Cold War Disability: The Biopolitics of U.S. Military Empire in Post-1945 Global Asia

Ka-eul Yoo
Global and International Studies
UC Irvine

Cold War Disability offers a comparative literary and cultural studies account of how the United States constructed and leveraged concepts of disease and disability in its military operations in Asia and at home to advance its Cold War agenda. Through interdisciplinary analysis of post-1945 transpacific cultural works and state-affiliated and community archives, the book retrieves and critiques a distinctively Cold War disability narrative that cast Asians and Asian Americans as ideologically contaminated, highly contagious, and selectively recuperable. This politicized narrative conflated contagious communist ideology with infectious disease, marking certain Asians as biological and ideological threats warranting violent state intervention. Simultaneously, U.S. Cold War policies promoted regimes of rehabilitation that targeted “disabled” Asian bodies—an elastic category encompassing Hansen’s disease patients, mixed-race children, and other populations produced by asymmetrical U.S. warfare—as objects of humanitarian rescue and imperial governance. By tracing how race and disability were conceptually blurred through Cold War logics of contagion and cure, Cold War Disability reveals how U.S. military empire managed difference under the guise of care. Centering community archives, this project also examines how impacted Asians and Asian Americans resignified the languages of disease and disability to contest Cold War pathologization and reimagine disabled life beyond imperial frameworks.