African Colonization Movement, American Colonization Society, Abolitionism, Ohio, Antislavery Movement

Women Surviving War: Food Prostitution in Comfort Woman, The Piano Teacher and The Surrendered

This article examines the intersection of food, gender and wartime in three Korean American novels set in Asia during the twentieth century. Drawing out women as the likely victims of hunger and starvation in wartime, the study attempts to examine a mode of survival that they sometimes resort to in times of food shortage, namely survival sex. The article focuses on the specific form of survival sex that entails the direct exchange of sexual favors for food. Far from framing food prostitution as a desirable strategy, the article merely aims to provide a new way of looking at it which unearths a measure of agency and subversion in the face of oppressive patriarchal frames. Providing examples from the three novels, the article highlights how women transcend the role of docile bodies and undermine the system that aims to subjugate them.