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Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S./Korea Relations, by Katharine H.S. Moon
Security studies, which have focused on the "guns and bombs" issues in international relations, have had very little to say about interstate relations and women. Perhaps Thucydides, a patriarch of the Realist tradition, of which contemporary security studies is an offspring, best summed up the connection between the politics among states and women through the words of his Athenian delegates to Melos: "The strong do what they will and the weak do what they must." He was referring to Melos as the weak party that was forced to accept Athenian rule through choice or conquest. The leaders of Melos chose independence and paid dearly for it--the Athenian navy conquered the island by force; it killed all young men and took the women as slaves.
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Women as victims of war has been the legacy.
Conventional security studies talk about alliances and focus on the relationship between the international system and the interactions among states 2 but say nothing about women and gender. 3 By addressing the relationship between the interests and actions of elites in institutions and foreign policy actions, studies on organizational behavior (bureaucratic politics) try to teach us that states are not monolithic abstract entities and that people do account for the decision making. 4 But again, such studies are silent about women and gender. For the most part, security studies do not say much about common people, with the exception of their potential as resources for and supporters of the state. 5 Schelling belies the ultimate cynicism in Realist thinking, when he highlights the central role of common people as potential or real recipients of pain and suffering; this, he says, is a form of power--the "power to hurt." 6
Feminist scholars have been prolific in filling the void of knowledge about women and war. Elshtain offered the first panoramic view of women and war from the perspective of a political theorist, focusing on the gendered underpinnings of women's and men's relationships to war and peace. 7 Spike Peterson has provocatively critiqued the gendered nature of the modern state, the wielder of "legitimate violence," as predator, rather than genuine protector, of women. 8 Jeanne Vickers and Tsehai Berhane-Selassie alert us to the detriment to women's welfare as a consequence of large military budgets. 9 A plethora of authors have graphically illustrated the horrors of war that women as victims experience--Susan Brownmiller's accounts of rapes in war are classic examples. 10 And everyday newspaper accounts of female refugees from Rwanda and Burundi remind us of the human atrocities that are today caused by war.
We know from these and other accounts that there are explicit connections between guns and bombs (or spears and canons) and women and that to a great extent, the relationship has been sexually defined. But the numerous writings on women and war say little about how power disparities in interstate relations affect and are affected by women. Most of the writings also focus on the gendered premises and consequences of international politics, but not on the gendered processes.
Feminist scholars and activists of the Marxist tradition pick up where Thucydides left off by transferring the power disparities between nations, or governments, onto women's bodies. The argument is that the relative weakness of a small state leaves its women unprotected and vulnerable to the violence, abuse, and exploitation by the strong state and its agents. Simply, the domination of a weak country leads to the foreign domination (economically, politically, sexually) of the women of that country. For example, Mies claims that "imperialist industrial capital follows the imperialist military, [sic] both, however, strengthen the sex industry." 11 Koreans on the left argue similarly that U.S. imperialism and militarism are responsible for the sexual exploitation of and physical violence perpetrated on kijich'on women. 12 Yu Pongnim, a cofounder of My Sister's Place, also publicizes this view. One Mrs. Choe, a former kijich'on prostitute, linked together the weakness of Korea, vis-ˆ-vis the United States, and kijich'on women's own powerlessness: "Korea was a land where only idiots lived: The government could not even defend its own people's inter ests with respect to the U.S." 13 Kim Yonja, a former prostitute for twenty-five years, echoed this view:
| [B]ecause kijich'on prostitutes had no political power to effect policy changes, the interest [in security and other governmental policies] wasn't there. But this refers to Koreans in general--there really isn't much that we Koreans have been able to influence vis-ˆ-vis the U.S. Is there?,/font> 14 |
There is no doubt that conquering nations and colonizing nations imposed their sexual demands on colonized women. Japan's forced prostitution of up to 200,000 Korean women during World War II is the most contemporary and egregious example. Cooper and Stoler point out that colonial "[policy makers] fantasized about what people did at night and thus alternately saw prostitution, concubinage, and 'healthy conjugal sex' as the basis on which colonial authority might be secured or irreparably undermined." 15 But an historical look at U.S.-Korean camptown prostitution raises a paradox and questions the accuracy of equating a stronger state's sexual domination and control of women with the political and economic weakness of the dominated state. In South Korea, the U.S. military was not able to control kijich'on prostitutes in the early 1960s but was able to do so in the early 1970s. In 1964, Lieutenant General T. W. Dunn, the Commander of I Corps (Group), vehemently complained about prostitution and VD in a letter to the Eighth U.S. Army (EUSA) Commanding General Hamilton Howze. He stated that the U.S. forces cannot "accept the deplorable conditions as an unchangeable part of service of US personnel in Korea." Relatedly, he complained about the lack of cooperation on the part of the ROK government to control the women and VD: "I am convinced that we receive mostly words and bows and little practical help in areas vital to the fundamental problem." 16
In the early 1960s, the USFK had been unsuccessful in persuading the ROK government to take action. An official from the Eighth Army (EUSA) IO (International Relations Office) also observed, in his memorandum to the EUSA Deputy Chief of Staff, that with respect to prostitution control, "our negotiating position appears to be weak, for we have no lever to force the ROKs to improve their efforts. Also, the VD problem to them is a minor one." 17 The Korean government considered kijich'on prostitution and venereal disease primarily a US problem and offered no or little help to US military authorities.
The immediate and favorable response of the Korean government, in 1971, to USFK complaints of unruly and unlawful conduct in camptowns was in and of itself a landmark in the history of ROK-U.S. military rela tions. For the first time, the Korean government went out of its way to address civil-military relations and to meet the standards of the U.S. authorities. Prior to 1971, the Korean government had not paid much attention to camptown problems. 18 For example, the only time such issues had been addressed by the Joint Committee, in 1968, U.S. complaints quickly became a non-issue. 19 Although the then U.S. Represen-
tative to the JC had painted a portrait of serious security threats, both political and economic, to the ROK, posed by lawlessness in the Osan area, the ROK Representative disagreed with his counterpart's assessment of the situation and forced his counterpart to back down and accept the ROK assessment of the situation. In 1968, what the USFK had deemed a potential Communist threat to the political and economic security of Korea, the Korean government had rejected as not a threat at all. However, three years later, the Korean government appropriated as a Korean problem what the United States depicted as primarily an in-house U.S. forces problem (black-white racism and lack of troop discipline). Without doubt, the Korean government felt more vulnerable to U.S. demands in 1971 than in 1968, and the importance of base-community relations in the greater context of the U.S.-Korea security relationship had increased significantly.
Several former prostitutes I spoke with recalled the 1960s as a time when they were "most free." They ran around wild, they said, drinking and fighting in public with GIs. They also got into violent brawls with one another; they cursed vehemently and even smashed glass bottles on top of one another's heads and ground the pieces into the scalp. They were brazen, they said, and fearless of governmental authority. Some boasted that even the police feared them and mostly left them alone. 20 The women did not have much governmental authority to fear in the early 1960s because the Korean government generally applied a laissez-faire policy to camptown affairs, including the women's activities.
Korea was weaker economically and militarily in the early 1960s, and hence more dependent on the United States, than in the 1970s. For example, per capita GNP in 1961 was $82 and in 1971 $285 (in 1990 terms), 21 and South Korea's GNP per capita had outpaced that of North Korea in the decade. The South also had a more technologically sophisticated military in the early 1970s than in the decade prior. 22 But it was in the early 1970s that the Korean government actively began to participate in the control over these women. The increased economic and military capabilities of the ROK in the 1970s, which logically should have decreased U.S. dominance in the relationship, and the retrenchment of the United States from "imperialistic interventionism" in Vietnam (and related reduction of its troops from Asia) did not translate into decreased control and abuse of the Korean kijich'on women.
The Korean case points out that foreign control and domination of women is variable and that Marxist-influenced correlations between interstate relations and women's oppression do not account for the variability. The basic problem is that such correlations assume a zero-sum relationship between a stronger state and a weaker state's interactions. But studies on organizational/institutional behavior, big power/small power relations, 23 and dependent development 24 point to the fact that actual bargaining activities of states are not fixed by discernible disparities in power. They illustrate ways in which a weaker power can gain leverage over the stronger power, given a particular context of interests and commitments. Viewing strong-weak state relations as an interactive process, then, offers us a more open-ended array of consequences and roles in interstate relations for women.
In addition, perpetuating a static dichotomy of power relations between nations, so that the women of the weaker nation are always oppressed and exploited by the men of the stronger nation (with the help of local operators, of course), does not help us "disaggregrate" the content and degree of exploitation and abuse. With respect to the U.S.-ROK power relations and military prostitution, what exactly are we trying to explain? Causes and characteristics of the sex trade? Variations in prostitution practices among the different military camps? Changes in the system over time? Or do we focus on the kind and degree of poverty, social degradation, and "choice" confronting the individual women in the prostitution systems?
What I try to do in this book is outline a framework for understanding the intersections of interstate relations and women's lives by drawing upon both established approaches in international relations and feminist studies. I particularly want to focus on specific aspects of kijich'on women's lives, rather than their general state of physical, economic, and social hardships, as manifestations of interstate relations.
First, we need to begin viewing even the most dispossessed women as "players" in world politics; without jumping back and forth from two opposite poles of self-agency and victim-hood, a middleground must be found. 25 The kijich'on prostitutes mentioned in this book were definitely not autonomous actors because they were economically and socially dispossessed. Moreover, their physical freedom was often limited. And most had psychological dependence on their pimps, club managers, or GI customers. But neither were these women simple recipients of governmental actions. The fact is that both the USFK and the ROK government acknowledged and treated these women as significant players in the Clean-Up Campaign. The women did not choose this particular camptown project, but the Campaign's success depended on these women's participation. Participation for these women was not free of co-optation, but neither were all women beaten into submission nor silent about the effects of U.S. foreign policy changes on their lives. The women themselves helped forge kijich'on residents' sentiments against U.S. military domination in their lives and used some of the Campaign's repressive policies to pursue their self-interest (chapter 6).
Keohane and Nye's early conception of transnational politics is helpful here: a "conception of world politics in which the central phenomenon is bargaining between a variety of autonomous or semiautonomous actors [i.e., not just governments]." 26 However, although transnationalism originally opened up international space to include nonstate actors, the great majority of the world's women cannot be included because they are without "significant resources" or "substantial control" over issue areas, requirements that Keohane and Nye include in their definition of transnational actor. 27 Elites and powerful transnational organizations, like multinational companies, the Red Cross, and Amnesty International, remain the source and focus of politics for many transnationalists. If we abide by such characterization of international actor, we would never be able to see how Korean kijich'on women, who lacked "significant resources" and control, had any significant role in transforming camptown relations. We need to broaden the content of significant resources to include not only money, guns, diplomatic weight, and public opinion, but also sex. As long as the prostitutes' bodies served as the daily "glue" between camptown Americans and Koreans, their role as a "player" in kijich'on politics was undeniable.
About twenty-five years later, current conceptions of nongovernmental actor have not expanded significantly upon Keohane and Nye's original formulation; the definition of "actor" as applied to the poorest and most dispossessed of women still goes wanting. In 1996, Weiss and Gordenker emphasize organization and "internationally-endorsed objectives" 28 as the defining characteristics of nonstate actors. They argue that no matter what one calls nonstate actors, "[t]here seems no quarrel, however, with the notion that these organizations consist of durable, bounded, voluntary relationships among individuals to produce a partic ular product, using specific techniques." 29 Again, these parameters leave most of the world's women outside the domain of recognized political processes and in the role of victim or bystander. Most poor women's political interests are matters of day-to-day survival, not of bounded durability, and most assert their interests through whatever apertures in the system they can take advantage of, rather than through organized techniques aimed at a "particular product." It is more useful to view disempowered women as players in world politics from the perspective of what they do with politics across borders--survive, adapt, facilitate, criticize, and resist--than what they do to it. Such women may not mitigate the sovereignty of states, as transnational organizations do, and they may not forge interests and coalitions across borders, as NGOs do, but they do share in the process of "politici[zing] the previously unpolicitized and connect[ing] the local and the global." 30
Second, in order to examine the dynamic of interstate relationships and their linkages with women's lives, we need to keep in mind that the "strong state," "the military," even "capitalist interests," are not monoliths. The papers in the November 1989 issue of American Ethnologist remind scholars of imperialism and colonialism that there were competing "colonialisms" among different groups of colonizers and colonists even in one location. Similarly, the U.S. military does not maintain the same and constant strategic and organizational interests, nor do these interests always coincide with those of the White House or Congress. And the U.S. military exhibits different norms and practices regarding fraternization and sexual interaction with local women in different overseas camp areas. Organizational studies help us maintain these distinctions and urge us to look for competition and bargaining activities among different groups with vested interests as a way to understand specific policy decisions and outcomes relating to women. 31
Like transnational studies, the bureaucratic politics model also focuses on the role of elites in policy making, including, in recent years, women. As more women have joined the ranks in these institutions and helped formulate women-oriented policies, they remind us that institutional cultures are not gender-neutral and therefore not value-free in making and implementing policies. Kardam and Whitworth offer excellent examples of ways in which even "women-friendly" offices and projects within, respectively, the World Bank and the International Labor Organization suffer from gendered biases about the meaning, context and goals of development and labor for women. 32 Kardam points out that the World Bank's bias toward the economic "efficiency" and "effectiveness" of their projects overshadows the "equity" and social welfare needs of most women in developing countries. 33 Similarly, Enloe and others have observed that military institutions are severely gendered in their organizational structure and culture. 34 For example, Enloe states: "A drill sergeant is trying to devastate a resistant young man when he contemptuously shouts into his face, 'Woman!' To be prepared for combat, to soldier, a man must be stripped of all his 'feminine' attributes." 35 This illustrates the way that the U.S. military establishes its organizational hierarchy and gendered ideology by degrading the feminine and constructing an acceptable masculinity.
But these pathbreaking studies still leave us with more questions than answers about how these organizations negotiate 1) the larger power disparities between the country or countries they are sponsored or funded by and those they are trying to aid; 2) the interests and capabilities of host nations and local people. Moreover, studies on organizations and women tell us little about the interactions of bureaucracies and the poorest and most powerless of women, and studies that focus on gendered ideologies of organizations cast women as recipients of actions based on such ideologies.
Feminist scholars of dependency and dependent development have sketched the connection from the international economic system to the limited control of developing countries' governments over the system, to the government's use of women, based on gendered ideology, for its own aims, to the work choices and living conditions of women. 36 For example, Truong has offered a compelling study of sex tourism industries in Southeast Asia as the outcome of interests and interactions between the Asian governments and international organizations and multinational corporations of wealthy countries. 37 But she does not include the residents and authorities of specific localities, who actually participate in and oversee the daily operations of the sex industry, as part of the sex tourism-building process. Nor are the women who work in the industries part of the bargaining process; they are the recipients of others' actions. In a different kind of study, Ward conducts statistical correlations of dependency (commodity concentration and foreign trade structure) and women's status and fertility, 38 but we are left with no idea of the different actors and their interests and interactions that have generated negative effects for women. What we need is to focus our inquiry on specific international actors, broadly defined, their interests and resources,their gender ideologies, and their interactive process.
Last, both dependency and dependent development approaches remind us that governmental and non-governmental elites use different classes and groups of individuals to pursue the "national interest." It goes without saying that all women of one country are not involved in or affected by the dynamic of interstate relations in the same way. Class, local culture, and race interface with a particular foreign policy issue and the interests and capabilities of governments. The key is to pinpoint which women at what time and in what gendered way are identified with the politics of a foreign policy issue. Korean kijich'on prostitutes' status as the "lowest of the low"--in terms of class, educational background, and social stigma of their work--and their key role as daily providers of a resource--sex--facilitated their "convertibility," through the Camptown Clean-Up Campaign, into joint governmental instruments of foreignpolicy.
The following chapters illustrate that power disparities do determine the general framework of interstate relations--the Nixon Doctrine framed U.S.-Korea relations in the first half of the 1970s--but that the dynamic of interests, bargaining tools, and coalitions among governmental and nongovernmental actors determine the relationship between interstate relations and women.
Note 1: 1. Thucydides, "The Melian Debate" in Classics of International Relations, 2d ed., ed. John A. Vasquez (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1990), pp. 16Ð20. Back.
Note 2: For a succinct overview of the alliance literature, see Stephen Walt, The Origins of Alliances, pp. 6Ð11. Back.
Note 3: A few of the most recent studies, especially postmodernist scholarship on security, do mention gender as a way to critique conventional understandings of security. For example, see David Campbell, Writing Security,. Also Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, ch. 3, which offers a historical examination of different ideologies that have informed U.S. foreign policy, is an excellent study of the intersections of race, gender, and international politics. For a feminist critique of conventional security studies, see Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations. Back.
Note 4: See Graham Allison, Essence of Decision; Morton Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy. Back.
Note 5: E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919Ð1939, pp. 132Ð45. Carr discusses the importance of individuals in forming public opinion, a form of power for states, which governmental elites must successfully manipulate. Back.
Note 6: Thomas Schelling, "The Diplomacy of Violence," p. 169. Back.
Note 7: Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War. Back.
Note 8: V. Spike Peterson, "Security and Sovereign States: What Is at Stake in Taking Feminism Seriously?" Back.
Note 9: Tsehai Berhane-Selassie, "The Impact of Industrial Development: Military Build-Up and Its Effect on Women"; Jeanne Vickers, Women and War. Back.
Note 10: Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will, ch. 3. Back.
Note 11: Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, p. 139. Back.
Note 12: Migun kiji pandae chon'guk kongdong taech'aek (National Association Against U.S. Bases), Yangk'i ko hom, (Yankee Go Home); Pusan minjok minju undong yonhap (Federation of Pusan People's Democracy Movement), Nôhûi ga mullônaya uri ga sanda, (You must withdraw so that we can live), part 2, ch. 2; Malchi, (Mal, Magazine). Back.
Note 13: Telephone interview with Mrs. Ch'oe via Mrs. Smith, April 2, 1993. Back.
Note 14: Interview with Kim Yonja, Songt'an, May 3, 1992. Back.
Note 15: Frederick Cooper and Ann L. Stoler, "Tensions of Empire," p. 614. Back.
Note 16: Letter by Lt. Gen. T. W. Dunn, Commander of I Corps (Group) to EUSA Commanding General Hamilton Howze, July 19, 1964. Back.
Note 17: Memorandum from EUSA IO to EUSA Deputy Chief of Staff, Re: "Construction of Medical Clinics," May 3, 1963. Back.
Note 18: Interviews with a key initiator of the Clean-Up, Coscob, Connecticut, October 24, 1991; a USFK community relations officer and former member of the Subcommittee (1970s), Seoul, April 6, 1992. Back.
Note 19: The then U.S. representative, Lt. Gen. Robert J. Friedman, described the USFK's alarm and sense of urgency regarding camptown problems. He stated that "North Korean intelligence and subversive agencies are known to be attempting to operate among criminal elements in the Republic of Korea" and that the "presence of such large, well-organized criminal groups in the immediate vicinity of the headquarters of the [US] Air Forces, Korea, offers the North Korean communist regime a lucrative target for exploitation, against the security interests of the Governments of both the Republic of Korea and of the United States." The then ROK representative, Yun Hajong, retorted that his government's investigations found to the contrary that the incidence of crime had decreased and KNP arrests had increased in the Osan area in 1968. Yun "concluded that he could not see that there existed general lawlessness or organized criminal elements at Osan." Gen. Friedman maintained that the situation remained serious but conceded that he "hope[d] that the ROK Representative's estimate of the situation at Chicol Village [Osan] was a more accurate assessment than that presented in the US statement." JC Minutes, #26, June 5, 1968. Back.
Note 20: Conversations with Kim Yonja, Songt'an, Spring 1992; interview with Ms. Pae, Songt'an, June 6, 1992. Back.
Note 21: Byung-Nak Song, The Rise of the Korean Economy, p. 60. Back.
Note 22: For a breakdown of troop composition and armaments in the early 1970s see Col. T. N. Dupuy and Col. Wendell Blanchard, The Almanac of World Military Power. Back.
Note 23: Robert O. Keohane, "The Big Influence of Small Allies," and "Lilliputians' Dilemmas"; Astri Suhrke, "Gratuity or Tyranny"; David Vital, The Survival of Small States. Back.
Note 24: Fernando Enrique Cardoso, "Associated Dependent Development"; Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America; Peter Evans, Dependent Development. Back.
Note 25: For example, Kathryn Ward, Women Workers and Global Restructuring, writes that women actively do resist patriarchal control and the negative aspects of global restructuring, including "working even though it is against cultural norms; manipulating racist and sexist managers into giving women privileges; participating in engagement parties and worker weekends; and unionizing" (p. 3). She includes both overt and passive forms of resistance (p. 15). Back.
Note 26: Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, eds., Transnational Relations and World Politics, p. 380. Back.
Note 28: Thomas G. Weiss and Leon Gordenker, eds., NGOs, the UN, and Global Governance, p. 21. Back.
Note 31: Graham Allison, "Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis"; Graham Allison and Morton Halperin, "Bureaucratic Politics: A Paradigm and Some Policy Implications." Back.
Note 32: Nuket Kardam, "The Adaptability of International Development Agencies"; Sandra Whitworth, "Gender, International Relations, and the Case of the ILO." Back.
Note 33: Kardam states that "[e]ffectiveness refers to the degree to which a given objective is achieved. Efficiency, on the other hand, is a measure of the relationship between given outcomes and their costs" (p. 117). Back.
Note 34: Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You?; and "Beyond 'Rambo': Women and the Varieties of Militarized Masculinity"; and "Bananas, Bases, and Patriarchy." Back.
Note 35: Enloe, Does Khaki Become You?, pp. 13Ð14. Back.
Note 36: See June Nash and Maria Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, eds., Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor. Back.
Note 37: Than-dam Truong, Sex, Money and Morality. Back.
Note 38: Kathryn B. Ward, Women in the World-System. Back.
Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations
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