Asia Pacific Modern. Oakland: University of California Press, 2024. US$35.00, paper. ISBN 9780520396463.
The State’s Sexuality: Prostitution and Postcolonial National Building in South Korea surveys the South Korean state’s instrumentalization of women’s sexuality, focusing on prostitution as a legal realm and regulatory practice, and traces how sexual policing became a central site of state governance over its people. This book attempts to weave together the multifaceted history of the post-1945 South Korean state into what the author calls a “toleration-regulation” regime. This term refers to the state’s dual intervention into prostitution: prohibition on the sale and purchase of sex in criminal law on the one hand, and the simultaneous regulation of women in the sex industry through bio- and administrative means on the other. Park’s investigation seeks to illuminate how the state has used women’s sexuality for economic development and national security while not recognizing women’s place within the state. Throughout five main chapters, Park argues that the seemingly contradictory prostitution policies of the South Korean government arise from a combination of a Japanese colonial legacy and postcolonial nation-building in the context of Cold War militarism and developmentalism.
Chapter 1 begins with the late Chosŏn and Japanese colonial periods, during which the prostitution regimes of “authorization-regulation” and “toleration-regulation” coexisted (29). The first of these refers to a colonial policy that legalized prostitution through licensing prostitution businesses and by mandating that women working in these state-sanctioned facilities take health examinations. As Park shows, this implementation of “public prostitution” did not eliminate other forms of commercial sexual services, such as the pre-existing occupation of geisha/kisaeng, and newly emerging occupations such as café waitresses, which remained outside the reach of the state’s authorization-regulation (27). While these other professions were not synonymous with prostitution, they nonetheless involved selling sex—a sort of clandestine prostitution that took place in a legally ambiguous space and was de facto tolerated and regulated by the colonial government.
The book next analyzes the post-1945 adaptation of the “toleration-regulation” policy in the US-occupied South. Park points out how the privileged feminists who led the anti-prostitution movement in collaboration with US military authorities framed prostitution in nationalist terms rather than in terms of women’s liberation. The abolitionists considered public prostitution a deplorable “remnant of Japanese imperialism,” but did not oppose the continuation of STD inspections and the stigmatization of women in the sex trade. This condescending view, Park argues, supported the continuance of the “toleration-regulation” policy as the South Korean government’s primary approach to prostitution.
Chapters 2 and 3 examine the interlocking processes of economic development and national security over the prime decades of the Cold War in East Asia—namely the emergence of the “camptowns,” sex tourism catering to Japanese businessmen, and the proliferation of the entertainment and sex industry for domestic male clients under the Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan military dictatorship. From this familiar history, Park attempts to create a comprehensive narrative of the colonial to postcolonial transition, employing prostitution as a conceptual window through which one can better illuminate the patriarchal nature of this governance toward its entire population, not just women.
Chapter 4 offers an arresting account of female reformatories, state-subsidized facilities that were meant to provide rehabilitation and re-education for “women needing protection,” a vague term that was used arbitrarily to crack down on any women suspected of being involved in commercial sex or otherwise sexually immoral (117). Oral histories of four women who experienced these reformatories are juxtaposed with an overview of “prostitution studies,” a field that gained currency in academia and among policymakers by corroborating the idea that “prostitutes” were social outcastes, to be differentiated from legitimate male and female members of society and who thus needed to be rescued by the state (132).
Chapter 5 covers the more recent challenges to this academic trend and state policy that have been raised by feminist scholar-activists. These activists succeeded in finally forcing the state to meaningfully realize its long-standing prohibition policy and to criminalize the brokers and clients of sex in 2004. Park notes, however, that the compromise laws of 2004 failed to decriminalize women involved in commercial sex and ended up reinforcing the binary between “prostituted” victims and those who voluntarily chose to sell sex and were thus deemed deserving of punishment (170). The book ends with the author’s reflections on the ongoing dilemmas facing feminists and others who are disenfranchised within the state.
The most compelling part of this book is the author’s pluralist take on feminism. The author carefully considers what the Korean women’s movement has lost as it has worked with the government on the issue of prostitution. And yet, it is here that the book would have greatly benefitted from a more rigorous discussion of what “prostitution” is, both as a feminist term and a state apparatus. The author introduces various terms such as “prostitutes,” “sex workers,” “(both Japanese and US) comfort women,” and “women needing protection,” but throughout the text these are used in ways that readers will find difficult to follow and differentiate. Each term is related to a particular mode of state governance and a clearer identification of their politics could have provided more insight into how feminist groups, women in the sex industry, and Korean society have responded to such impositions. Such an analysis would strengthen the author’s argument that “prostitution” is not a fixed category and its meaning has “shifted” over the course of the “historical upheavals” in South Korea (13), and would help us understand these “women who had many names” (5) in full context and not “overwrite” the history retroactively (150).
On the last page of the book, Park compassionately advocates for “women’s right to engage in sex work and their right to leave [the sex trade],” and asserts that both “must be guaranteed by the state” (194). This acceptance of the patriarchal state’s view of itself is a surprising conclusion to a history of state discrimination. Contra these concluding words, the book leads readers to reconsider whether the state must or should play this particular role—given its history, perhaps the state is not qualified to speak on women’s rights, and we should instead redefine feminism and women’s sexual rights as existing beyond it.
Jeongmin Kim
University of Manitoba, Winnipeg