This event is free and open to the public. The Center for Korean Studies is located at 1881 East-West Road on the UH Mānoa campus. Paid parking is available in the lot mauka of the CKS building.
For further information, including arrangements for access for the handicapped, call 956-7041.
Friday, November 13, 2009
4:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Center for Korean Studies, Room 204
During the post–World War II era, the United States has built and managed an uprecedented global network of military bases, and more than two-thirds of these bases have been concentrated in South Korea, Japan/Okinawa, and Germany. Using her forthcoming book, "Over There": Living with the U.S. Military Empire (Duke University Press, 2010; Maria Hoehn and Seungsook Moon, co-editors and primary authors; names in alphabetical order), Professor Moon will present a comparative discussion of how U.S. military bases impact social relations of gender, sexuality, race, and class in these countries. Approaching the U.S. military as a global and transnational phenomenon, she will focus on the politics of gender, sexuality, race, and class, which are constitutive of the maintenance of the military empire. In particular, she will analyze recurring patterns and differentiations in the social costs of maintaining the empire, paying special attention to the hybrid spaces in and around U.S. military bases that obscrure the boundary between civilian society and the military.
The comparative analysis illuminates the following findings: (1) The contour of the U.S. Military empire is not as monolithic as many existing studies of the U.S. military presence abroad assume or imply. (2) The Local civilian-U.S. military relationships vary across these countries and within a country over time, depending on the following factors: the nature of host government (e.g., democratic or authoritarian) and nature of its political and military alliance with the U.S. government (e.g., egalitarian or neocolonial), the type of spatial arrangements that regulate the interactions between a U.S. base and surrounding communities, the demographic and social features of U.S. soldiers sent to these countries, and the presence or absence of cultural and “racial” affinity beween the United States and these societies.
Seungsook Moon is professor of sociology at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She received her Ph.D. at Brandeis University in 1994 and is the author of Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea (Duke University Press, 2005).