The UN Ladies’ War

The second chapter examines the ways Ahn Junghyo in Silver Stallion rewrites the Korean War as a gender war. Initially, the author’s portrayal of the Korean War as a civil conflict questions the supposedly humanitarian cause of American intervention in the Korean War. Contradicting the US’s self-image as a kind of global police force, the novel invites the reader to wonder whose interests the ‘police action’ was really aimed at protecting. The author’s anti–Cold War project coincides with a sexual politics that rewrites the Korean War as a contest between South Korean patriarchs and American GIs over the bodies of Korean women. In turn, this contest sets off a new war waged against the traditional system of Korean patriarchy by military prostitutes who wish to reclaim the rights to their bodies. While foregrounding the female protagonist’s achievement of full subjecthood in this war, this chapter also restores anti-communist persecution to the novel by placing the protagonist and her family’s ordeal within the context of an ideological branding of certain individuals by the authoritarian South Korean government. Read in this way, the protagonist and her family’s ostracism, this chapter argues, alludes to the notorious anti-communist punishment of guilt-by-association persecution.