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A Critical Review on Base Politics of the U.S. Military in South Korea

Miduk Kim 1

1이화여자대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper examines studies on base politics of the U.S. military bases and camptowns. Since the mid-2000s, studies on base politics(the relationship of U.S. military overseas to the host nations in terms of the establishment and management of the bases) have appeared in U.S. academia, questioning the imperialist nature of U.S. military overseas. In feminist academia, political scientists Cynthia Enloe and Katharine Moon have greatly influenced the discussions and critique of gendered militarism. They demonstrate that the existence of U.S. bases overseas is the product of political negotiation between the U.S. military authorities and the host governments, and thus the sex industry around camptowns is not based on male soldiers’ sexual nature but negotiations between two governments. In the meantime, the question of U.S. military bases in the Korean society has been discussed since 1945. The issues surrounding the question have included sovereignty, environment contamination, the unequal nature of SOFA, sex industry, and offsprings between soldiers and Korean women. In terms of perspective, there is indifference, or a dominant idea in which the station of U.S. soldiers is considered as necessary for national security and the sex industry around the camptowns is a necessary evil. There are also the anti-U.S. nationalist perspective and feminist perspective. Whereas anti-U.S. militarism has been evolved as kind of social movement during the 1990s, since the 2000s the systemic role of the Korean government in the camptowns and the regulation of women’s bodies has intensively been discussed. And it is noticeable that the camptown women more directly participate knowledge production as the form of oral life history, testimony, and autobiography. The increase of studies on geopolitical aspect of camptowns is another noticeable development. By exploring the contesting knowledges on the camptowns and U.S. military bases, I demonstrate the subjectivity and historicity of knowledge.

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* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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