s073837: David Jeffries [CGS NewsLetter 001]
The phrase 'military prostitution' resounded across the room, across imaginations of water and of violence, around conceivable images of young soldiers and communities of women. As I listened to Professor Katherine Moon's lecture regarding this 'military prostitution' and its presence in Korea, my mind expanded. As Moon spoke, I began to stretch my imagination to picture the current situation in Iraq. My two-dimensional questions of 'what is happening with the soldiers and with the country', bends further now to gain more depth, as I begin to wonder of the perspectives of women, or of a single woman in Iraq?perspectives of which I suddenly realized I have yet to hear, or read. I began to wonder what is being negotiated beyond my non-mobilized, male imagination in spaces of women and war. Regardless of what I am able to conceive, what things might surely be happening in Iraq...in Korea...in Japan...or in my home country, the United States regarding women and prostitution? My ignorance on these issues of prostitution, and how prostitution is related to the military, humbled me as a male who dares to say that he cares for women's issues, as a male who dares to call himself a feminist in the year 2004. Far beyond this humbling, however, Professor Moon also reminded me during her lecture of my privilege as a male, a privilege that allows me to slip past the narratives of these women, whose voices compile stories that are also, in some way, relative to my own life. After all, as women, as prostitutes, as nationals, and as mothers, these women share the world with me. They are family members to others as my mother and sister are family to me. These women and myself belong to the community that I most often forget about: the international community. Listening to the voices of some of these women through Moon's lecture has brought me back to the fact that I do indeed share space with such women, and that I must, therefore, take part in these issues surrounding military prostitution.
Although sudden, this reminder of my global connection to women came upon me quite strongly while watching a video in the middle of Professor Moon's lecture. Images of Korean women perming their hair, hoping to appeal to black G.I.'s were potent. Images of black/Korean, biracial children singing Korean songs, with elated expressions of their own imaginations, painting portraits of unseen fathers, of English-speaking communities that were not the camp towns of Korea?these are the images which have remained with me since the lecture. To these images I have now attached truths that I have long since been forced to face: one being the truth that I am a male, and as such could never, in any east Asian or western community, augment to the just treatment of women while truly sharing in their experience. In this sense, I am always an outsider. Alongside this fact, however, I attach another truth, being that I am an African-American, black male, and the son of a mother who is not of the same race, and that as an African-American, history has often neglected to tell me about the black community that is global, that is Asian, that is Korean. This misinformation allows me to feel as an outsider (perhaps, in this case, to Koreans) when I am not always so much outside. I regarded those black, Korean children on the screen before me with a simultaneous distance and familiarity--knowing, personally, what it is to grow up 'black'. On top of knowing this, I also was very much relating to what it is to look at my mother, who does not so much look like and yet is so much of me, and know that there is truth in our connection. Despite this connection to difference, being black and growing up in the United States, I have also spent time alienating myself, looking away from other margins, fearful of finding another unfamiliar face. Yet as I watched Professor Moon's video, I found something Korean, something black, and something not quite so unfamiliar. Beyond comfort in this feeling, I felt determined to further participate in this discussion of these children and their mothers, and to know of this 'military prostitution' and its effects. But how could I make sense of it? Professor Moon also presented me with words in the lecture that helped me to understand this terminology: prostitution is not a coincidence, nor is this an accident, she says. Instead, prostitution is a process that is a highly maintained, political and economic system.
Listening to the phrase 'military prostitution' echoing in my head and relaying it to the idea of a system attacked many of my senses for the first twenty minutes of the lecture. How could these two words go together and make a system, and why was I feeling such a juxtaposition between 'military' and 'prostitution' when it was being used here as a phrase? Then, I began to make connections. A train of thought was engendered: Systems carry out a function. The military carries out a function to sustain the presence of a national force in a given area. Prostitution (in this case) also carries out a function of physically 'satisfying' predominantly male customers via the objectification of women. The military further allows soldiers to obtain an identity which both binds them to a national sentiment, and excludes them from those who cannot relate to this identity. Similarly, for prostitutes, their job provides them with a community that both binds and excludes them to a private sphere that is nationally condoned, while being publicly condemned.
In addition, both systems of the military and of prostitution depend upon the usage of the body as a machine. The individuals whom inhabit these bodies are not the primary concern of either system. As long as the body of a soldier and the body of a prostitute function to carry out its said service, these systems can be maintained. This maintenance, Moon explains, is the primary concern of those who are consumers to military prostitution.
Therefore, it is the synthesis of the military and of prostitution that leads to two results: one, where prostitutes are militarized, and another where soldiers are prostituted. Economies that are dependent upon the trafficking of women impose nationalism into those women working and living in camp towns, passing down to them a sense of national duty to their families to fulfill their occupation as pleasure objects for stationed soldiers. With this rhetoric, they are made to be soldiers, suppressing their emotions for survival to make ends meet for their family. Similarly, soldiers are then eagerly bought and sold by the military, without the mentioning of any long term effects of learning to oppress an 'other' as a source of building manhood and nationalism. They themselves are prostitutes, who survive on the fed assumption that they, too, do not exist in a community that does not carry out the same function as them. Accordingly, they isolate themselves and base their identity on how they manipulate their bodies to survive, and control the bodies of others (i.e. prostitutes) to validate their manhood.
If anything, Katherine Moon's lecture on military prostitution reminds us that all systems are based upon the process of people maintaining identities through which society can accept them. One does not have to look far to recognize that those who are oriented outside of these social systems, or on its edges, can often feel lost. It is therefore imperative that we use Moon's lecture as a take-off point in our class discussion to examine the ways in which gender is systematically maintained by the use of controlling images that suggest we do not exist outside of extreme masculine and feminine frameworks. What must be remembered is that we all do exist outside of these frameworks. Otherwise we would not be able to see outside of them. Furthermore, this must leave no doubt that we have the power to change these frames of reference as well, and make new shapes, new systems. For these reasons, in this class and in our daily lives, we should continue not only to deconstruct gender, but also to invoke our privileges and connections to one another as a means to contribute solutions in our own communities?local and global?to the issue of 'military prostitution'.