Tag: army

War Is Interested in You

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A review of An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management, Randy Martin, Duke University Press, 2007.

Empire of IndifferenceIn An Empire of Indifference, Randy Martin makes the argument that a financial logic of risk management underwrites US foreign policy and domestic governance. Securitization, derivatives, hedging, arbitrage, risk, multiplier effect, leverage: these keywords of finance can be applied to the field of war-making and empire-building. The war on terror has created an empire of indifference that distances itself from any particular situation, just like the high finance of Wall Street is unconcerned about the travails of the real economy in Main Street. Finance can help us understand how foreign policy decisions are made, military interventions are planned, and scarce resources are allocated for maximum leverage. As a diplomat trained in economics, I find this angle very stimulating. However, the author approaches it from the perspective of the cultural critic, not as an economist or a political scientist. His book is written on the spur of the moment and oscillates between a denunciation of the war on terror and a conventional analysis of mounting risks in the financial sector. His logic is sloppy at best and his references to finance and economics are unsystematic and clumsy. Even his Marxism is of the literary type: he treats Marx as a shibboleth and a source of metaphors, not as an analytical toolbox or a conceptual guide. In the following lines, I would like to reclaim the impetus of mixing economics, war studies, and finance. But first, let me try to summarize Randy Martin’s argument.

Theories of imperialism

The link between the logic of capital and the expansion of Western power was first articulated in the theory of imperialism. For Marxists, imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism. Marx himself did not use the word “imperialism”, nor is there anything in his work that corresponds exactly to the concepts of imperialism advanced by later Marxist writers. He did, of course, have a theory of capitalism, and his work contains extensive, if rather scattered, coverage of the impact of capitalism on non-European societies. Unlike many of his successors, Marx saw the relative backwardness of the non-European world, and its subjection to European empires, as a transient stage in the formation of a capitalist world economy. The conceptualizing and theorizing of imperialism by Marxists has evolved over time in response to developments in the global capitalist economy and in international politics. For Rudolf Hilferding, finance capital is marked by the highest level of concentration of economic and political power. State power breeds international conflicts, while internal conflicts increase with the concentration of capital. Nikolai Bukharin transformed Hilferding’s analysis by setting it in the context of a world economy in which two tendencies were at work. The tendency to monopoly and the formation of groups of finance capital is one, and the other is an acceleration of the geographical spread of capitalism and its integration into a single world capitalist economy. Vladimir Illich Lenin also considered Hilferding’s thesis “a very valuable theoretical analysis” and complemented it with the view that rich capitalist nations were able to delay their final crisis by keeping the poorer nations underdeveloped and deep in debt, and dependent on them for manufactured goods, jobs, and financial resources. Rosa Luxemburg wrote the most comprehensive theory of imperialism, and her conclusion that the limits of the capitalist system drive it to imperialism and war led her to a lifetime of campaigning against militarism and colonialism.

Randy Martin only mentions these early contributions in passing. He devotes more time to contemporary critiques of imperialism articulated by Giovanni Arrighi, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, David Harvey, and others. Earlier Marxists saw the expansion of empires as the sign of capitalism’s imminent demise. By contrast, for their modern epigones, the empire is here to last. They analyze the constitution of global imperial formations as the extension of neoliberalism to all sectors of social life. Empire is the new logic and structure of rule that has emerged with the globalization of economic and financial exchanges. Although capital’s expansion inevitably involves proliferating economic and financial crises, these shocks to the system are not signs of imminent collapse but, instead, mechanisms of adaptation and adjustment. Under neoliberalism, war and empire-making are privatized and generate in response insurgencies and resistance of the multitudes from below. As Slavoz Zizek observed about the Iraq war, “there were too many reasons for the war”: the American decision to invade Iraq in March 2003 was overdetermined and justified by a long list of arguments, from bringing democracy to asserting hegemony and securing oil. President Eisenhower’s greatest fears about the expansion of the military-industrial complex have not only been realized, they have been surpassed due to the symbiotic relationship it has with the neoliberal agenda.

Asset-Backed Security

Works penned by critics of empire are usually reactive: they come after the facts and often react to geopolitical events such as the launch of a preemptive war by the US in response to the September 11 attacks, the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and the extension of counter-insurgency, or the vilification of presidential power brought forth by Donald Trump. Randy Martin’s book was published in 2007, shortly before the start of the subprime crisis that ushered a sharp decline in economic activity known as the Great Recession. He achieves a certain degree of prescience by pointing out the imbalances building in the subprime loan market and the excessive leverage of government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But his main contribution is to assess what the recent ascent of finance has meant for the conduct of military interventions and foreign policy. “Simply put, finance divides the world between those able to avail themselves of wealth opportunities through risk taking and those who are considered ‘at risk’.” Populations become the target of portfolio management at home and abroad. The logic of finance by which the United States manages its human assets and social liabilities now guides its foreign policy. The ability of an individual or a nation to sustain debt is portrayed as a sign of strength and rewarded with access to additional capital and good credit rating. Those citizens or countries deemed to being bad risks are cut short and left out to loan sharks and debt collectors.

Martin devoted one full book to The Financialization of Daily Life, analyzing the mechanisms by which finance permeates and orients the activities of markets and social life. An Empire of Indifference focuses on what finance does to foreign policy and war-making. War today takes on a financial logic in the way it is organized and prosecuted. America applies a utilitarian frame to war and peace, and seeks tradeoffs between security and risk. Security gives way to securitization, war-making follows the same rules as financial products such as options and derivatives, and Wall Street’s indifference to Main Street now extends to the empire’s carelessness about the lands and populations that become the target of foreign interventions. More specifically, the author sees a strong parallel between monetary policy and the Bush doctrine of preemptive strikes. Inflationary pressures have to be nipped in the bud before they affect the overall economy; likewise, enemies are to be defeated before they can make their antagonism manifest. By converting potential threats into actual conflicts, the war on terror transfers future uncertainty into present risk. Bridging the future into the present has been the guiding principle for monetary policy since the late 1970s. The same logic of rational expectations and backward induction now applies to military operations abroad and to homeland security: controlling risk necessitates constant interventions and is necessarily preemptive. For risks to be reliably calculable, the future must look like the present.

Security and securitization

Randy Martin sees other parallels between circuits of finance and the military. Both seek to leverage narrowly focused interventions and investments to more global effects. This is the logic of arbitrage, coupled with financial derivatives, that exploits small differences in market value and leverages it on a large scale. New battlefield tactics rely on concentrated, relatively small deployment of soldiers to achieve strategic results. Special Forces are meant to eliminate targets before a formal battle is joined; air strikes and armed drones use high-frequency information to maximize return. The intervention in Iraq was supposed to usher a new era of peace and democracy in the Middle East, solving the Palestinian question and giving lasting guarantees of security to Israel along the way. The outcome could have been predicted by pursuing the parallel with market forces and financial intermediation. The war on terror creates what it seeks to destroy; likewise, derivatives create the volatility they were meant to manage. Despite the rhetoric, preemptive wars and forward deployments do not necessarily attempt to deter enemy action, to ward off an undesirable future, but are as likely to prove provocative, to increase the likelihood of conflict, to precipitate that future. American imperium now oscillates between invasion and isolation and remains geared toward short-term gains and high risk, high rewards investments. In this new empire of indifference, people are left to manage the mess that the occupiers deposited before taking flight.

My main issue with Randy Martin’s Empire of Indifference is that the author is not an economist: he literally does not know what he is talking about. Finance is for him a play of words and a source of metaphors, not a rigorous method of allocating risk and maximizing return. Even his Marxism is literary and evocative as opposed to rational and analytical. The book is tied to a particular moment in recent history, associated with the doctrine of preemptive war and the marriage of convenience between neoliberalism and neoconservatism. Its chapters read more like newspaper columns or opinion essays meant to put the news in perspective and to influence public opinion toward desired goals.  And yet, Martin’s proposition to look at imperial ambitions in the context of the powers of finance is highly relevant in our day and age. Since Keynes’ Economic Consequences of the Peace, economists have been brought to the negotiating table; it is now time to bring them to the war room as well. Finance is doubly performative: it impacts a nation’s ability to declare and sustain war, and it affects the way war is conducted. Financial markets are often seen as reacting to political events. They are the biggest consumers of country risk analysis and geopolitical futures, and they absorb information in real time. But finance also shapes our vision of possible futures and produces affects and expectations that impact the results of foreign engagements.

You may not be interested in war, but…

Maybe it is time for finance to become weaponized, and for corporate strategy and military tactics to cross-pollinate each other. The US military has a National Guard and Reserve component of more than 1.1 million members. I wonder how many of them work in the financial sector, or how many West Point graduates are employed by Wall Street firms. There has always been a revolving door between investment banking and the DoD. The generation that laid the ground of the post-WWII international order, known collectively as the Wise Men, all had military experience. Finance as an academic discipline grew out of war-financed research in decision science and optimization. Operation research and game theory were the brain children of the Cold War, and had military as well as economic applications. DARPA has pioneered the use of prediction markets and futures exchanges based on possible political developments in various countries and regions, including violent events such as assassinations or terror attacks. To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, economists and financial market operators may not be interested in war, but war is interested in them.

South Korea Meets the Queer Nation

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A review of Queer Korea, edited by Todd A. Henry, Duke University Press, 2020.

Queer KoreaOn March 3, 2021, Byun Hui-su, South Korea’s first transgender soldier who was discharged from the military the year before for having gender reassignment surgery, was found dead in her home. Her apparent suicide drew media attention to transphobia and homophobia in the army and in South Korean society at large. According to Todd Henry, who edited the volume Queer Korea published by Duke University Press in 2020, “LGBTI South Koreans face innumerable obstacles in a society in which homophobia, transphobia, toxic masculinity, misogyny, and other marginalizing pressures cause an alarmingly high number of queers (and other alienated subjects) to commit suicide or inflict self-harm.” Recently people and organizations claiming LGBT identity and rights have gained increased visibility. The city of Seoul has had a Gay Pride parade since 2000, and in 2014 its mayor Park Won-soon suggested that South Korea become the first country to legalize gay marriage—but conservative politicians as well as some so-called progressives blocked the move, and the mayor committed suicide linked to a #metoo scandal in 2020. Short of same-sex unions, most laws and judicial decisions protecting LGBT rights are already on the books or in jurisprudence, and society has moved towards a more tolerant attitude regarding the issue. Nonetheless, gay and lesbian Koreans still face numerous difficulties at home and work, and many prefer not to reveal their sexual orientation to family, friends or co-workers. Opposition to LGBT rights comes mostly from Christian sectors of the country, especially Protestants, who regularly stage counter-protests to pride parades, carrying signs urging LGBT people to “repent from their sins.” In these conditions, some sexually non-normative subjects eschew visibility and remain closeted, or even give up sexuality and retreat from same-sex communities as a survival strategy.

Queer studies in a Korean context

There is also a dearth of books and articles addressing gay and lesbian cultures or gender variance in South Korean scholarship. Unlike the situation prevailing on North American university campuses, queer studies still haven’t found a place in Korean academia. Students at the most prestigious Korean universities (SNU, Korea University, Yonsei, Ehwa…) have created LGBT student groups and reading circles, but graduate students who specialize in the field face a bleak employment future. Many scholars who contributed to Queer Korea did it from a perch in a foreign university or from tier-two colleges in South Korea. This volume nonetheless demonstrates the vitality of the field and the fecundity of applying a queer studies approach to Korean history and society. The authors do not limit themselves to gay and lesbian studies: a queer perspective also includes cross-gender identification, non-binary identities, and homosocial longings that fall outside the purview of sexuality. Queer theory also takes issue with a normative approach emphasizing political visibility, human rights, and multicultural diversity as the only legitimate forms of collective mobilization. Queer-of-color critiques point out that power dynamics associating race, class, gender expression, sexuality, ability, culture and nationality influence the lived experiences of individuals and groups that hold one or more of these identities. Asian queer studies have shown that tropes of the “closet” and “coming out” may not apply to societies where the heterosexual family and the nation trump the individual and inhibit the expression of homosexuality. In addition, as postcolonial studies remind us, South Korea is heir to a history of colonialism, Cold War, and authoritarianism that has exacerbated the hyper-masculine and androcentric tendencies of the nation.

Some conservatives in South Korea hold the view that “homosexuality doesn’t exist in Korean culture” and that same-sex relations were a foreign import coming from the West (North Koreans apparently share this view.) This is, of course, absurd: although Confucianism repressed same-sex intercourse and limited sexuality to reproductive ends, throughout Korean history some men and women are known to have engaged in homoerotic activity and express their love for a person of the same sex. To limit oneself to the twentieth century, there is a rich archival record relating to same-sex longings and sensuality, cross-gender identification, and non-normative intimacies that the authors of Queer Korea were able to exploit. Homosexuality didn’t have to be invented or imported: it was present all along, albeit in different cultural forms and personal expressions. Close readings of literary texts, research into historical archives, surveys of newspapers and periodicals, visual analysis of movies and pictures, and participatory observation or social activism allow each contributor to produce scholarship on a neglected aspect of Korean history and society. But it is also true that persons that were sexually attracted to the same sex lacked role models or conceptual schemes that would have helped them make sense of their inclination. They were kept “in the dark” about the meaning of homosexuality as anything but a temporary aberrant behavior, a perverted desire that ordinary men “slipped” or “fell into” (ppajida), especially in the absence of female partners. The strong bondings that girls and young women developed in the intimacy of all-female classrooms and dormitories was seen with more leniency, but was considered as a temporary arrangement before they entered adulthood and marriage. As a result of the authoritarian ideology of the family-state, official information about non-normative sexualities such as homosexuality was highly restricted. Many men and women attracted to the same sex were confused and morally torn about their desires.

The elusive Third Miracle of the Han River

An optimistic view alleges that sexual minority rights with follow the path of economic development and democratization, only with some delay. According to this view, the “miracle of the Han river” occurred in three stages. A country totally destroyed by the Korean War transformed itself in less than three decades from a Third World wastebasket to an Asian economic powerhouse, becoming the 12th largest economy in terms of GDP. The second miracle occurred when democratic forces toppled the authoritarian regime and installed civilian rule and democratic accountability. The third transformation may be currently ongoing and refers to the mobilization of civil society to achieve equal rights for all, openness to multiculturalism, and women’s empowerment. But this teleological view neglects the fact that an emerging market economy can always shift to reverse mode: economic crises may sweep away hard-won gains, the rule of law may be compromised by ill-fated politicians, and social mobilizations may face a conservative backlash. This is arguably what is happening in South Korea these days. To limit oneself to sexual minority rights, the current administration has backpedalled on its promise to pass an anti-discrimination law; the legalization of same-sex-marriages still faces strong opposition; and homophobic institutions such as the army or schools fail to provide legal protection for gender-variant or sexually non-normative persons. The failure of LGBT communities to adopt a distinctive gay, lesbian, or trans culture and follow the path of right-based activism should not be seen as an incapacity to challenge the hetero-patriarchal norms of traditional society in favor of a transgressive and non-normative identity politics. As John (Song Pae) Cho notes, “For Korean gay men who had been excluded from the very category of humanity, simply existing as ordinary members of society may be considered the most transgressive act of all.”

The current backlash against homosexuality is not a return to a previous period of sexual repression and self-denial. It is triggered by economic necessity in the face of financial insecurity, labor market flexibility, and a retreating welfare state. John Cho shows that the three phases of male homosexuality within South Korea’s modern history were intrinsically linked to economic development. The “dark period” of South Korea’s homosexuality during the late developmentalist period, from the 1970s to the mid-1990s, was followed by a brief flowering of homosexual communities fueled by the Internet and the growing economy. But this community-building phase was undermined by the family-based restructuring that accompanied South Korea’s transformation into a neoliberal economy. As a response to the IMF crisis of 1997, the Korean state revived the older ideology of “family as nation” and “nation as family.” It used family, employment, and other social benefits to discriminate against non-married members of society and discipline non-normative populations who did not belong to the heterosexual nuclear family. Many single gay men in their thirties and forties were forced to “retreat” and “retire” from homosexuality to focus on self-development and financial security that often took the form of marriage with the opposite sex. Other gay men turned to money as the only form of security in a neoliberal world. In her chapter titled “Avoiding T’ibu (Obvious Butchness)”, Layoung Shin shows that young queer women who used to cultivate a certain masculinity, wearing short hair and young men’s clothing to emulate the look of boy bands’ idols, reverted to a strategy of invisibility and gender conformity to avoid discrimination at school and on the job market. The choice of invisibility is rendered compulsory in the army, where the Korean military even uses “honey traps” on gay dating apps to root out and expel gay military personnel.

Fighting against homophobia and transphobia

In such a context, developing queer studies in South Korea is going against the grain of powerful societal forces, and this may account for the militant tone adopted by many contributors to this volume. John Cho concludes his article on “The Three Faces of South Korea’s Male Homosexuality” by stating that the homophobic backlash is “ushering in a new period of neofascism in Korean history.” Layoung Shin emphasizes that “we cannot blame young queer women’s avoidance of masculinity,” and formulates the hope that “our criticism may offer them the courage to not fear punishment and harassment or bullying at school, which an antidiscrimination bill would remedy.” Timothy Gitzen exposes the “toxic masculinity” of South Korea’s armed forces where, on the basis of an obscure clause in the military penal code, dozens of soldiers who purportedly engage in anal sex are hunted down and imprisoned, even though they met partners during sanctioned periods of leave and in the privacy of off-base facilities. An independent researcher and transgender activist named Ruin, who self-identifies as a “zhe,” shows that bodies that do not conform to strict boundaries between men and women face intense scrutiny and various forms of discrimination, consolidated by institutions and norms such as the first digit in the second part of national ID numbers which are used for all kinds of procedures like getting a mobile phone or registering for employment and social benefits. Zhe claims that “this problem cannot be solved by legal reform; on the contrary, abolishing these legal structures altogether may be a more fundamental and effective solution,” as ID numbers were introduced to exclude and persecute “ppalgaengi” citizens suspected of pro-Communist sympathies during the Korean War. Todd Henry, the volume editor, notes that homophobia and transphobia are not limited to South (and North) Korea and that queer and transgender people in the United States face the added risk of being brutally murdered by gun-toting individuals.

But the most transgressive moves in Queer Korea may be the attempt to reframe history and revisit the literary canon using queer lenses and critical approaches inspired by queer theory. Remember that some conservative critics pontificate that “homosexuality didn’t exist in Korea” before it was introduced from abroad. In a way they are right: the word “same-sex love” (tongsongae) was translated from the Japanese dōseiai and was introduced under colonial modernity at the same time as “romantic love” (yonae) and “free marriage” (chayu kyoron). Colonial society allowed certain groups, such as schoolgirls, to engage in spiritual same-sex love to keep young people away from heterosexual intercourse. Pairs of high school girls formed a bond of sistership (ssisuta) and vowed they would “never marry and instead love each other eternally.” But during this period, “love” had little to do with sexual and romantic desire, and society relied on conjugal and filial conventions that privileged men at the expense of women. High school girls were expected to “graduate” from same-sex love and to serve as “wise mothers and good wives” (hyonmo yangcho). Those who didn’t and who tragically committed double suicides (chongsa) or led their lives as New Women (shin yoja) attracted a great deal of contentious debates and literary attention. Meanwhile, namsaek (“male color”) and tongsongae (homosexuality) between men was medicalized and pathologized as an abnormal behavior discussed along the same lines as rape, bigamy, and sexual perversion (songjok tochak). Whereas male spiritual bonding (tongjong) and physical intimacy known nowadays as skinship were tolerated and even sometimes encouraged, there seems to have emerged a fixation on anal sex (kyegan, “chicken rape”) that is shared today by the military and conservative Christian groups.

Drag queens and cross-dressers

Traditional Korea also had its drag queens and cross-dressers. The male shamans and healers (mugyok, nammu, baksu), female fortunetellers and spiritists (mudang, posal), and the so-called flower boys (hwarang) practiced cross-dressing, sex change, and gender fluidity avant la lettre. Transgendered shamans passed as women by dressing, talking, and behaving as women, while women practitioners of kut ceremonies donned kings’ and warriors’ robes and channelled the voice of male gods and spirits. Despised by traditional Korean society, they formed guilds and associations under Japanese occupation and assimilated with official shinto religion to get political favor. Under their theory of “two peoples, one civilization,” Japanese scholars claimed that Korean shamanism and Japanese Shintō shared a common origin. Meanwhile, well-known historians such as Ch’oe Nam-son and Yi Nung-hwa exploited the precolonial traditions of these marginalized women and men to forge a glorious story of the nation, one that re-centered Korea and Manchuria in a larger continental culture of shamanism. Korea’s colonial modernity had also a “queer” writer in the person of Yi Sang (1910-37), whose pen name could be transliterated as “abnormal” or “odd,” and who cultivated a Bohemian style inspired by European dandyism and avant-garde eccentricity. During the Park Chung-hee era (1963-79), the suppression of homosexuality didn’t mean that unofficial and popular representations of non-normative sexualities were absent. In fact, both reports in weekly newspaper and in gender comedy films were rife with such representations, of which queer populations were shadow readers and viewers. In a long and well-documented article, Todd Henry shows that South Korea boasts a long but largely ignored history of same-sex unions, particularly among working-class women. Journalists working for pulp magazines routinely covered female-female wedding ceremonies from the 1950s to the 1980s. In “a Female-Dressed Man Sings a National Epic,” Chung-kang Kim analyzes the story of the movie Male Kisaeng (1969), the Korean equivalent of the gender comedy film Some Like It Hot.

Queer studies are underdeveloped in South Korea. In an academy that remains disinterested in, if not hostile to, queer studies, it takes some courage to stake one’s career on the development of the field. This explains the militant tone adopted by some contributors, who mix scholarship and social activism. In a society that has often been framed in terms of ethnoracial and heteropatriarchal purities, they have a lot to bring to contemporary debates by showing how Korea has always been more diverse, and sometimes more tolerant to diversity, than dominant representations make us believe. As one of the authors claims, “homosexuality is not a ‘foreign Other’ that has been imported only into the country as part of the phenomenon of globalization. It likely has always existed as a ‘proximate Other’ within the nation itself.” And yet, Queer Korea appears at a time when the LGBT movement seems to be in retreat. The stigmatization and marginalization of sexual minorities continue unabated, and the emergence of LGBT organizations, film festivals, and political organizations during a period that witnessed the establishment of democratic institutions has given way to individual strategies of invisibility and retreat. Most queer subjects avoid the kind of public visibility that typically undergirds identity politics. Even politicians sympathetic to gay and lesbian rights avoid taking positions in this fraught context in fear of “homophobia by association”—they might be involved in collective culpability, just like the families and colleagues of ppalgaengi (Reds) were targeted by “guilt by association” under authoritarian rule. Queer studies in Korea, and Korean queer theory, will not necessarily follow the path taken by the discipline elsewhere. But this volume definitely puts it on the map.

Shattered Bodies and Broken Minds

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A review of After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed, Zoë H. Wool, Duke University Press, 2015.

After WarIt is said that Americans don’t have social security. Soldiers do. Earnings for active duty military service or active duty training have been covered under the Social Security Act since 1957. Veterans get social security benefits after they are discharged. Military service members who become disabled while on active duty can file for disability claims. The social security system also covers families and relatives of a deceased soldier. Active duty military members can retire after twenty years of active duty service. In exchange, they receive retirement pay for life. Veterans get free or low-cost medical care through VA hospitals and medical facilities. They have access to special education programs, housing and home loan guarantees, job training and skills upgrading, small business loans, and even burial and memorial benefits. Their situation contrasts with the thirty million Americans who do not have health insurance and who cannot afford medical costs, and with the many more who get only minimal retirement pension and healthcare. In sum, when you join the US Army, Uncle Sam gets your back covered.

Fieldwork and care work

But being a soldier in a warlike nation comes with a high risk. Wars waged abroad bring home their lot of shattered lives, broken bodies, and crippled minds. These are the lives and bodies that Zoë Wool encountered while doing fieldwork at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC. Her book begins with a seven-pages lexicon of abbreviations and acronyms, from ACU (Army combat uniform) to VA (Department of Veterans Affairs). Any person who has approached a military administration will recognize the heavy use of jargon and code words that puts a distance between those in the know and the civilians outside. But the dehumanizing aspect of military language is soon countered by the vivid portraits from the gallery of characters that the reader encounters. Zoë Wool makes the book’s purpose and design clear in the introduction. Readers won’t find reams of statistics, or dates and facts arranged in a linear history, or the description of the running and functioning of an institution. Neither will they hear a vocal denunciation of the US military-healthcare complex. Although the author did some work with Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and attended congressional hearings related to the “war on terror,” her book centers on the lives of those with whom she spent time at Walter Reed.

Fieldwork, or spending time with people in order to answer research questions, is “the thing anthropologists do.” But the term “fieldwork” does not necessarily describe the kind of work researchers like Zoë Wool are engaged in. “Emotional work” or “caring” may be closer to what she actually did, although she wasn’t a caregiver or didn’t try to pass as such. But she cared about the people she encountered at Walter Reeds in a deep and emotional way. Whenever she could, she gave them a hand and helped them to do small things, she registered their ordinary thoughts, or lent an ear to their silence. Asked about the purpose of her research, she often said: “I just want to see what life is like here for you guys.” She wasn’t there to listen to their stories, for they had no stories to tell. Their broken bodies did the talking: missing limbs, infected bones, colostomy bags, catheters, intravenous lines, wheelchairs, and numbing medication. As for themselves, their experience and memory of the war theater was shattered and broken into pieces. Talk of war rarely took narrative form. Injured soldiers were often prompted to talk about their combat experience with visiting journalists and well-wishers, but the anthropologist didn’t add to their burden and ask them about this “asshole of a place” that was Iraq. They preferred to keep silent, and she respected that.

The most warlike people on earth

Life at Walter Reed follows very American norms. US soldiers and veterans swear only by nation, mother, and apple pie—or rather by country roads, girlfriend, and painkillers. A feeling of ordinariness permeates every situation in a place that nonetheless falls out of the ordinary. The fact that the patients are soldiers, and their injuries sustained during war, marks the situation in unique ways. Of course, Walter Reed has sheltered and treated other soldiers in previous engagements: Vietnam, Korea, World War II, and World War I. The United States is, after all, a bellicose nation, and Americans are the most war-prone people on earth if we judge by the twentieth century’s record. Heroism and patriotism have always been linked to the violence of war, and the image of the wounded soldier undergirds the national narrative of the United States. But this time was different. Injuries that were fatal in previous conflicts can now be healed or contained. A disproportionate number of soldiers were exposed to the blasting of IED or EFP (explosively formed projectiles) which have the purpose to maim and to cripple as much as to kill. These are the people that Zoë Wool encountered at Walter Reed. In addition to bodily injuries, they had to cope with PTSD, throbbing headaches, and the adverse effects of medication. Blown-up bodies can be stitched back; but broken minds can never be restored to normal.

The lives of injured soldiers at Walter Reed are characterized by an unstable oscillation between the extreme and the unremarkable, a balance the author calls “the extra/ordinary.” As she describes it, “Life was heavy and slow. Soldiers felt it in the excruciating sluggishness of each day. Hours died impossibly long deaths watching TV, playing video games, sleeping, smoking, nothing.” “Surprises were so expected you could almost see them coming.” Moments of intense boredom alternated with flashes of unbearable pain. People became fast friends without the preliminary step of getting acquainted, and they parted accordingly. While the atmosphere at the housing facility was made to recreate a “home away from home,” journalists and philanthropists popped in regularly, and people would get notes telling them Miss America will be making a visit. Publicity and patriotism saturated the place, with ubiquitous stars and stripes banners, yellow ribbons, and “support our troops” signs. Many patients hated going to special events for injured soldiers because doing so made them feel like a “charity case,” but they nonetheless accepted the invitation to be wined and dined by nation-loving benefactors.

Private donations and public support

Indeed, the mix of public support and private charity is what characterizes Walter Reed from the ground up. The housing facility in which Zoë Wool did her research, the Fisher House, is named after a married couple of benefactors who wanted to provide a living space for the spouses, parents and siblings of injured soldiers so as to recreate a form of family life. Each house functions as its own nonprofit organization and relies on the generosity of philanthropic organizations and individuals. Injured soldiers are never left alone: whether in the street or in their living room, grateful strangers come to see and meet and touch them in order to offer them thanks. The field of exchange in which soldiers are included is all at once moral, material, and affective. Claims about the sacrifice of injured soldiers are claims about the valuation of life and death in the context of America’s wars abroad. The deadly risk of soldiering is rendered sacred, and blood sacrifice is the measure the debt that society incurs. Soldiers do not always adhere to this moral economy: they do not see themselves as self-sacrificing heroes, and consider what they did on the war front as mere “work” or “a job”. Similarly, attending patriotic dinners, or accepting the grateful messages of strangers, is considered by them as part of their job.

The Fisher House at Walter Reed is also suffused with the ideology of the normative family. The institution was created to host the conjugal partners and close relatives of injured soldiers. It provides a space where couples can recreate a normal life before leaving to civilian residence. But normalcy can be elusive in the extra/ordinary context of Walter Reed. Soldiers typically married at a very young age shortly before getting enlisted, and never experienced married life as conventionally defined. Apart from their parents’ place, there was no place they could call home, a place where they used to reside and to which they could go back. Their injury and medical condition created new forms of dependency that raised specters of abandonment, isolation, and solitude. Families did not offer a refuge from the impermanence, instability, and boredom that characterized life at Walter Reed. They were torn by domestic violence, sexual frustration, or unwanted pregnancies. Soldiers held to intimate attachments like lifelines in a rough sea, while the material perks earned by their companion entered in the calculus of spouses who chose to love and to cherish for better and for worse. The pensioned veteran is the opposite of the single-mother “welfare queen”: social benefits and state support is what makes couples stay together.

The military-healthcare complex

Walter Reed General Hospital was built in 1908. It is the place American presidents visit to express the nation’s gratefulness to injured soldiers. It is also the place where Donald J. Trump got tested and treated for Covid-19. This mix of high politics and intimate care is what characterizes the military-healthcare complex. The expression “military-industrial complex” was coined by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to warn against the unholy alliance between the nation’s military and the defense industry that supplies it. Its medical equivalent raises another specter: that of a country in which a passage through the US Armed Forces is the only way to access decent living and healthcare for the disenfranchised classes. Military benefits are considered as the only legitimate form of social security. The welfare state is reduced to the warfare state. This dependency fuels an unending process of overseas wars and military entanglements. In her book, Zoë Wool doesn’t indulge in such social critique; but her deeply moving portrayal of shattered bodies and broken minds warns us of any temptation to consider homecoming soldiers solely as war heroes, victims of trauma, or bearers of patriotic pride.

Making the World Safe for Tourism in Asia-Pacific

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai’i and the Philippines, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Duke University Press, 2013.

Securing ParadiseWhen she was a little girl growing up in the Philippines, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez considered American tourists and soldiers that she encountered or heard about as a benevolent presence. They were there to protect the land and to share their riches with a people in need of security and prosperity. This positive image was reinforced by the missionary schools founded by Americans, the remittances sent from abroad by relatives, the proceeds from commerce and military bases, and the endless stream of American movies and serials flowing from television. Later on, when her family emigrated to the United States, she would accompany her father to the Douglas MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, Virginia, and share the gratitude held by many Filipinos for the general who liberated their country from Japanese occupation. For her, America was still the land of the free, a beacon of hope and opportunity for those seeking a better life beyond their own shores. But then she went to study at UC Berkeley and her worldview changed. She learned about the history of American imperialism, the gruesome stories of the Philippines-American war, the propaganda machine of Cold War politics, the complicity with authoritarian regimes, the destruction of the planet by the forces of neoliberalism, and the cynicism of exploitative raw power. Her homeland, the Philippines, became associated with the image of a puppet regime led by a dictator clinging to power with the backing of the US military. She applied the same critical lenses to the state of Hawaii and its populations after the was nominated as Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. For her, the Hawaiian archipelago was forced into the American fold at the end of the nineteenth century by a coalition of military imperialists, colonial planters, and migrant laborers who relegated the natives to subordinary status and even to cultural extinction. Being herself a nonnative in an adopted homeland, Vernadette Gonzalez purports to speak on behalf of the Native Hawaiians who should, however implausible it may sound, reclaim their sovereignty.

In the introduction, the author asks: “What alchemy transforms the terror of imperial violence and American postwar occupation to deeply felt understandings of American rescue, liberation, and benevolence?” One could raise the opposite question: how did a young girl raised in the spirit of America’s gentle embrace turn against a familiar presence and came to see it as a force of evil? How to explain this complete reversal, and what turned her from a believer of American kind-heartedness into a staunch critic of US malignity? Was it her studies in social sciences at UC Berkeley? And why did she choose to study at this university in the first place? Although she doesn’t give any biographical clues, I see three general reasons for this conversion: history, ideology, affect. These factors work both ways: the same historical, ideological and affective formations that explain Filipinos’ conversion to a myth of American compassionate guardianship also explain the anger, resentment, and challenge to the United States’ past and present imperial role. In a reversion of values, the soldier and the tourist can be seen alternatively as the Good American or the Ugly Yankee. Like a Janus-faced figure, the two characters are one and the same. He can be invited by his hosts to come home as a guest or, in the same movement, told to go home and depart. Thinking about tourism and militarism in Hawaii and the Philippines allows Vernadette Gonzalez to vent her anger against US imperialism past and present, and also to disavow the young girl who held hands with her father in American Pacific War memorials. In Securing Paradise, she applies critical lenses to analyze the history, ideology and affects sustaining the “military-tourism security complex” in the Philippines and in Hawaii.

Tourists and soldiers

In a way, the tourism industry is the opposite of militarization. Tourism is a peaceful activity, and tourists don’t go to war zones or to places exposed to the risk of insecurity. Unlike the soldier, the tourist doesn’t engage in violent or threatening behavior. He brings with him a camera, not a gun, and leaves behind dollars and trinkets, not bullets and explosives. The tourist is more often a ‘she’ than a ‘he’: a softer, warmer version of America’s presence in the tropics that stands in stark contrast to the masculine figure of oppression and threat. For Vernadette Gonzalez, the desires and economies of modern tourism are central to American military dominance in Asia and the Pacific. Tourism and militarism are mutually constitutive: both are part of am American project of domination and imperial outreach, and Hawaii and the Philippines form the first line of this concentric projection of power and sentiments. The roots and routes of the US military in these sites are foundational to tourist itineraries and imaginations. Tourism normalizes the presence of the military, prioritizes its needs, and disseminates a racialized and gendered idea of security. Both militarism and tourism rely on sedimented notions of colonized land and people (especially women) as waiting idly for their arrival, passively there for the taking. In many places, tourism has its roots in the militarized “rest and recreation” industry that thrived in the periphery of war theaters. The security that military bases provide is a fiction that starkly contrasts the reality of sexual exploitation and social insecurity that develops in the vicinity of army camps. The male tourist and the soldier both harbor voyeuristic and violent fantasies and usually turn their gaze against the bodies of women. For the author, many modern tourist sites are tainted by the illicit sexual economies and violence produced in rest and recreation sites of military occupation.

“Militourism” is designed as the activity fusing the two activities of militarism and tourism: making historic battlefields fit for tourism, creating memorials and museums to commemorate past military engagements, displaying military presence as a guarantee of security for foreign holidaymakers, or attracting active military personnel and retired soldiers to beach resorts and scenic sites. It also involves transforming former military bases into vacation sites and other sources of economic revenue, or building dual-use facilities and infrastructures such as scenic highways or helicopter landing platforms. In Asia and the Pacific, these “militourisms” take place on terrains that have long felt the impact of being objects of imperial desire. The first touristic explorations and adventures in the Pacific also doubled as military reconnaissance and imperial prospection. The image of the tropics as paradise was instrumental in justifying a policy of land grabbing and imperial expansion; it also served to lure young soldiers enrolling in overseas tours of duty. The world of the soldier and that of the tourist are often one and the same. The business of tourism benefits from the high drama of war: places like Pearl Harbor remain popular because war is at the core of America’s past and present identity. Likewise, the US military benefits from the glorification of American cultures of war that occurs in sites memorializing past military engagements. Gonzalez describes the activities of “remembering Pearl Harbor” at the USS Arizona Memorial or “playing soldier” on former US training grounds in  Subic Bay as emotional labor: the labor that it takes to shape a national myth that is instrumental to Hawaiian dispossession and to the Philippines’s subordination.

History, ideology, affect

History is at the heart of people’s ambivalent attitudes towards the United States. The history of Hawaii and of the Philippines can be told in two very different ways: one eliciting sympathy and hope, the other criticism and grief. One reason for the adherence to the myth of American benevolence in the Pacific is that its believers are served with a rosy picture of history. And one reason for their conversion to the message of “Yankee Go Home” is that they come into contact with a very different story. It is this black book of misery and sorrow that Gonzalez presents to her readers. As she notes, Hawaii before the annexation by the United States was a sovereign kingdom that was undergoing struggles for internal unification and also fighting off external attempts on its autonomy. Massive population decline following the arrival of European explorers and sailors had produced conditions for exploitation, dispossession, and cultural ethnocide. A coalition formed by white plantation owners, missionary elites, and the US Navy collaborated to roll back native sovereignty with the Bayonet Constitution of 1887, the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893, and the annexation of the islands in 1898, creating America’s first foothold in the Pacific. This history is paralleled by America’s expansion westwards and its collusion with the Spanish empire in the Philippines. The Spanish-American War of 1898 was soon followed by the Philippine-American War, a nasty and brutish conflict in which torture was used against the native insurgents. This brought the Philippines into the American fold, and allowed the US Navy to strengthen its presence in the Pacific. Indeed, Hawaii and the Philippines would share linked fates as part of the American chain of garrison islands.

American tourists and soldiers are served a version of history that stands in stark contrast with the unofficial narrative told in Securing Paradise. They visit landmark sites and museums that present a sanitized version of the United States’ imperial expansion in the Pacific. America’s presence in the Philippines is retold as a story of rescue, liberation, and sharing of riches. The US administration of the Philippines, from 1898 to 1946, and the period following the annexation when Hawaii became a US Territory, from 1989 to 1959, are characterized as a progressive era during which the United States implemented a benign and modern form of stewardship. The authorities undertook a slate of reforms, hygiene, education, and economic projects that uplifted the population and created sympathy even among former insurgents. For example, in the Philippines, the military took on projects such as road building and land clearing to rehabilitate its public relations, substituting promises of constructive colonialism and economic development to its recent history of brutality and oppression. But it is the Pacific War that sealed the fate of these two territories and anchored them in the grand narrative of the United States’ national history. For the American public, Hawaii and the Philippines remain forever associated with Pearl Harbor, Corregidor, and the Bataan Death March. The enduring narratives of masculine sacrifice and heroism in World War II constitute the framing through which the two archipelagos are imagined and understood. This history is made visible and concrete through memorial sites and scenic circuits that have become a magnet for tourists. In these sites, visitors pay their respects to the dead, take part in rituals of remembering, and celebrate a bond of brotherhood with American soldiers, sealed with blood and anchored in Cold War rhetoric. Pilgrimage to historical military sites is not the preserve of American tourists or local visitors: even Japanese tourists are invited to “Remember Pearl Harbor” or to discover Corregidor as the “Island of Valor, Peace, and International Understanding.” For the author, the fetishization of December 7 overwrites January 17, 1893—the day the Kingdom of Hawaii was overthrown and its native population dispossessed.

Neoliberalism and neoliberation

The second factor that has the strength to induce positive or negative attitudes towards the United States is ideology. For Gonzalez, militarism and tourism in Asia-Pacific embody the ideologies of neoliberalism and what she calls neoliberation. Since the departure of the US military from the Philippines, Subic Bay and Clark Base have been transformed into special economic zones under public-private partnerships and now operate as commercial and tourist hubs integrated into global circuits of capital, labor, and commerce. The “post-base” era has not put an end to military cooperation between the US and the Philippines: on the contrary, US forces benefit from an advantageous Visiting Forces Agreement, they participate in joint training operation with their Filipino counterparts, and they are at the vanguard of the fight against Muslim extremist groups the southern region of Mindanao. The US Army left the Philippines through the door and came back through the window of opportunity provided by the fight against terror. Just as the war theaters of the Pacific War were transformed into symbols of liberation from Japanese occupation and fraternal collaboration between Filipino and American soldiers, the discourse of neoliberation transforms the exploitative economies of predatory capital and imperial outreach into narratives of security and shared prosperity. American military occupation and economic hegemony are cast in the same heroic light that fuses the twin ideologies of neoliberalism and neoliberation. The “return” of the base properties to the Philippines are presented as evidence of American generosity; meanwhile, the American military continues to occupy and tour the Philippines, and foreign capital, bolstered by the structural adjustment policies dictated by the Bretton Woods institutions, benefit from zero taxation and rampant violation of basic labor rights in the Special Economic Zones.

Or at least this is how Vernadette Gonzalez presents it, based on her own biased ideology and slanted perspective in which the United States is cast as the villain and its policies as conspirational schemes to maintain neocolonial influence over its dominion. This is, in a way, a missed opportunity: because beyond the Pavlovian denunciation of neoliberalism as evil, Securing Paradise raises many important economic issues. There is indeed an economic case to be made about the links between militarism and tourism. Both activities stem from certain comparative advantages and resource endowments, like having a long and accessible coastal line to build bases and resorts. Both generate rents and drive domestic prices up, giving rise to a particular version of the Dutch disease. Both military bases and tourism resorts may be the only viable economic sectors in territories that are otherwise too far away from centers of capitalistic concentration. There are complementarities between the two activities, as when the soldier goes on vacation as a tourist or when tourism is made safe by the presence of soldiers. But there are also contradictions, especially when the local population becomes more educated and more prosperous than the soldiers posted in their midst. Beyond a certain threshold, tourism development holds more promises than military build-up. When they are consulted about their own destiny, local populations will aspire to transform their territories into islands of peace, as opposed to hosting bases of discontent. But these issues of territorial specialization and economic reasoning are not raised in this book. Instead, the author adheres to a primitive notion of economics-as-witchcraft, with neoliberalism as dark magic and the Bretton Woods institutions as wicked witches. I don’t know where Vernadette Gonzalez got her economics, but it’s certainly not from UC Berkeley’s economic faculty. Even the variant known as international political economy, taught in political science departments and exerting some influence on literary scholars, has more consideration for basic facts and logical explanations than her casual treatment of economic factors.

Combat boots clamping and digital cameras clicking in Asia-Pacific

A conversion is always an affective turn: from love and attachment to abhorrence and alienation, from warm feelings of joy and happiness to dark motives of grievance and hate. Sometimes this reversal of sentiments can be triggered by a traumatic experience or a dreadful event: as when a story of rape and sexual aggression by soldiers or tourists turn the local population against any foreign presence. For Vernadette Gonzalez, the defining moment may have been provided by the image of President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda leaving the Malacañan Palace and fleeing the country in US army aircrafts after having been ousted by the people. She also describes a traumatic scene that happened to her shortly after September 11, when she was faced with the barrel of a gun for having committed a small breach of security protocol in a tourist resort. For her, tourism and violence are intimately intertwined. In the eyes of local authorities and American strategists, tourists’ safety and comfort take precedence over the needs and aspirations of the local population. The US military wants to make the world safe for tourism. It prioritizes certain forms of mobility and border-crossing at the detriment of others. As a result it makes the world more insecure, not less, and exposes local populations to new risks and insecurities. Although Vernadette Gonzalez doesn’t explicitly formulate policy recommendations, the solutions that can be inferred from the author’s presentation should be resolutely de-colonial: let the US forces go home for good this time, severe the ties of dependance and domination that bind local populations and indigenous peoples in exploitative conditions, reclaim the sovereignty of native right-holders and democratic representatives, protect the environment from the encroachment of army bases and tourist resorts, and bring an end to the tourism industry’s deleterious influence on the social fabric of host nations.

One may or may not agree with these solutions; but they appear to me as severely out of sync with the present geopolitical situation in Asia-Pacific. As the author herself acknowledges, the region is increasingly becoming more insecure; and the blame cannot be put solely on the presence of US forces, less even so on the continuous flow of American tourists. Any person who has travelled in the region can attest that the majority of tourists are no longer Americans or Europeans. These new tourists, who may be followed by soldiers as in the previous historical sequences described for Hawaii and for the Philippines, bring with them different dreams and aspirations, and interact with local populations and the environment in different forms and modalities. They too are looking for a paradise to cherish and to hold, but their version of heaven is based on different cultural and political assumptions. (For a local version of the mix between militarism, exoticism and affect, I recommend the 2016 Korean drama series Descendants of the Sun and its local adaptations by Vietnamese and by Chinese television.) One should lend an ear to the growing sounds of army boots and tourist crowds in Asia and the Pacific: are they harbingers of a new era when the digital camera will prevail over the machine gun, or will they repeat past experiences on a larger and more devastating scale? This is why I find books such as Securing Paradise useful: they allow readers who come to them with an unjaundiced eye to enter the fabrique of sentiments, and they enable us to envision a future that may not be determined solely by militarized tourism and the touring of armies on and off duty.

A Gender Perspective on the U.S. Military Presence Overseas

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present, Edited by Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon, Duke University Press, 2010.

Over There.jpgA few years ago Hashimoto Toru, mayor of Osaka and president of Japan’s Restoration Party, caused outrage when he declared that Japan’s wartime use of comfort women was “understandable,” implying that when male soldiers are at war, organized efforts to provide women to satisfy their lust are natural, and that the practice has been adopted by many countries. He further undermined his credibility by saying that U.S. soldiers on Okinawa should use the island’s “adult entertainment industry” in order to reduce incidences of sexual assault on local women. Facing domestic and international uproar, he retracted the second comment and formulated an apology to the American people and to the U.S. military. But he stuck to his first comment on comfort women, claiming he had been misunderstood and that other countries were also guilty of sexual abuses during wartime. He called the use of comfort women, many of whom were recruited in Japanese-ruled Korea, “an inexcusable act that violated the dignity and human rights of the women.”

Comfort women and administered prostitution

To the Japanese public, these comments brought up memories from a not so distant past. They echoed the decision taken by the first postwar cabinet, immediately after Japan’s surrender, to provide sexual services to the U.S. Occupation Forces through a system of administered prostitution. The Japanese officials hoped that special comfort women would provide an outlet for the occupiers’ sexuality, help to prevent mixed blood, and serve as a buffer between “good” Japanese women and GIs. Similar plans were also proposed by German officials managing the postwar transition, only to be turned down by American commanders, who unsuccessfully tried to apply a strict policy of non-fraternization between U.S. soldiers and German male and female nationals. Likewise, during the Korean War, the Korean government reinvigorated the Japanese institution of “comfort stations” to serve Allied Forces and Korean soldiers in the name of protecting respectable women and rewarding soldiers for their sacrifice. These unsavory episodes belong to an immediate postwar or a wartime context; but despite the official ban on prostitution, the institution of camptown prostitution or “adult entertainment” has accompanied the U.S. military presence abroad throughout the years.

Regardless of what Osaka’s mayor has said, or meant to say, there is a genuine need for an open debate on the side effects of large military deployments overseas and on official attitudes regarding the sexual demands of male soldiers. These public attitudes are fraught with ambiguities and contradictions. On the one side, the U.S. military, and many host country governments, maintain a prohibition on prostitution and punish it with variable sanctions. On the other hand, they tolerate and even regulate the presence of camptown prostitution, registering sex workers and imposing medical visits in order to limit the spread of venereal diseases. While modern rest-and-relaxation (R&R) facilities and adult entertainment may not always involve paid sex, the presence of transnational sex workers with little legal protection raises the issue of transborder human trafficking, which the U.S. strongly condemns. At a time when U.S. policymakers are debating the future shape of the global network of military bases, the new global posture, which emphasizes mobile forces sent on short-term deployments without families, has far-reaching implications for gender and sexual relations with host societies.

A global network of military bases

The essays collected by Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon in this volume are not limited to the issue of prostitution – although the book cover makes the theme quite explicit. Written with a historical perspective, and using the lenses of gender and postcolonial studies, they illustrate the various aspects of the politics of gender, sexuality, race, and class that are constitutive of the maintenance of America’s military presence in its main postwar locales: West Germany, Japan and Okinawa, and South Korea (with an additional essay on Abu Ghraib). The authors insist that this global network of military bases constitutes what can only be described as an empire: indeed, “the debate is focused not on whether the United States is an empire at all but on what kind of empire it is.” The absence of formal colonies and the reliance on bilateral or multilateral security arrangements and Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) obfuscate the deep power imbalances between the imperial power and its military projection outposts, creating a relationship that the authors frame in neocolonial terms.

By focusing on the social and cultural impacts of the United States’ military presence overseas, the authors’ ambition is to “make visible this unprecedented empire of bases.” The U.S. military empire has bearing not only on the lives of soldiers and their families, but also on the lives of camptown workers, who cater to their needs, and on residents of local host communities, who have to deal with the economic, social, and cultural consequences of their presence. America’s global military footprint is ubiquitous. During the Cold War, some 500,000 soldiers, as well as tens of thousands of civilian employees and hundreds of thousands of family dependents, were stationed overseas. Most Americans would be stunned to hear that the United States now maintains military bases in more than 150 countries. In the Middle East, it has kept a substantial military presence in Bahrain and Turkey for more than fifty years. To provide housing and training facilities for its personnel, the U.S. military controls almost 29 million acres of territory. And the SOFA agreements cover relations with host countries in minute detail, granting legal privileges to American servicemen that are deeply resented by local citizens.

American empire and neocolonialism

According to the volume editors, “the U.S. military displayed a colonial perception that women of occupied territories in Korea, Japan, and Germany should be sexually available for G.I.s, just as colonized women of color had been available to European colonialists.” Within the context of these three countries, nowhere was the neocolonial character of the U.S. presence more evident than in South Korea. Clustered in Gyeonggi Province and around Seoul, camptowns became a virtually colonized space where Korean sovereignty was suspended and replaced by the U.S. military authorities. The clubs and bars catering to GIs were legally off-limits to Korean nationals (except for registered hostesses and sex workers). After the Korean War, liaisons between G.I.s and Korean women often took the form of concubinage, a practice developed in European colonies whereby a white man and a local woman would cohabit outside the respectability of marriage and dissolve their relation upon the white man’s departure. Although the U.S. now maintains a zero-tolerance policy with regard to human trafficking and prostitution, many Filipinas or Russian camptown women fall prey to similar arrangements with American soldiers, and are left raising children alone because their G.I. boyfriends or husbands have returned to the United States. Foreign migrant workers continue to be subjected to abuse and violence, and the exploitative working conditions maintained by business owners and managers often comes close to the trafficking in persons that the U.S. State Department so vehemently condemns.

For Seungsook Moon, the U.S.-Korean SOFA has remained far more unequal than comparable agreements in Japan, Germany, or other NATO countries: “under the SOFA, Korean citizens are virtually colonial subjects in their own territory.” The U.S. military bases “have enjoyed extraterritoriality, marking them virtually as U.S. territories where Korean sovereignty ends.” She analyzes the presence within U.S. Army ranks of KATUSAs, or young Korean conscripts who serve as augmentation troops in support functions. This institution, “which resembles nineteenth-century European colonial military arrangements with native soldiers,” was created during the Korean War to compensate for dire manpower shortages. Nowadays KATUSAs often come from privileged social backgrounds and, unlike other Korean conscripts, they benefit from more lax discipline and better infrastructure in an English-speaking environment. While KATUSA service remains the most popular form of military service among Korean conscripts, they often resent the menial work and sense of superiority of their American colleagues. As analyzed by the author, the nonfictional and fictional accounts produced by KATUSAs about their experience of serving in the U.S. military reveal criticism of arrogant male G.I.s and fantasies about sexual encounters with white female GIs. Young Korean men also resent the predatory attitude of white male soldiers towards Korean female college students, who are often seen visiting military bases or going out with G.I.s.

Mama-san and pan-pan girls

The chapters about Japan also highlight the hidden social costs, the unequal power relations, but also the transformative and sometimes even the emancipating aspects of America’s military presence. The United States stations the bulk of its forces on the island of Okinawa, a former colony of Japan, whose inhabitants were regarded as second-class members of the nation. The institution of military prostitution has now disappeared, and the “pan-pan girls” of occupied Japan are a distant memory, but sexual or romantic entanglements around U.S. bases have not ceased. Okinawan women who date or marry U.S. military men are often the target of local scorn and ostracism. They occupy a hybrid space or liminal status in the Okinawan and U.S. military communities. Although social, racial, and cultural hierarchies are also present among the members of a Japanese Wives Club described by one contributor, Japanese women who marry American GI..s feel most at home not in the United States or in their local communities, but in the extraterritorial spaces that the military housing areas provide. Residing in the hybrid spaces created in and around U.S. military bases, local nationals are able to challenge existing hierarchical social relations of race, gender, sexuality, and class in their own societies. These same challenges of class and gender boundaries are also expressed by the young Okinawans practicing for eisa, a traditional dance performed each summer during Obon, the festival of the dead. Formerly practiced by young warriors of noble ancestry, eisa now provides working-class Okinawans, male and female, the occasion to transcend the history of double colonization and contemporary lives dominated by the overwhelming U.S. military presence. Beautifully written and deeply evocative, the text on the eisa dance enchants the reader with a literary interlude, while building on what Ann Laura Stoler has called “the affective grid of colonial politics.”

Germany provides an interesting counterpoint to the studies of South Korea and Japan. The narrative about the U.S. occupation and military presence is sharply divided along gender and generational lines. To the men who fought in the Wehrmacht or were enrolled in the Hitlerjugend, the widespread sexual and romantic fraternization between German women and U.S. soldiers came as a shock. A particularly misogynist joke during the bitter occupation years lamented that “German men fought for six years, while German women fought for only five minutes.” Those same men later held deep skepticism about the fighting spirit of their American allies against the Soviet threat. The relaxed attitude of GIs who strolled in German communities, hands in pocket and chewing gum, stood in sharp contrast with the tightness and discipline that Germans educated in the Prussian tradition had come to equate with “manliness”. But this new masculine casualness had opposite effects on the younger generation, who eagerly adopted the clothing habits and musical tastes of their American role models. During the Vietnam War, as they learned about the civil rights movement, German students reached out to African-American soldiers in order to fuel dissent in army ranks and encourage desertion. The racial crisis in the U.S. military was addressed very differently in West Germany, where it led to the adoption of sweeping measures to eradicate discrimination, and in South Korea, where it was framed as a dispute about access to local women. By exposing U.S. servicemen and their families to different racial and gender roles, the overseas military presence also had effects in changing social relations back home.

Framing the U.S. military presence overseas
Over There is a fine volume of advanced scholarship that breaks new ground and explores an issue that has garnered strikingly limited attention from scholars working outside the narrow circle of strategic studies and military history. The decision by the editors to frame the U.S. military presence overseas in imperial and neocolonial terms will not convince all readers. Some of the chapters are avowedly militant in style, and breach the sharp line between academic scholarship and social activism. But the combination of gender studies and a postcolonial perspective sheds light on an important aspect of America’s global military shadow. Referring in particular to Ann Stoler’s work, the editors argue that “social relations of gender and sexuality figure into the working of an imperial power not as a peripheral issue but as a constitutive aspect of producing and maintaining the boundary between the colonizer and the colonized.” A debate on the gender and sexual aspects of America’s military empire is long overdue.