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ABSTRACT
This study unravels how discourses and practices on national security and economic development were intertwined at different scales via the US military camptowns in South Korea. While the camptowns have been generally perceived as problematic spaces in socio-economic or ethical terms, memories of camptown residents tell a different and more nuanced story. Yongjugol in Paju, once the largest camptown in Korea, demonstrates how the dynamic nexus between security and development has been constructed and shifted through various spatial scales and how this effectively served to legitimise the exploitation of military prostitutes. However, it also notes that underlining these women’s contributions to national security and economic development leads to unwittingly legitimising the US’s imperial rule in Korea. In this regard, we argue that unravelling the inter-scalar dynamics of the security-development nexus in camptowns helps us de-fantasise the empire’s operation in Korea.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. There has been another critical and controversial designation, ‘comfort women’. While the term ‘comfort women’ is widely known to indicate ‘women and girls who were forced into sex slavery by the Japanese military before and during World War II’ (Amnesty International Citation2020), it was also the official designation that the Korean government used for the prostitutes who served American soldiers from the Korean War era to the 1970s (Park Citation2015).
2. This research was a part of a project to explore a post-Cold War and peace city in East Asia. The camptown was chosen as a key local space to demonstrate the historical trajectory of the Cold War security and development nexus. In addition, the first author joined a research project commissioned by Paju City Government, ‘Research on the Life Conditions and Support Plans for Camptown Women in Paju’ in 2021 to collect military prostitutes’ concerns and interests.
3. As previously mentioned, there is a wealth of ethnographic literature that examines the exploitation of military prostitutes. While much of the existing research draws on the firsthand accounts of comfort women, it is important to also consider the discourses and practices surrounding military camptowns, which requires interviewing local residents.
4. For the first two terms, Yuh (Citation2002, 20) stresses that ‘the use of “princess” and “bride” to describe these women can be seen as a rhetorical gesture that acknowledges the material comfort and glamor symbolized by the United States while ridiculing the women’s efforts to achieve it by selling their bodies to American soldiers’. We clarified our position of empathy towards the struggles and exploitation faced by camptown women before initiating our interviews.
5. Beyond their focus on the state, some critically examine how the nationalist left took advantage of these women’s tragedy for their political purpose of promoting anti-US nationalism in Korean society (Lee Citation2006, Citation2010). They also looked at how ‘camptowns were turned into a symbol of Korea’s suffering as a nation’ (Schober Citation2016, 6, 78).
6. The initial failure of the USFK (United States Forces in Korea) to persuade the Korean government to address these issues demonstrates that power disparities between the two countries did not simply translate into control of the camptown women. It was the withdrawal of US troops under the Nixon Doctrine in 1969 that drew the ‘immediate and favorable response of the Korean government … to USFK complaints … in and of itself a landmark in the history of ROK-U.S. military relations’ (Moon Citation1997, 50).
7. We must consider that this figure is not official, as it was impossible to accurately count the number of unregistered prostitutes.
8. In this respect, Yuh (Citation2002, 27) claims ‘This creates the illusion that it is primarily the Korean government that regulates prostitution and the camptowns, but in reality, such regulation is demanded and orchestrated by the American military, with a weak Korean government able to do little but acquiesce’. Yet, Moon (Citation1998, 147) criticises that US imperialism cannot explain the dramatic shift of the Korean’s government attitude from ‘negligence and intransigence toward any US requests to address camptown problems’ to active intervention and cooperation.
9. For this reason, the 1950s and 1960s were remembered as ‘the heyday of camptown prostitution’ (N-Y. Lee Citation2018, 759) when prostitutes were ‘much “freer” “wilder” “bolder” and less controllable by US or Korean authorities than the women of the 1970s and 1980s. … The Camptown Clean-Up Campaign … marked the end of an era of “wildness” and “freedom” for many camptown prostitutes’ (Moon Citation1998, 149, 163).
10. While the military government officially prohibited prostitution through the establishment of the Act on Prevention of Prostitution, etc. in November 1961, it also set up ‘special districts’ in June 1962 where prostitution was allowed.
11. It was estimated that military prostitutes in Gyeonggi Province earned eight million dollars in 1970 (Lee Citation2006, 345).
12. Yongjugol consisted of two different prostitution districts which were separated by a stream called galgokchun: one to serve the American servicemen and the other to serve the Koreans. While the latter has survived until today, the former gradually deteriorated as the relocation of US military proceeded in accordance with the Nixon Doctrine. Our analysis focuses on the former between the 1960s and 1970s.
13. The prostitutes had been regarded as a necessary evil to support the US military presence in Korea before (Paju-gun Citation1995, 779). In October 1959, one member of the National Assembly even claimed that military prostitutes to satisfy foreign soldiers were inevitable (Heo Citation2014). Moon (Citation1998) stresses ‘The Korean government considered camptown prostitution primarily a US problem and a matter between GI and prostitute, not, as in the 1970s, a matter of state-to-state relations and security affairs’ (150, our emphasis). However, it was the announcement of the Nixon Doctrine that triggered intense discussions about the security-development implications of the US military upon Korea among politicians and media. N-Y. Lee (Citation2018, 762–3) points out that ‘This sense of crisis caused the Korean government to reconceptualize camptown prostitution not only as an integral part of “national economic growth” but also as an aspect of “self-reliant national defense”’.
14. However, as feminist scholars stress, entrenched ethnic nationalism and patriarchal ideology have reduced these women to a symbol of shame that threatens the boundary of the Korean (pure) nation. In this way, military prostitutes were represented as ambivalent beings in nationalist politics.
15. Na-Young Lee (Citation2018, 762) argues that ‘Koreans expressed the fear that the “United States would abandon infant-like Korea’’ … However, this fear was not just about national security, but also about the national economy’.
16. To local people, American soldiers who were not subject to Korean law were objects of fear (Cha Citation2011, 329).
17. Most interviewees that we met, including the military prostitutes, said that the dream of these prostitutes was to marry an American serviceman and migrate to the U.S. A host of scholars have examined this phenomenon (Cho Citation2006; Lee and Lee Citation2007; Yuh Citation2002), and Yuh (Citation2002) calls it ‘American fever’.
18. Sohn (Citation1970) calls Hanjin ‘a military supply chaebol (a large industrial conglomerate)’.
19. According to our interview #4, tailor shops especially in Yongjugol were where military prostitution was widely organised.
20. During the heydays of the camptowns in the 1960s, there was a joke that the salary of a houseboy who worked at the US military camps almost matched that of a minister (Cho Citation1989).
21. This has led to discussions regarding the (re)development of the camptowns mostly in association with US military base transfer (Martin Citation2018a, Citation2018b; Paek Citation2020).
22. Moon (Citation2007, 130) argues ‘Most significantly, since the democratic movement of 1987 and the end of Cold War in the West, the Korean public has become an active and vocal player in national security discourse and policy formulation … in terms of the exercise of Korean sovereignty’.
23. The decline of the camptown economy also led to the forgetting of military prostitutes either as patriots or as disgraceful beings, but this tragedy reinvigorated the public attention of these women as ‘our sisters’ whose dignity was violated by the empire.