters fleeing 17  According to the records from the US Embassy in Korea in 1988, a statistical average of fifteen relatives followed every military bride to the United States. Most Korean G.I. wives from 1950s to 1980s were Western Princesses. These women are the backbone of Korean American communities in major US cities. See Ji-yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America (New York University Press, 2004), 109. 18  Gabe Gutierrez and Corky Siemaszko, “Photographer Reveals Story behind Iconic Image of Fleeing Migrants at Mexico Border,” NBC News, November 26, 2018, https:// www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/photographer-reveals-story-behind-iconic-photo-fleeingmigrants-mexico-border-n940271

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frantically from smoking tear gas fired by US border protection agents. They were among the peaceful protesters marching along the Mexican side of the border walls. Kim’s photo brought international attention to the Trump administration’s brutal immigration policy of indiscriminately attacking border-crossers, including Mesa’s children, as if they were criminals, terrorists, and threats to US security.19 Kim and his Reuters colleagues received the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Photography for the series of photos of Central American caravans, including Mesa and her children.20 Border crossing signifies physical movements and, simultaneously, legal movements from one sovereignty to another. While crossing borders, diasporic subjects, such as Mesa and her children, must pass through multiple geopolitical and legal institutions and successfully prove themselves harmless to the communities where they permanently or temporarily stay. Legal, political, and economic vulnerability is not equally distributed among diasporic subjects. Mesa’s life-and-death situation at the US-Mexican border is incompatible with the experiences of tourists or trade diasporas. If prematurely developed, the notions of cosmopolitanism and global citizenship would romanticize transnational movements, excluding the experiences of Central American caravans, and fail to interrogate the complexities of the victim and labor diasporas. In the smokey borderland, Mesa and her children embody what Gloria Anzaldúa lamented: “The US-Mexican border es una berida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.”21 Transborder migration, particularly for poor third-world women, is dangerous—death and violence are ubiquitous. In part, the danger is caused by their non-­ belonging status: they are stateless migrants not claimed by any nation-­ state politically and metaphorically. Mesa could not belong to Honduras because the Honduran government does not or cannot protect poor women and landless farmers  from economic violence and para-militia attacks. She belongs neither to Mexico nor to the United States. Non-­ belonging means no systematic or institutional protection. Hence, 19  Megan Specia and Rick Gladstone, “Border Agents Shot Tear Gas into Mexico. Was It Legal?” The New York Times, November 28, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/28/ world/americas/tear-gas-border.html 20  “Photography Staff of Reuters,” The Pulitzer Prizes, The 2019 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Breaking News, https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/photography-staff-reuters-1 21  Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007), 25.

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non-belongers cannot prove their harmlessness to others. Their survival depends only on global citizens of conscience or Good Samaritans on the road. In Kim’s photo, Mesa’s pink Disney animation Frozen t-shirt and her daughters’ saggy diapers display simultaneously US cultural power and a caravan’s taxing journey. Perhaps Mesa’s daughters had to wear diapers because they were unable to potty on the road. Indeed, the visual images, especially those of suffering human bodies, invoke many indescribable emotions among the viewers. However, we should also be keenly aware that images can be manipulated by producers and viewers. The images of Mesa, like Jesus bloody on the cross, can be the theological site for viewers to empathize with suffering and interrogate the causes of human suffering. At the same time, those images show only temporalities of human suffering. We need more than suffering images in order to meditate on the deeper meanings of life beyond the realities of human suffering and to build cross-border solidarity in diasporic spaces. We should develop critical skills to read the full stories and collective memories hidden and embedded behind the images.

Colonial and Imperial Diasporas Central American caravans remind me of a colonial and an imperial diaspora. Slightly different from Cohen’s typology of diasporas, I intentionally differentiate a colonial diaspora from an imperial diaspora to emphasize the power differential between colonized and imperial subjects on their diasporic roads. If colonized subjects experience ruptured dispersion due to the colonization of their homelands, imperial subjects cross borders as their sovereignty expands beyond their home territories. In many cases, both diasporas reflect labor and trade diasporas, although a colonial diaspora shares many elements of a victim diaspora. These two diasporas are created by colonialism but offer different entry points to critical reflection on diasporas. Moving now from the US–Mexican border, I turn my attention to Japan, where a mass resettlement of Koreans took place during the Japanese colonial period on the Korean Peninsula. The relocation of Koreans to Japan suggests the patterns of colonial, victim, labor, trade, and, finally, incipient diasporas. While I contemplated the possible collective memories of displaced Hondurans behind Kim’s photo from the US-Mexican border, Kim’s physical location in Tokyo caught my eyes, reminding me of the presence

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of Zainichi Koreans in the history of the Korean diaspora.22 Along with Korean Chinese (Joseonjok) and Goryeoin in Central Asia and Russia, Zainichi Koreans embody a tragic chapter of Korean history. All these Korean diasporas, as well as those in the Americas, began in the fin de siècle when Euro-American empires colonized 90% of the world. At that time, imperial Japan arose as an Asian-Pacific superpower and prepared to annex Korea after it had won the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). Both wars were fought on the Korean peninsula. The dispersion of Koreans caused by imperial wars and, subsequently, colonization invokes feelings of sorrow or a collective trauma among diasporic Koreans, as ethnic Koreans collectively remember Japanese colonialism followed by the Korean War. Zainichi Koreans illuminate the colonial and imperial impact on diasporas and possible ways of decolonizing diasporas. Zainichi Koreans are usually referred to as Korean emigrants and their descendants from colonial Korea who remained in Japan after their country’s liberation in 1945.23 Over two million Koreans lived in Japan at the end of World War II, primarily representing labor and victim diasporas. Many of these Koreans were draftees of the Japanese colonial government who were forced to fill the labor shortage in Japan at the height of the Pacific War. After Korea won a sudden independence from imperial Japan on August 15, 1945, as many as 1.4 million Koreans were repatriated to Korea.24 However, the Koreans’ journey back home was deadly. On August 24, after a mysterious explosion, the Ukishima Maru, the first Japanese naval vessel carrying Korean laborers and their families to Korea, sank in the

 Kyung-Hoon Kim is not a zainich Korean but a South Korean national working in Japan.  Hawon Jang, “Special Permanent Residents in Japan: Zainichi Korean,” The Yale Review of International Studies (2019), http://yris.yira.org/comments/2873; The Japanese government does not distinguish post-World War II Korean immigrants from colonial immigrants. 24  Between 1939 and 1945 during the height of the Pacific War, imperial Japan sent roughly two million Korean civilians overseas: 200,000 soldiers, 200,000 civilian employees of the military, 720,000 forced laborers, 300,000 members of the volunteer labor corps, 80,000–200,000 comfort women, and 500,000 agricultural laborers in Manchuria. See Keun-joo Christine Pae, “Factory Girls, Comfort Girls: A Feminist Theo-Ethical Reflection on Korean Girl Soldiers in Japanese Empire,” in Female Child Soldiering, Gender Violence, and Feminist Theologies, edited by Susan Willhauck (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 115. 22 23

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Maizuru Gulf near Kyoto.25 While Korean survivors claim that between 5000 and 8000 Koreans died in the seas, these victims do not exist in official Japanese records.26 The unrecorded victims do not have a history but are absent, leaving a big hole and crack in the collective memories of the Korean diaspora. This hole is a source of haunting, grief, and silence; they are present in their absence. Survivors of the Ukishima Maru and victims’ families still demand that the Korean and Japanese governments thoroughly investigate the Ukishima incident. According to Grace Cho, the wrecked Ukishima Maru made a “phantomatic return” to the ship transporting Korean survivors of the Japanese military “comfort” women system from Japan to Korea, and once again, to the lives of yanggongju GI brides who crossed the Pacific Ocean with shame and guilt, but simultaneously strange hopes and dreams.27 The Ukishima Maru, the ship, haunts other global diasporas. The Ukishima might have made its phantomatic return to Vietnamese refugee boats on the high seas of the Pacific. Or the ship might have encountered the ghosts of the Zong. The Zong was a British ship built to hold approximately 220 people but sailed with between 442 and 470 African captives toward Jamaica from Cape Coast. In the Caribbean, the captain and crew ran short of water and food, so they murdered or threw 142 enslaved people into the sea. When the Zong arrived in Jamaica on December 22, 1781, only 208 living Africans were on board. Since each African captive had a price tag and insurance value, the captain and crew claimed that they

25  Kim, Min-hee. “Underwater Monument to Be Set Up in Memory of Ukishima Victims.” The Korea Herald, August 12, 1999. https://advance-lexis-com.denison.idm.oclc.org/api/ document?collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:3X62-9K60-007K-G16X00000-00&context=1516831 26  Lee Jae-ho, “Survivors of the Ukishima: Find Truth before We All Die,” Hangyerei 21, August 13, 2019. https://h21.hani.co.kr/arti/cover/cover_general/47457.html; The Japanese government officially announced that 3785 boarded on the Ukishima, but the survivors of the Ukishima claimed that more than 7500 people sailed on the ship and more than 5000 died. They also argue that it is unclear who exploded the ship. No official investigation of the Ukishima explosion has been conducted. In 1999, the underwater monument in remembrance of Ukishima victims was erected by the committee of Koreans who demanded truth about the Ukishima incident (See Kim, “Underwater Monument to Be Set Up in Memory of Ukishima Victims”). 27  Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora, 173–175 and 182.

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sacrificed the diseased bodies among the captives to protect the valuable cargo (both African captives and goods) on the ship.28 Japanese Korean American scholar Sonia Ryang summarizes the multiple stages of Zainichi Koreans’ transformation: “First as colonial immigrants, then as stateless people, and more recently, as permanent residents with cultural and economic roots built in Japan and with little to no possibility of returning to their ancestral homes in Korea.”29 These stages correspond to the changes of diasporic character from a victim to an incipient diaspora. In addition, the transformation of Zainichi Koreans from living in a “colonial metropolis to postcolonial temporary station” or from an unwelcoming place to an adopted home illustrates how their lives are caught between Japan and Korea.30 To be sure, the Zainichi Koreans are not a homogeneous group. Among Zainichi Koreans, those from Jeju Island demonstrate the colonial and postcolonial political trauma inflicted on the diasporic body. During the colonial period, approximately 50,000 Jeju islanders lived in Japan.31 After Korean independence, many of these islanders, who had expatriated to Japan as guest workers in the agricultural sector, forced laborers in the military-industrial complex, or drafted soldiers, returned to their hometowns. These repatriates had critical views on the intersection of the class system with colonialism, so they had a more vigorous nationalist and socialist political agenda than Korean mainlanders did.32 However, the Korea, occupied by the US military (1945–1948), was in despair. Due to the US military government’s failed economic policy, Jeju, in particular, did not have enough jobs or food for repatriates. To make matters worse, a cholera outbreak deteriorated the living conditions on the island. Many Jeju repatriates crossed the Korea Straits, the 28  Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 35–37. 29  Sonia Ryang, “Space and Time: The Experience of the ‘Zainishi,’ The Ethnic Korean Population of Japan,” Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development vol. 43 no. 4 (2014): 522, https://www.jstor.org/stable/ 24643204 30  Ryang, “Space and Time,” 522. 31  Heo Hojoon, 4.3: 19470301–19540921 (Seoul, Korea: Hyehwa1117, 2023), 140 (Korean). 32  Keun-joo Christine Pae, “Faith-Based Popular Resistance to the Naval Base in Gangjeong of Jeju: Transforming Militarized US–Korea Relations for Peace and Justice,” in Critical Theology against US Militarism in Asia: Decolonization and Deimperialization, ed. Nami Kim and Wonhee Anne Joh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 205.

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narrow sea between Korea and Japan, again, this time illegally. As the number of Korean smugglers in Japan increased, in 1946, the US military government in Korea prohibited anyone from crossing borders by any means without permission.33 Until early 1947, abject poverty was why Jeju islanders left for Japan. In 1948–1949, the massacre of civilians on the island carried out by the US and the Korean military led people to sail to Japan. Many Jeju locals were smuggled into Japan even after the 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement, as late as 1965 when South Korea and Japan reestablished their diplomatic relationship. Between 1953 and 1965, almost 1000 Jeju smugglers were arrested at ports in Korea and Japan or while sailing on the sea.34 The collective trauma of a Jeju diaspora in Japan is caused by the massacre of civilians in Jeju, known as Jeju 4.3, analyzed in the previous chapter. A postcolonial diaspora embodied by Jeju islanders in Japan does not fit logically in Cohen’s typology of diasporas because their home dispersed them instead of giving them a culturally and ethnically shared root of their identity. The lives of Zainichi Koreans mirror Korea–Japan relations, South Korea’s economic development, global sanctions on North Korea, and Japan’s political economy. For instance, Zainichi Koreans were stateless until 1965, when South Korea and Japan reestablished their diplomatic relationship. In 1964, the total Zainichi population was approximately 580,000, including 8000 originally from northern Korea.35 The 1965 Basic Treaties between Korea and Japan protected the legal status of Zainichi Koreans by allowing them to get South Korean nationality in order to apply for permanent residency in Japan. However, most Zainichi Koreans opted out of the opportunity mainly for two reasons. First, they saw the separation of the two Koreas as temporary. Second, the oppressive American military authorities in Japan left Zainichi Koreans disillusioned with an American military-controlled South Korea. As a result, they supported nationalist socialism and favored the North Korean regime until the 1980s.36 Today, approximately 30,000 pro-North Korea Zainichi Koreans still remain stateless.37 For the past thirty years, more and more Zainichi Koreans, especially third and fourth-generation, have pursued  Heo, 4.3, 139.  Heo, 4.3, 140. 35  Ryang, “Space and Time,” 524. 36  Ryang, “Space and Time,” 525. 37  Jang, “The Special Permanent Residents in Japan,” 4–5. 33 34

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naturalization as they started critically reflecting on ethnicity separate from nationality.38 These ethnic Koreans in Japan represent some aspects of deterritorial and incipient diasporas. At first, they belonged neither to Korea nor to Japan, but now they embrace both Korean and Japanese identities without splitting them into two national and political entities. While most Zainichi Koreans have been excluded from Japanese society, living in impoverished ghettos for a century, many Japanese settlers in Korea made a fortune in Japan’s newly acquired territory during the colonial period. By 1945, over 700,000 Japanese civilians had settled in Korea. They were “merchants, traders, prostitutes, journalists, teachers, and continental adventurers who, in remaking their lives on the peninsula, also helped to make their nation’s empire.”39 Japanese migrants in Korea were a mixture of the middle and lower class in their home country. Some of them, of course, did not make a fortune in Korea. Still, they did not experience racial/ethnic discrimination or live in impoverished ghettos in Korea. These Japanese expatriates could be considered victims of Japanese colonialism and war. When the Japanese empire collapsed, they were re-­ displaced to Japan, leaving behind what they had accumulated in Korea. They lived in “self-imposed silence or kept their memories private, out of shame or fear of association with [their nation’s] militarist past.”40 Japanese imperial citizens in Korea do not show traces of a diaspora but they were migrants who returned to their homeland. If their presence in Korea reminded Koreans of the Japanese occupation, their presence in Japan reminded the Japanese of defeated sovereignty. Having meditated on Kyung-hoon Kim’s photo of Mesa, my mind travels through the Pacific Ocean and moves beyond time and space. The experiences of varied diasporas reflect the complex layers of domestic and international politics, complex power relations in their (ancestral) homelands, and between host communities and expatriates. Now, I contemplate whether a diasporic consciousness as the spirit of solidarity can emerge among diasporas even in historical conflict.

 Jang, “The Special Permanent Residents in Japan,” 7–8.  Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 3. 40  Uchida, Brokers of Empire, 5. 38 39

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Diasporic Consciousness from Home to Home What is home? Where is home? A diaspora discourse critically engages in questions about home. Home is a heavily loaded word. On the one hand, it arouses nostalgia, warmth, comfort, and utopia. On the other hand, as feminist scholars point out, the home is a dangerous space for many women and children where they experience domestic violence, patriarchal gender hierarchy, and exploitation. From a postcolonial perspective, feminist theologian Kwok Pui-lan reminds us that home is not simply a private sphere but intersects with “national identity, ethnicity, citizenship, law, and women’s rights.”41 Kwok’s critical point is especially true in the diasporic and postcolonial context filled with dangerous transborder migration, war, violence, and hybridized culture and ethnicity. A so-called homeland could have been full of miseries, deaths, violence, and discrimination. In the case of the Jeju diaspora, their home dispersed postcolonial subjects even after they had painstakingly returned. Seen through the cases of Mesa and Zainichi Koreans, many of the dangers of diasporas are the ongoing legacy of colonialism. So is the internal displacement of Native Americans, many Chicanas, Mexican Americans, and Palestinians. In the meantime, feminist scholars have warned of the danger of ethnocentric nationalist nostalgia for a pre-colonial society. Even when the postcolonial world does not seem to give homes back to diasporic subjects, how can they reconstruct homes materially and metaphorically? How would they forge a diasporic consciousness accentuating liberation from fears and interdependence among all living beings? Here I meditate on the home to search for a liberative diasporic consciousness. Just as Gloria Anzaldúa compares herself to a turtle that carries home on its back, Kwok states that, “home is not a fixed and stable location but a traveling adventure, which entails seeking refuge in strange lands, bargaining for survival, and negotiating for existence.”42 These feminist reflections on home revolve around how diasporic subjects maintain their integrity while living in multiple institutions, cultures, fragmented spaces, or nepantla. In her posthumous book, Light in the Dark, Gloria Anzaldúa notes that nepantla is the Nahuatl (Aztec) word for an in-between space, 41  Kwok Pui-lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 101. 42  Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 43; Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology, 102.

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where the constant transformation of the self occurs.43 Nepantla is the connective tissue and bridge between the material and the immaterial and between ordinary and spirit realities.44 Soul work, imagination, and creative work in nepantla cross multiple times and spaces. Ultimately, in nepantla, we can see that the self is one of the many members and imaginal figures. For Anzaldúa, spirituality or soul work connects different forms of consciousness and realities—a different kind and way of knowing.45 Anzaldúa’s understanding of the self is possible only with in-depth empathy, as seen in Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem, “Please, Call Me by My True Name.” The poem posits “I” in multiple forms: a bud on a Spring branch; a frog; a hungry, boney boy in Uganda; a refugee girl who threw herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate; and a sea pirate who grew up in abject poverty.46 Radical empathy and deep compassion for all sentient beings are cultivated through Zen meditation and Mahayana Buddhist teachings of emptiness and interbeing/interdependence. The Mahayana Buddhist notion of emptiness does not mean nothingness or a nihilistic approach to life. Instead, emptiness illuminates the quintessence of beings beyond languages and perceptions, the necessity of being liberated from false selfhood to end suffering, and enlightenment to the realities of interbeings—all forms of life are interconnected. In emptiness, all forms of lives radically embrace one another despite their conflicted relations, chaotic co-dependency, love, and  compassion. This notion of emptiness is one way to understand Dorothee Soelle’s delineation of the “I” found in all forms and everything the previous chapter contemplated as a source for spiritual activism. From a Christian theological perspective, emptiness can also shed critical light on God’s incarnation: God emptied Godself and took a human form (Jesus), and thus, emptiness can be considered the Body of God. A diasporic consciousness emerges when the “I” consciously resides in-­ between a physical sense of home (the materially concrete context) and an imagined, symbolic, and metaphorical home (emptiness and interconnectedness). Diasporic subjects’ understanding of their integrity and  Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro, 28–29.  Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 28. 45  Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 38. 46  Thich Nhat Hanh, “Please, Call Me by My True Name,” Plum Village, June 2020 https://plumvillage.org/articles/please-call-me-by-my-true-names-song-poem/ 43 44

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personhood is formed in a healthy tension between a geopolitical home and a symbolic home. If a geopolitical home indicates where “I” am physically located, a symbolic home is where “my” desires and longing for wholeness and liberation from fears will carry “me.” Hence, one’s inner transformation and spiritual work cannot be separated from outer-worldly changes for justice. Prolonged turmoil in a physical home in the concrete geopolitical context would enable diasporic subjects to critically apprehend the meanings of home, security, peace, and justice. Although politically vulnerable subjects’ epistemic privilege of knowing God’s peace and justice should be recognized and respected, political economic crises and turmoil should not be justified on a spiritual level. Injustice and oppression are generally harmful to diasporic subjects’ livelihood and personhood. Finally, let us consider how to build up a diasporic consciousness. If diasporas involve creative, cultural, and symbolic meanings of home, self-­ referentiality can be an entry point to diasporic discourse but cannot represent diasporas. Yet, diverse diasporas create multiple contact zones here and there with historical specificities and, simultaneously, beyond particular times and spaces. My understanding of diasporic consciousness here relies on Kwok’s elaboration on diasporic imagination. To signify diasporic imagination, Kwok proposes the image of the storyteller: [W]ho selects pieces, fragments, and legends from her cultural and historical memory to weave together tales that are passed from generation to generation. These tales are refashioned and retold in each generation, with new materials added to face new circumstances and to reinvent the identity of a people.47

As a diasporic subject, I am a storyteller. One’s identity, the identity of a people, and desires for home and rootedness are shaped by stories—what stories are told and retold, how these stories are told, and who tells the stories. Telling stories requires me to be accountable to myself and to multiple diasporic subjects. Telling diasporic stories involves creative non-­ fiction writing—I am telling only certain truths about dispersion and painful displacement with accountability beyond my lived experience. As Kwok elaborates, a diasporic consciousness “finds similarities and differences in both familiar territories and unexpected corners; one catches glimpses of

 Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology, 46.

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oneself in a fleeting moment or in a fragment in someone else’s story.”48 I interweave my diasporic stories with the stories from the Ukishima Maru, Central American caravans, and Zainichi Koreans as I see myself in fleeting moments of their lives. These stories teach me how to live with integrity in fragmented spaces, telling me who I am and to whom I should be held accountable.

Jesus as a Collective Subjectivity of Diasporas So far, I have contemplated a liberative diasporic consciousness with an emphasis on radical empathy and interconnectedness among all living beings. My understanding of diasporic consciousness is based on the diverse categories and meanings of diasporas, including religious implications and critical social analysis. Critical analysis of diasporas in the colonial and postcolonial context is especially necessary to comprehend the dangers of border crossing, the political vulnerability of diasporic subjects, and the collective trauma inflicted on diasporas. Central American caravans and Zainichi Koreans in Japan help me critically analyze global diasporas. At the same time, Gloria Anzaldua and Kwok Pui-lan offer me feminist spiritual and theological resources to elaborate on diasporic consciousness. To bring this chapter to a close, I want to meditate on Jesus as the collective subjectivity of diasporas moving through various crossroads of time, space, borders, gender, sexuality, the material, the spiritual, presence, and absence. I begin this meditation with M.  Jacqui Alexander’s elaboration on the Sacred in memories of Afro-Caribbean diasporas. Then, Jin Young Choi’s body of Jesus in borderlands helps picture the mysterious connection between the body of the historical Jesus and the body in the Eucharist. Alexander articulates the Sacred in light of “Mojuba” calling Afro– Caribbean diasporas to remember that their souls are connected to the Divine, the Sacred. According to Alexander, Mojuba: an expansive memory refusing to be housed in any single place, bound by the limits of time, enclosed within the outlines of a map, encased in the physicality of the body, or imprisoned as exhibit in a museum. A refusal that takes its inheritance from the Crossing, which earlier prophets had been forced to undertake from the overcrowded passageways in a place  Kwok, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology, 50.

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called Gorée, the door of no return, still packed centuries later with the scent of jostled grief so thick that no passage of human time could absorb it. It hangs there, this grief, until today, an indelible imprint of the Crossing, fastened by a pool of tears below, constantly replenished by the tremors of human living.49

Mojuba embraces and carries out the expansive memories of Afro– Caribbean diasporas for ages. The term is a verb and simultaneously a noun. Mojuba invokes the sacredness of the Sun, Ocean, Earth, Wind, and Sky and names of African deities and spiritual praxis of Orisha, Lwa, Kitsimba, all the ancestors, and many others through the Caribbean Sea from Guinea to Brazil.50 Thus, Mojuba takes up the entire space of intersection, and one crosses it again and again even without knowing it—not only crossing borders, including racial, cultural, sexual, and spiritual boundaries, but also crossing multiple worlds—a human world, a natural world, a world of the living, a world of the dead, an ancestral world, and a spiritual world.51 Paradoxically, Mojuba takes not only the inheritance of the Crossing marred with grief and death on the Atlantic passage but also yearning for wholeness and unity with the Sacred. The Sacred subjectivity is the force of the Sprit who has been walking with African diasporas and arduously healing their bodies and souls broken by colonialism, slavery, racism, heteropatriarchal sovereignty, war, and violence. The work of the Spirit and the praxis of the Sacred are visible and material enough to renew feminists’ and diasporic subjects’ knowledge about the Sacred and reassemble them again and again in justice work for all.52 In the fall of 2013, when Alexander visited Denison University to deliver a prestigious Laura C.  Harris Lecture, I asked her about “The Pedagogies of the Sacred,” elaborated in the last chapter of her critical book, Pedagogies of Crossing. It was painfully difficult to understand the chapter, filled with many names of African deities and African spiritualities practiced in the Caribbean region and Black Latin America. Alexander’s pedagogies of the Sacred made the familiar unfamiliar. To my question, she said, “I wrote that chapter in a different consciousness, not in the usual feminist critical consciousness.” I remember her raising her hand 49  M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and The Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 288. 50  Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 290. 51  Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 287 and 294. 52  Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 324–329.

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above her head when speaking. I felt instantly connected to her in the Spirit and did not need to beg for any further explanation about the Sacred and the pedagogies of the Sacred from Alexander. However, I am still unsure whether I fully comprehend the Sacred in a different consciousness or whether it is possible to write about the Sacred revealed in a different consciousness. Nonetheless, Alexander reminded me that spiritual, physical, and emotional work would be necessary to glimpse the Sacred. Imagining Jesus as the collective subjectivity of diasporas requires a similar work in the unity between spirituality and physicality. Heteropatriarchal Christianity delimits our imagination of the Spirit through the Body of Jesus because Jesus is often confined to the male body and the heteropatriarchal family model of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This model portrays Jesus as the obedient son and the Spirit as a helper for Jesus (as well as the children of God) to obey and fulfill God’s will, although that obedience costs Jesus’s life and the lives of the children of God. Here, only obedience to God signifies the presence of God, the Spirit, and the Divine in the body, the material. Even if the doctrine of the Trinity emphasizes Three in One, heteropatriarchal Christianity (un)intentionally creates invisible but demarcated boundaries among the Three. In these boundaries, “the crossing” happens in one direction from the Father to the Son through the Holy Spirit. Thus, the body of Jesus embodies a one-way crossing and the limited work of the Spirit for the Son’s obedience. Alexander notes, “Not only humans made the Crossing, traveling only in one direction through Ocean given the name Atlantic. Grief traveled as well.”53 Alexander’s words may hint at how the one-way crossing has treated Jesus’s body, indoctrinated by the heteropatriarchal system, as a theological source of grief, guilt, anger, and shame instead of hope, joy, and liberation. Of course, as a historical event, the body of Jesus on the cross provokes grief, anger, and shame among spectators. However, we should scrutinize why Jesus’s body has been remembered within the frame of the one-way crossing, for what purpose, and who reaps benefits from this heteropatriarchal remembrance and mourning. At the same time, critiques of heteropatriarchal religions and fundamentalisms should not keep us away from the search for the Spirit but motivate us to imagine and reimagine Jesus and the work of the Spirit so that we can attain and embody liberation from fears.

 Alexander, Pedagogies of the Crossing, 289.

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Similar to Alexander’s understanding of Mojuba, the Body of Jesus is the material form of the expansive memory of God. I imagine this body through the Eucharistic body of Jesus, contemplating how diasporic subjects would remember the original story of dispersion as they resettle in multiple places for generations, like Afro-Caribbeans, Asian Americans, Zainichi Koreans, and many others. US-based Korean feminist biblical scholar Jin Young Choi’s postcolonial reading of Jesus’s body is beneficial in mulling over Jesus’s presence in absence in the Eucharistic body. According to Choi, the Markan Jesus’s identity is evasive, as Jesus refuses to identify himself with certain names. This refusal suggests that proper knowledge of Jesus’s identity is not a prerequisite to being his disciples.54 While Jesus’s identity is indescribable, his bodily and social movements are “nomadic”—he appears to resist occupation in any place and any time, like Mojuba. In the meantime, his body is broken and consumed by his followers, where the name of Jesus is invoked. In this way, Jesus’s body connects different bodies when broken and consumed (e.g., Eucharist). Choi argues that, “the presence of Jesus’s absent body … is a transcorporeal and interrelational reality.”55 For Choi, discipleship means embodying the immanence of body and simultaneously the transcendence of mystery across boundaries of people, lands, and cultures.56 In particular, Choi’s postcolonial reading of Jesus’s encounter with a Syrophoenician woman in the Gospel of Mark (7:24–30) illuminates diasporic subjectivity marked by a transcorporeal and interrelational reality. In the story, Jesus told an unnamed Syrophoenician woman, who begged him to clean her daughter possessed by an impure spirit, that it was not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs. She then replied, “Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs (New International Version, Mark 7:28).” Jesus, moved by her wise and audacious words, cast the impure spirit out of the daughter with his words. When she arrived at home, she saw her daughter clean. Choi sees both Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman as colonized subjects who encountered each other at the border or the margin of the Roman Empire. Yet, 54  Jin Young Choi, Postcolonial Discipleship of Embodiment: An Asian and Asian American Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Mark (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 14; If we follow Choi’s logic, conversion to Christianity does not require one to confess Jesus as the son of God and the savior of humans from sin. Instead, confession-based conversion confines the converter to one dimension of Jesus and discipleship. 55  Choi, Postcolonial Discipleship of Embodiment, 14. 56  Choi, Postcolonial Discipleship of Embodiment, 15.

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Jesus portrays both colonized and colonial tendencies due to his gender superiority and entitlement to ethnonational purity. A Syrophoenician woman challenged Jesus to reflect critically on his sense of entitlement and to be awakened to the nomadic agency or diasporic consciousness.57 In this way, the woman and Jesus were transformed based on “a creative relationship”: if the woman and her daughter’s confinement to religious, cultural, and social exclusion due to defilement and impurity was transformed into life and liberation, thanks to Jesus, Jesus’s could move beyond ethnonational purity and male superiority across various boundaries toward the restoration of life of all otherized and displaced people.58 Similar to Anzaldúa’s borderland, nepantla, Choi’s concept of border is where the transformation of the self and new beings emerge because diverse diasporic subjects encounter one another. The border in Choi’s reading of the Markan narrative is a contact zone where multiple diasporic subjects challenge one another toward decolonized peace and justice rather than where imperial subjects force displaced and colonized subjects to assimilate into the dominant culture and power structure. Furthermore, Choi accentuates that displaced and diasporic people embody “spirituality” instead of religion, often marred by fortified national identity and fundamentalism, when diasporic bodies encounter the Other and one another, crossing various temporalities. This encounter among the displaced is where “mystery operates.”59 Between two powerful feminist diasporic subjects, Alexander and Choi, what images of Jesus as the collective subjectivity of diasporas will arise? Tentatively, I present three images of the diasporic Body of Jesus. All these Body images are describable only in Christianity liberated from heteropatriarchy. Here, I seriously consider Traci West’s insight that in the spirituality of traditional religions such as Christianity, “defiant methods of reclaiming cultural spaces of gender freedoms must incorporate inventiveness.”60 The following images are only imaginable in reclaimed cultural spaces of invented gender freedoms beyond the Trinitarian patriarchal family model, although I am not explicit about the gender and sexuality of Jesus.  Choi, Postcolonial Discipleship of Embodiment, 100.  Choi, Postcolonial Discipleship of Embodiment, 100. 59  Choi, Postcolonial Discipleship of Embodiment, 103. 60  Traci West, Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality: Africana Lessons on Religion, Racism, and Ending Gender Violence (New York University Press, 2019), 235. 57 58

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First, the Body of Jesus is the materiality of the expansive memory of God walking with displaced and diasporic people. The historical particularity of Jesus, who lived in first-century Palestine, is undeniable. However, in Christianity, Jesus does not simply remain in the body of a first-century Jewish Palestinian man but transcends his historical specificities when his stories are told and retold in the church community. Choi’s postcolonial interpretation of the Syrophoenician woman story does not delimit the liberative power of Jesus to the first-century Palestinian context but liberates his power beyond time and space. Where the Syrophoenician woman story is told, people remember the transformative power of the borderland only when diasporic subjects are willing to engage with one another in creative relationships. The Syrophoenician woman story is one story inscribed in the Body of Jesus. Countless stories of transformation and creative relationalities are inscribed in the Body, which refuses to be housed in one place and bound by limited times. As the Body moves, more stories are inscribed, transforming interpersonal relations. Second, although the death and resurrection of Jesus might be the original stories that dispersed his followers and later Christians, the shared and consumed Body of Jesus at the Eucharistic table is what has sustained the Christian community in diasporas. The Eucharist is the ritual of remembering Jesus as the collective subjectivity of diasporas. At the Eucharistic table, the bread must be broken to remember Jesus. The bread can symbolize and materialize the Body of Jesus only when it is broken into pieces and consumed by people from all different walks of life. When broken and consumed by people, the bread brings heaven on earth and the Sacred into the material in temporality. It is not a priest’s blessing over the bread and wine but the very actions of breaking and consuming them that make the Eucharist sacred and mystical. Although I am an Episcopal priest privileged to preside over the Holy Communion, the priest’s role at the communion table and the long ritual before breaking and eating the Body of God should be considered peripheral, not central to the Eucharist. The Eucharist is analogous to diasporas. In addition, Alexander’s elaboration on the Sacred and Choi’s Body of Jesus as a transcorporeal and interrelational reality becomes congruent with the Eucharistic body of Jesus. The bread broken into pieces symbolizes borders and the dispersion of Jesus’s Body. By consuming a small piece of the bread, Christians know that they cannot claim ownership of the mystical knowledge of Corpus Christi. Furthermore, the bread and wine shared and consumed at the Eucharist hold the presence of Jesus in the absence of him. The

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paradoxical presence of Jesus in his absence can be understood better through a diasporic consciousness. Diasporic subjects are absent from their homes in their story of origin, but their homes are always present in their life. So, dispersion does not mean being erased from history and, more importantly, from the expansive memories of diasporas inscribed in the Body of God. Similar to how Mojuba works, nothing is erased or lost in the Body of God. Finally, seen through the Eucharist, the Body of Jesus destabilizes the center and the periphery. Where can we trace the center and the periphery once the Body is broken into pieces and partaken by dispersed people? The pieces of bread all become peripheries interrelated to the presence of Jesus in absence. Diasporic consciousness challenges boundaries between the center and periphery, revealing interstitial integrity as a reality of the self, similar to what Anzaldúa notes that the self is one of many interstitial beings. Namely, the self becomes known to oneself only when it becomes a periphery in relation to other peripheries, living in and moving through interstices of time and space, just as Choi argues in the case of Jesus’s encounter with the Syrophoenician woman. Moreover, if we carefully and imaginatively read early Christian communities’ memories of Jesus in the Christian New Testament, we may recognize that early Christians tried to remember how Jesus called them to live in diasporas—physical, spiritual, and intellectual diasporas. Just as diasporic subjects constantly destabilize territorial sovereignty and a nation-state by crossing borders, debunking globalized violence, and connecting other diasporic bodies, the disciples of Jesus are called to live in diasporas, courageously crossing boundaries of differences, destabilizing the center and the periphery, and displacing themselves from heteropatriarchal sovereignty. Do the dispersed children of Âu Cơ and Lạc Long Quân embody the indefinite divisions or the yearning for unity and creative relationalities? In the Eucharistic Body of Jesus, I imagine that all the dispersed children of the Creator yearn for unity among themselves and with the Creator to be whole. Desire for this unity can be explained through Black feminist theologian M.  Shawn Copeland’s term “Eucharistic solidarity.” Copeland articulates Eucharistic solidarity as “a virtue, a practice of cognitive and bodily commitments oriented to meet the social consequences of Eucharist.”61 Thus, Eucharistic solidarity is not far different from the 61  M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 127.

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spiritual activism that brings changes on the material, spiritual, and intellectual levels which I have accentuated many times. Eucharistic solidarity “enfolds us, rather than dismiss ‘others,’ we act in love; rather than refuse ‘others’—solidarity is the materiality of our (diasporic subjects’) deep yearnings for wholeness being present in one another’s lives in the Creator.”62

Epilogue Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novella “Black-Eyed Women” tells the story of a Vietnamese American woman who makes a living by ghostwriting, especially for people who have survived tragic events. Since her father’s death, she has lived with her mother. Her mother says that her dead brother, who had drowned in the Pacific Ocean on their way to the US, has visited their house. The novella’s protagonist denies her mother’s claim while her mother insists that her brother swam through the Pacific and arrived home soaking wet. One evening, finally, her brother visits her when she is alone in the house. She can recognize his t-shirt and shorts even if they are wet and covered with seaweed. Touching her brother’s scars and the bruises on his body and having a long conversation with him, she can finally face what happened on the refugee boat on the high seas. When her family left Vietnam on the boat after the war, her parents dressed her like a boy to protect her from rape by sea pirates. The Pacific Ocean was a dangerous space for refugees, especially for girls. When sea pirates caught their boat, one pirate recognized her gender and dragged her from the crowd. At that time, her brother stabbed the pirate, who, in return, beat him to death. Then, she was raped. From her brother, she learns that she is also dead (perhaps, he means that she is emotionally dead or the girl inside her died because her family has never brought up what happened to her on the boat that night). Her brother’s visit enables her to weep for him, for herself, and for all the girls who have vanished and never returned, including herself. Her brother finally let her live and cry without shame or fear. After the mysterious encounter with her brother, the protagonist decides to write ghost stories coming from her and her mother instead of ghostwriting for others.63  Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 128. A parenthesis is added by the author.  Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Black-Eyed Women,” The Refugees (New York: Grove Press, 2017), 1–21. 62 63

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The phantomatic return of the dead brother who courageously resisted a sea pirate is not a strange or unfamiliar story. If Jesus were a Vietnamese refugee, his story would be like the brother in “Black-Eyed Women.” The phantomatic return of the brother can be analogous to the resurrection of Jesus—the resurrected body of Jesus’s visit to his disciples, first Mary Magdalene and then other disciples. The brother was not merely a ghost— he appeared in a substantial body, talked to the living, and crossed the boundaries between the Pacific Ocean and the United States, as well as between the dead and the living. Indeed, he knew he had been dead but did not want to be forgotten because his death was unjust. His death haunted his family, who had lived with shame and guilt for a long time. The ghost of the brother visited his mother and sister to liberate them from silenced pain interwoven with war, gender-based violence, dangers at sea, violence against stateless people, and resettlement in a foreign country. The resurrected Jesus might not be a ghost. However, his return to his disciples was first phantomatic and then real and material enough to heal and reassemble the Jesus community after the traumatic event. Jesus’s resurrection liberates his community from fear and shame and enables them to heal the world broken by violence and injustice as healed healers. Transnational feminist ethics inspired by Christian feminist theology in the Pacific attentively listens to the stories of ghosts and history’s victims dispersed and uprooted from their ancestral lands. Even if we are unaware of their presence, they visit us to liberate us from fear and shame so that we, as healed healers, can continue working for peace and justice.

Bibliography Alexander, M.  Jacqui. 2005. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and The Sacred. Durham: Duke University Press. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2007. Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. ———. 2015. Light in the Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating. Durham: Duke University Press. Bauman, Martin. 2013. Exile. In Diasporas: Concepts, Intersections, Identities, ed. Kim Knott and Seán McLoughlin, 19–23. London: Zed Books, 23. Cho, Grace M. 2008. Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Choi, Jin Young. 2015. Postcolonial Discipleship of Embodiment: An Asian and Asian American Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Mark. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Cohen, Robin. 2022. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. 3rd ed. London: Routledge. Copeland, M.  Shawn. 2010. Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Gandhi, Evyn Lê Espiritu. 2022. Archipelago of Resettlement. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gutierrez, Gabe, and Corky Siemaszko. 2018. Photographer Reveals Story behind Iconic Image of Fleeing Migrants at Mexico Border. NBC News, November 26. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-­news/photographer-­reveals-­story-­behind-­ iconic-­photo-­fleeing-­migrants-­mexico-­border-­n940271. Heo, Hojoon. 2023. 4.3: 19470301–19540921. Seoul: Hyehwa1117 (Korean). Jang, Hawon. 2019. Special Permanent Residents in Japan: Zainichi Korean. The Yale Review of International Studies. http://yris.yira.org/comments/2873. Kim, Min-hee. 1999. Underwater Monument to Be Set Up in Memory of Ukishima Victims. The Korea Herald, August 12. https://advance-­lexis-­com. denison.idm.oclc.org/api/document?collection=news&id=urn:contentIte m:3X62-­9K60-­007K-­G16X-­00000-­00&context=1516831. Kwok, Pui-lan. 2005. Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Lee, Hyo-sik. 2011. Gay Korean Gets Refugee Status in Canada. The Korea Times, December 15. http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/ 2021/11/113_100898.html. Lee, Jae-ho. 2019. Survivors of the Ukishima: Find Truth before We All Die. Hangyerei 21. August 13. https://h21.hani.co.kr/arti/cover/cover_general/ 47457.html. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. 2017. Black-Eyed Women. In The Refugees, 1–21. New York: Grove Press. Pae, Keun-joo Christine. 2016. Faith-Based Popular Resistance to the Naval Base in Gangjeong of Jeju: Transforming Militarized US–Korea Relations for Peace and Justice. In Critical Theology against US Militarism in Asia: Decolonization and Deimperialization, ed. Nami Kim and Wonhee Anne Joh, 199–226. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/ 978-­1-­137-­48013-­2_9. ———. 2019. Factory Girls, Comfort Girls: A Feminist Theo-Ethical Reflection on Korean Girl Soldiers in Japanese Empire. In Female Child Soldiering, Gender Violence, and Feminist Theologies, ed. Susan Willhauck, 109–122. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ryang, Sonia. 2014. Space and Time: The Experience of the ‘Zainishi,’ The Ethnic Korean Population of Japan. Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development 43 (4): 519–550. https://www.jstor. org/stable/24643204.

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Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press. Specia, Megan, and Rick Gladstone. 2018. Border Agents Shot Tear Gas into Mexico. Was It Legal? New York Times. November 28. https://www.nytimes. com/2018/11/28/world/americas/tear-­gas-­border.html. The Pulitzer Prizes. Photography Staff of Reuters. The 2019 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Breaking News. https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/photography-­staff-­ reuters-­1. Thich Nhat Hanh. 2020. Please, Call Me by My True Name. Plum Village, June 2020. https://plumvillage.org/articles/please-­call-­me-­by-­my-­true-­names-­ song-­poem/. Uchida, Jun. 2014. Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. West, Traci. 2019. Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality: Africana Lessons on Religion, Racism, and Ending Gender Violence. New York University Press. Wolman, Andrew. 2013. Asylum for Persecuted Homosexuals in the Republic of Korea. Forced Migration Review 22. https://www.fmreview.org/sites/fmr/ files/FMRdownloads/en/sogi/wolman.pdf. Yuh, Ji-yeon. 2004. Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America. New York: New York University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Yearning for Wholeness

This book is about how to do feminist ethics transnationally when gender-­ based violence interlocking with racial discrimination, economic disparities, war, and border control refuses to appreciate life created by God in every living being. Transnational feminist ethics, inspired by Christian feminist theology, particularly in the transpacific space, challenges us to realize that the personal is internationally political and spiritual. Whether we are feminists, people of faith, or global citizens of conscience, our work for justice and peace requires a concerted effort to build up transborder and cross-racial solidarity. This solidarity work is possible when we critically analyze global power structures that affect global populations differently, embody spirituality that enables us to see and feel the interconnectedness of all living beings, find joy in living in unity with this interconnectedness, the core of the Sacred, and create bridges among radical resurgence movements across the globe. Our body is always the center of transnational feminist solidarity work as Traci West beautifully elaborates, “The spirit of defiance that comes from somatic knowledge and learning can hold psychic, physical, and political space for the transformation of rape cultures [gender-based violence].”1 After visiting almost seventy women’s antiwar activist organizations across the globe, British antiwar feminist scholar Cynthia Cockburn urges her readers to engage in antiwar feminist work “from where we stand,”

 Traci West, Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality: Africana Lessons on Religion, Racism, and Ending Gender Violence (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 234. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. C. Pae, A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43766-3_7

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which is from a political standpoint, a feminist one.2 We can also make a transversal move to stand in the world of the globally disenfranchised, diasporic subjects, and war slaves. Likewise, transnational feminist ethics begins “from where we stand,” and we can choose which political points and actions we stand for: global peace and justice, spiritually imagined and embodied by the globally disenfranchised. Seeing antiwar feminist activism from where a female subject of war slavery stands, Cockburn argues that antiwar feminism is the project of liberation from fear, because the slave fears her ruler, but even more, the rulers are also afraid.3 The more I contemplate Cockburn’s words, the more they rejuvenate spiritual insight and wisdom about transnational feminist ethics. As major world religious traditions have taught how to overcome fear, the ultimate source of violence and hatred, transnational feminist ethics is a liberative praxis of overcoming the fear that divides the world, otherizes people based on religion, race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and (dis)ability, and creates oppositional politics rather than empathy and understanding. Overcoming fear begins from where we stand—physically, spiritually, and intellectually, and what we learn from our bodies (somatic knowledge). Now, I return to where I begin this book, the Pacific Ocean. As a concept, the transpacific illuminates lives in the Americas bound with those in Asia. As a region, the transpacific holds lands, islands, and waters. For a long time, Christian theology has been concerned about land—critiques of and liberation from territorial sovereignty and its oppression against indigenous peoples, a nation-state and its exploitation of gender, sexual, and racial minorities, only to name a few. Neocolonial and neoliberal power structures see land and island as private property, while liberation theologians see them as shared property. The ocean inspires new theological ideas. Water is constantly moving and should run to keep its liveliness. Water is adaptive. It goes and comes, holding everything in it; nothing is lost in the water system. All the waters on Earth are connected. The Pacific runs into the Atlantic through waves and vice versa. Rather than disappearing, one drop of water in the Pacific is, in fact, connected to all the waters on Earth. Like one drop of water in the ocean, the self lives in the body of water, close to the Body of God, the Divine, and the Sacred. Seas and rivers connect different lands and islands, erasing human-made 2  Cynthia Cockburn, From Where We Stand: War, Women’s Activism, and Feminist Analysis (London and New York: Zed Books, 2007), 258. 3  Cockburn, From Where We Stand, 258.

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borders and divisions. What is left in transnational feminist theo-ethics imagined in the transpacific space is this: we are all interconnected. Thus, our joy and suffering always send repercussions throughout the entire system of interconnected living beings. This book is neither the beginning nor the ending of my journey in transnational feminist theo-ethics. Since transnational feminist theo-ethics is always in the making, this book presents only a temporality of transnational feminist theo-ethics in the palimpsest of God’s story. So, this book may be erased, and something will be rewritten on top of these impartially erased traces of mine.

Bibliography Cockburn, Cynthia. 2007. From Where We Stand: War, Women’s Activism, and Feminist Analysis. London/New York: Zed Books. West, Traci. 2019. Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality: Africana Lessons on Religion, Racism, and Ending Gender Violence. New York: New York University Press.

Some chapters of this book

have been revised and expanded

significantly from the following materials. permission:

I appreciate their

“Imagining Transnational Feminist Theo-Ethics and Solidarity.” In Theologies of the Multitude for Multitudes: The Legacy of Kwok Pui-Lan, edited by Rita Nakashima Brock and Tat-siong Benny Liew, 157—178. Claremont Press, 2021. “Indecent Resurgence: God’s Solidarity against the Gendered War on COVID.” In Doing Theology in the New Normal, edited by Jione Havea, 179—195. London: SCM, 2021. “Spiritual Activism as Interfaith Dialogue: When Military Prostitution Matters.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 36, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 71–84. “The Empathetic Power of Suffering: The Memories of Killing and Feminist Interfaith Spiritual Activism.” In Resistance to Empire and Militarization-Reclaiming the Sacred, edited by Jude Lal Fernando, 198–212. Sheffield, UK: Equinox, 2020. “The Prostituted Body of War: U.S. Military Prostitution in South Korea As a Site of Spiritual Activism.” In Transformational Embodiment in Asian Religions: Subtle Bodies, Spatial Bodies, edited by George Pati and Katherine C. Zubko, 187—205. New York: Routledge, 2019.

Index1

A Abu Ghraib, 59, 159, 160 Alexander, M. Jacqui, 8, 12, 13, 13n30, 19, 24, 27, 29, 30, 40, 43, 47, 49, 74, 121, 140, 159, 183–188 Althaus-Reid, Marcella, 14, 18, 25, 30, 37, 43, 57, 58, 68, 89, 111, 118, 120, 122 American exceptionalism, 74n71, 150 Anti-Asian hate, 2, 88, 95, 102, 113 anti-Asian racism, 2, 17, 88, 93, 96, 103–116 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 9, 12, 19, 40–42, 173, 180, 181, 183, 187, 189 Apathy, 157 Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI), 33, 34 Asia Pacific, 2, 3, 34, 36, 48, 74, 88, 104, 107, 135

B Body literacy, 18, 88, 121, 122 sovereignty, 17, 79, 84, 117 Brock, Rita Nakashima, 12, 13, 13n30, 31, 35–37, 46, 70n57, 98, 108n67, 123 Bubonic plague, 2, 96–98 Butler, Smedley, 69, 69n55 C Chan Khong, 18, 19, 42, 43, 45, 131, 152–156, 159 Chinatown, 96, 97, 104–107, 110 Cho, Grace M., 66, 143, 176 Choi, Jin Young, 19, 114n82, 147, 183, 186–189, 186n54 Christian Triumphalism, 148–152, 158

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. C. Pae, A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism, New Approaches to Religion and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43766-3

199

200 

INDEX

Clausewitz, Carl von, 132, 133, 135 The Clean-up Campaign, 65, 66 Cold War, 66, 108, 112, 136, 137, 140, 144, 148, 150 Colonialism, 3n2, 4–6, 12, 14, 16, 26–28, 40, 44, 47, 67, 73, 75, 117, 146, 174, 175, 177, 179, 180, 184 neocolonialism, 4, 5, 40, 47 Connell, R.W., 81 COVID-19, 2, 3, 17, 18, 23, 26, 87–124 Crucifixion, 72, 123, 133 Cumings, Bruce, 139n29, 156 D Debilitation, 102, 116, 132, 147, 148, 156 Decolonizing, 14–15, 31–41, 47, 48, 117, 168, 175 Diaspora diasporic consciousness, 19, 20, 49, 166–168, 172, 179–183, 187, 189 diasporic subject, 19, 49, 50, 165–173, 180–184, 186–190, 196 E Ellison, Marvin, 81 Empathy, 19, 78, 131, 152–154, 157–159, 181, 183, 196 Enloe, Cynthia, 69, 75, 76, 109, 158n89 Eucharist, 14, 19, 120, 183, 186, 188, 189 Evangelical purity culture, 18, 88, 103–116, 121

F Fire and fury, 134, 135, 140, 156 Five faces of oppression, 17, 89, 93, 106, 122 Forgotten War, 130, 139, 140 Fujikane, Candice, 34 G Gebara, Ivone, 11 Gender-based violence, 17, 18, 59, 60, 71, 75, 87–124, 191, 195 Genocide massacre, 152 mass killing, 133, 134, 146, 147 Ghandhi, Evyn Lê Espiritu, 166 Ghost, 19, 130, 147, 159, 160, 176, 190, 191 Grossman, Dave, 57, 58, 80 H Haunting, 19, 130, 176 Heteropatriarchy, 27, 51, 118, 187 heteropatriarchal capitalism, 74 Heterosexuality, 81, 82 Homonationalism, 74, 74n71 Hypersexualization of Asian women, 38, 103, 107 I Indecent Theology, 14, 89, 118, 120, 121 Interconnectedness inter-being, 154 interdependence, 11, 19, 154 Interfaith dialogue, 18, 153–155, 158, 159 Intersectionality, 16, 25, 32, 37, 46, 49, 50, 82, 83, 120

 INDEX 

Interstitiality divine, 35, 36 interstitial integrity, 11–13, 13n30, 16, 19, 25, 31–43, 46, 47, 50, 51, 116, 168, 189 J Jakobsen, Janet, 55 Japanese colonialism, 67, 175, 179 Jeju 4.3, 145, 145n52, 178 diaspora, 178, 180 People’s Uprising, 136, 137 Jesus, 19, 37, 58, 71–73, 115, 116, 118, 119, 122, 123, 133, 134, 165–191 Joh, Wonhee Anne, 133, 177n32 Justice, 5, 7, 8, 10–12, 16, 17, 24, 26, 27, 33–37, 40–42, 48–50, 55–57, 59, 71, 73, 76, 79–84, 117–120, 122, 131, 148, 152, 182, 184, 187, 191, 195, 196 K Kim, Jong-un, 20, 134, 140 Kim, Kyung-hoon, 172–174, 175n22, 179 Kim, Kyung-hwan, 170, 170n11 Kim, Nami, 9, 115 Korean Armistice, 150 Korean War, 19, 62–64, 67, 129–131, 133–151, 133n12, 142n38, 153, 159, 171, 172, 175 Kwok, Pui-lan, 6, 6n9, 7, 15, 16, 19, 20, 25, 29, 46–51, 180, 182, 183 L Lee, Jin-kyung, 5, 16, 56, 61 Lee, Jung Yong, 135, 135n14

201

Lee, Mary Paik, 2, 20 Lee, Yanggu, 78, 78n76 LGBTQ+, 89, 118 Liberation theology, 14, 26, 30, 118, 131n4, 152, 196 Life-affirming theology, 121–124 Lowe, Lisa, 36 Luxocracy, 45 M Mary Magdalene, 37, 71–76, 84, 119, 191 Mary, Mother of Jesus, 115, 122, 123 Masculinity hegemonic, 81, 82 militarized, 16, 69 Massage parlor, 89, 91, 109, 110, 112, 113, 116, 122 Mbembe, Achille, 60, 61, 132, 133, 159 Mesa, Maria, 172–174, 179, 180 Migdal, 72, 73, 76 Militarization, 62, 68, 84 Military prostitution, 16, 53–84, 108, 121, 134, 146, 153 Rest and Recreation business, 74, 107 Minority nationalism, 115 Model minority, 33, 88, 111, 113–116, 114n82, 121 Mohanty, Chandra, 4, 5, 8, 10, 24, 24n3, 26–30, 28n9, 36, 38, 44, 49 Mojuba, 183, 184, 186, 189 Moral injury, 98–101, 121 Moslener, Sara, 111 N Napalm, 142, 143

202 

INDEX

Necropolitics, 60, 61, 66, 69, 80, 100, 147, 159 necropolitical labor, 16, 17, 56, 57, 61, 61n22, 65, 66, 68, 69, 74, 78, 79, 82, 83, 100 Neoliberal global economy, 37, 102 neoliberalism, 117 Nepantla, 12, 19, 166, 180, 181, 187 Nguyen, Viet Thanh, 48n69, 129, 190 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 149 Nogeunri, 141, 141n37, 142, 144, 156 massacre, 141–143 O Operation Strangle, 142, 143 P Pacific Asian North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry (PANAAWTM), 4 Palimpsest, 19, 130, 131, 140–148, 151–154, 156, 157, 159, 160, 197 Park, Jeong-mi, 64, 66, 83 Physicality, 17, 30, 57, 185 Politics of killing, 131–134, 152, 156 Politics of love, 131, 152–157, 159 Postcolonial imagination dialogical, 16, 47, 50 diasporic, 16, 47, 50 historic, 16, 47, 50 Praxis, 3, 7, 12, 15, 24, 25, 31, 50, 117, 118, 121, 131, 132, 159, 184, 196 radical, 8–11, 13, 16, 18, 19, 24, 24n3, 25, 27, 30, 40–46, 50 Prostitution, 5, 16–18, 53, 54n1, 55, 56, 59–67, 71–84, 81n81, 88, 91, 97, 105–110, 112, 113, 145, 158

Protestant missionary rescue mission, 110 Proximity, 8–11, 16, 24, 28, 44–47, 50 Puar, Jasbir, 74, 74n71, 132, 133, 147, 159 R Radical resurgence, 18, 89, 116–121, 131, 195 Reflexive fire training, 80 Reflexivity, 8–10 self-reflexivity, 9, 26n7, 45 Relations of imperial ruling, 4, 5, 7, 8, 14–16, 24, 26, 31, 32, 48, 118 Right to kill, 60, 66, 79, 132, 148, 152, 159 Right to maim, 132, 148, 159 Ryang, Sonia, 177 S Schaberg, Jane, 37, 72 Self-referentiality, 27, 182 Sensuality, 18, 81, 88, 122 Settler colonialism, 3n2, 29, 31n18, 34, 116, 117, 167 Seventh Cavalry, 143 Sex tourism, 73–75, 108 Sex trafficking, 105, 106, 109, 110 Sexual ethics, 16, 17, 53–84 Sexuality, 5, 8, 14–16, 18, 23–25, 27, 32, 33, 36–38, 45, 47, 56–61, 68–71, 73–76, 79–84, 88, 108, 115–122, 130, 134, 144–146, 159, 183, 187, 196 Sheth, Falguni, 32, 34–38, 46, 82, 93 Shin, Gi-cheol, 141n36, 142n39, 142n40 Simpson, Leaane Betasamosake, 18, 89, 116–118, 117n89, 131

 INDEX 

Sin, 55, 60, 71, 72, 79, 80, 123, 148, 186n54 sexual, 59, 72, 80, 123 Smith, Dorothy, 4 Soelle, Dorothee, 18, 19, 131, 152–159, 181 Soldiering, 16, 17, 56, 57, 58n10, 60–71 Solidarity cross-border, 174 eucharistic, 189, 190 transnational, 16, 18, 19, 25, 29, 41, 43, 45, 47–49, 89, 118, 168 Solidarity Network for Human Rights in the Camptown, 53, 83, 84 Sovereignty, 60, 61, 64–66, 73, 79, 94, 132, 133, 147, 148, 152, 159, 170, 173, 174, 179, 184, 189, 196 Spa shootings in Atlanta, 90, 91 Spiritual activism, 3, 5, 11–13, 15, 16, 18, 19, 24, 25, 41–47, 50, 51, 129–160, 181, 190 State of exception, 64 Storytelling, 18, 25, 43, 44, 49, 140, 152–154, 156, 159, 167 storyteller, 18, 49, 182 Sunlit Center, 17, 53, 57, 65n39, 76–79, 83 Syrophoenician woman, 186–189 T Thich, Nhat Hanh, 11, 42, 152, 155, 181 Thistlethwaite, Susan, 59, 68, 69, 79–81, 94, 123 Townes, Emilie, 117n89 Transborder crossing, 172–174 Transnational feminism, 8, 11, 16, 24, 27, 30, 31, 40, 46, 117

203

Transpacific, 1–20, 31, 36, 39, 48, 165, 171, 172, 195–197 Trump, Donald, 94, 134, 135, 140, 149n62, 156, 173 U Ukishima Maru, 175, 176, 183 US camptown (kijichon), 53 V Vietnam War, 61n22, 73, 98, 107, 143, 147, 152–154 Violence, 2, 8, 16–20, 23, 39, 47, 55–57, 59–62, 59n13, 66, 67, 69, 73, 76, 79, 81n81, 82, 87–124, 131, 132, 144, 145, 152, 153, 155, 157–159, 165, 170, 173, 180, 184, 189, 191, 195, 196 W War metaphor, 18, 88, 94, 95, 98, 100, 101, 103, 116, 121 Western Princess (yanggongju), 55, 63, 65n39, 66–68, 70, 77, 78, 82, 83, 171, 172n17 West, Traci, 115, 187, 195 Y Yellow Peril, 2, 88, 104, 109, 110, 115 Young, Iris, 17, 89–91, 93 Yun, Geum-yi, 67, 67n46, 68, 73, 83 Z Zainichi Korean, 175, 175n23, 177–180, 183, 186 Zong, 176