Reformulating Militarized Masculinity in Cold War Borderlands: Laboring Men in South Korea’s American Military Camptowns

This research examines the re/formulating of masculinity among Korean laboring men in the hyper-masculinized, neo-colonial spaces of American military camptowns in Cold War Korea during the 1960s. Korean men working in camptowns were positioned outside traditional patriarchal norms, as they were dependent on both more powerful American male counterparts and the indispensable labor of Korean women. At the same time, these seemingly marginalized men redefined their own militarized masculinity through various strategies: conscientious self-distancing from camptown economies, mimicry of American practices of militarized masculinity, and the systematization of camptown economies through the control of women’s labor. Their own rendition of militarized masculinity—enacted through denial and dismissal, mimicry of hypersexuality, or patriarchal dominance over wome—simultaneously enabled their reclaimed place in the patriarchal normative while exposing their split-subjectivity as colonized men colonizing women. Drawing on both camptown literature, which frames camptowns as symbols of South Korea’s emasculated neocoloniality, and oral histories of local men who worked in these Cold War borderlands, this analysis offers a critical gender perspective.