As conveyed by Cynthia Enloe, there is a need to look
at women’s experiences on and around military bases,
the wives, and the laundress. I would like to take her call
to think deeply together and remember those who live on and
in the fence lines where their normalized experiences include
institutional rape and violence. Transnational organizing
amongst women in the Asia-Pacific has opened up the possibility
for other women who experience similar systems of violence
in varying contexts, to speak to what is the common paradigm
within which they live that sustains and supports violence
against their bodies, and the creative ways they resist ongoing
colonialisms. And while I was not a part of the birthing
of this particular movement, through storytelling, practice,
and supporting the continuation of passing on knowledges
of resistance, in joining the network I have been challenged
to think deeply about collective memories of traumas and
violence of ongoing colonialisms through militarisms where
communities are able to break silences that have been historically
institutionalized in our history books, news media, education,
and generally within our own bodies of memories.
In 1997, the International women’s network in Asia-Pacific formed specifically
to address these concerns. The beginning of the international women’s network
in Asia-Pacific was galvanized by a response: In Okinawa, the highly publicized
gang rape of a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl in 1995 by three U.S. Marines, three
U.S. servicemen, U.S. Navy Seaman Marcus Gill and U.S. Marines Rodrico Harp and
Kendrick Ledet, all from Camp Hansen on Okinawa, rented a van and kidnapped a
12-year-old 6th-grade Japanese girl. While called an “incident” in
news media the case galvanized political activism and brought wider attention
to military-related violence against women illustrating that regardless if it
was seen as an “incident“ it was quite clear to the international
women‘s community, this particular incident was part of many moments of
normalized violence. In an effort to build a broader coalition, the women from
Okinawa, mainland Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and the United States
organized our first international meeting in Okinawa in 1997.
In 2007 I joined the network due to my work and interest
on militarisms, prostitution, and human trafficking. As a
Korean-Mexican American my history is deeply tied to militarisms,
where a majority of my Korean family of my mother’s generation
would migrate from Korea as a means to leave the poor divided Korea. Some would
come as “military brides” due to the 1945 Brides Act, and then reunite
with other family members through the 1965 Immigration Acts. And while there
has been work to connect how the U.S. military would continue to use the “comfort
women” stations set up by the Japanese, questions of
silences surrounding trauma and working towards healing communities,
is what my work centers around.
In my research I center praxis, the practice of theory. Questions
that I have been challenged to think deeply about in the
context of my work on human trafficking in the Asia-Pacific
includes: How may we genuinely work towards non-violence
and peace in our multiple locations? In our multiple locations
based on our race/ethnicity, gender, and occupation/class
how do we move strategically to building sustainable communities?
How do we take what we imagine and turn it into a practice?
In my participation of this international network, the question
that still touches me deeply from the first day of organizing
with U.S. local meetings that began in May of 2007 in which
the women organizing were asked: “what does militarism
mean to you?” What militarism means is one that cannot be confined to an
English definition but always remembering that this is rearticulated and redefined
through the collaborative process of sharing in our respective languages and
translating as best as possible recollections, definitions of militarism, the
impacts/costs of U.S. expansionism that date before 9/11, the coalitions that
are being built, the articulations of decolonialisms as a transnational initiative
that as a movement, centers women‘s experiences.
There are two main points that I would like to walk us through together:
1) How do race, class, gender, and nation in the multiple
contexts of militarisms reinforce particular violence against raced, classed,
gendered bodies? 2) How do we as a collective strategize in our multiple contexts
to work to end violence against women that is deeply entrenched in militarisms?
In illuminating these two points, I would like to not simply say that this
is all there is to say about violence against women in the context of militarisms,
but to extend an invitation to all of us to think deeply on the multiple sites
in which military violence against women is systemic, institutionalized, and
normalized. And that working towards unpacking such complexities necessitates
the need to understand such complexities in their multiple locations, both
historically and in real embodied experiences.
For example, in 2004 Korea passed its prostitution laws that
organizations such as the Center for Women’s Human Rights had hoped would change perceptions
of women in prostitution to that as “victims” rather then criminals,
and in 2005, Bush signed, the Department of Defense memoranda and Executive
Order 13387 which made patronizing prostitution as leading to “dishonorable
discharge.” Organizations such as durebang still deal
with the continued influx of women from South East Asia,
the Philippines, and Europe into military camptowns. And
in the Yong-San District Korean police found 1,093 foreign
women, from the Philippines and Russia, to work as entertainers
near the U.S. military camp. However, it is difficult to
count the number of bodies of those trafficked due to the
underground networks they function.
The current climate of prostitution surrounding military
bases is historically constituted. While cases such as the “Comfort Women” in the Asia-Pacific
would not receive a “pay check” for militarized prostitution, it
is documented that the U.S. military would also use the “Comfort Women” stations
set up by the Japanese military. The reason for women/men entering prostitution
varies, but studies have shown that provided other alternatives, women in prostitution
would choose those alternatives. The lack of options for women/men in occupied
territories fed by the fuel of a demand for prostitution around military camptowns
both feed into the economy of military prostitution. I recall when Koon-Ja kim
was in Berkeley, she was asked why did she go into military prostitution? She
responded, “who would want to go knowing what would happen to us?” While “comfort
women” would be coerced through false hopes of jobs in factories, the reason “why” people
enter into prostitution is multiple, but also systemically
reinforced.
How women‘s bodies come to matter is best illuminated by Jeon, who in 1956
was driven by hunger to Dongduchon, a camp town near the border between the two
Koreas: “The more I think about my life, the more I think women like me
were the biggest sacrifice for my country’s alliance with the Americans,” she
said. “Looking back, I think my body was not mine, but the government’s
and the U.S. military’s.” -- this was cited in
a recent article by Katherine HS Moon
But, if we are to take seriously the multiple contexts within
which militarisms operate, what is apparent is how the multiple
sites in the Asia Pacific are deeply linked. Hawai`i, a major
tourist destination, is the embodiment of how tourisms and
militarisms are deeply interconnected. I recall, an outreach
worker in Hawaii once saying that “when the ships come to dock in Waikiki, the women go
out to work.” While Hawaii has worked with “prostitution free zones” as
a means to change its’ visible prostitution industry in areas such as Honolulu
and Waikiki, the linking of exotic Hawai`i is historically rooted in perceptions
of the “exotic” indigenous. How prostitution figures into the history
of a people who socio-economy prior to contact did not depend on capitalisms,
is that it was introduced. In the early 1900s, prostitution in Hawai`i was military
enforced, as illuminated by the work of Richard Greer. Many of the women who
were in prostitution in the early 1900s, were white women from the continental
US and abroad. As Hawai`i reached “statehood,” prostitution
would move into underground venues including the hostess
bar system, and later the increase of massage parlors. The
first hostess bar to open in Hawaii in 1959 was called Arirang,
a love song. While diverse, many of the hostess bar systems
in Hawaii are identified as Korean, in spite of the diverse
origins of the women. In part, this is historically rooted
in the hostess bar systems that developed surrounding military
camptowns in Korea that would crop up in the United States
around the 1950s.
Questions that this leads me to ask is how do we move ourselves
towards building sustainable communities that takes into
account for social disparities that are raced, classed
and gendered? In order to envision genuine security that
enables the building of sustainable communities requires
a relinking of how systems of gendered violence are imbricated
in other components of militarisms, whether that is the
economics of a military culture, the notions of “nation-state” building,
and the raced, sexed, and classed perceptions of occupied
territories. As delineated in the work of Kathleen Barry,
in order to understand what is going on in the world, necessitates
a looking back at what is going on in the “home.” US
policies have perpetuated a difference that is informed
by its’ own racist, classist, and sexist systems
that operate within our own country.
That while I was not part of the sweat and fire that breathed
the international women’s network for peace in the
Asia-Pacific that was ignited by the calling to the continued
rapes in military fence lines, the cases have continued to
haunt us, the U.S. in the present: including Nicol in Subic
Bay, Yun Geumi in Korea, and that in Okinawa, I come with
a remembering, a recalling, and my own embodied experience
that knows and sees that while we as a peace movement have
come a long way, there is much work to do in which "our
struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting" --
bell hooks cites "Freedom Charger, that works towards
tracing aspects of the movement against racial apartheid
in South Africa
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