Diasporic visions: Transgenerational haunting and the figure of the yanggongju

This dissertation analyzes the figure of the yanggongju (literally translated as "western princess," but more commonly translated as "yankee whore" or "GI bride") as a figure of trauma that haunts the Korean diaspora. Yanggongju is a Korean word that refers to women who sell their sexual labor to U.S. military personnel, or sometimes more generally to women who date or marry Americans. Using the psychoanalytic framework of "transgenerational haunting," which states that an unspoken trauma can be passed unconsciously across body boundaries, I look at how the traumas of the Korean War and subordination to the U.S. military come to be embodied in the figure of the yanggongju. The yanggongju (as GI bride) circulates these traumas through Korean diaspora, and in her attempt to hide her past, she transmits her traumatic history to her kin. In addition to the questions, "What is the genealogy of the yanggongju's trauma?" and "How does the yanggongju haunt Korean diaspora?" I also take up the methodological question, "How does one study a trauma that is unseen and unspoken?" I develop the notion of "methodologies of trauma," arguing that one must employ methods of interpretation and writing that engage trauma through the use of non-linear temporalities, repetition, fantasy, and fiction. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's notion of distributed perception and John Johnston's idea of machinic vision, I theorize that through Korean diaspora, a method of seeing and speaking trauma is composed of scattered images, affects, and voices---what I call "diasporic vision." The purpose of diasporic vision is not only to tell a story, but also to capture the non-narrativizable. The data for my project include narratives about U.S.-Korea relations and Korean diaspora in which the yanggongju is present only as a trace, alongside other narratives in which the she becomes central to the story. This data is drawn from historical documents, personal narratives, the popular literature of social movements, cultural productions by diasporic Koreans, and scholarly writings on Korean nationalism and U.S.-Korea relations.