LIFE Summer Research Grant Reflections: The ‘Safety’ of Militarism and the Routes for Resistance: Navigating Marginalization Through the Stories of Itaewon’s ‘Others’

This is the first blog post in a series written by the 2025 recipients of the Duke University Libraries Summer Research Fellowship for LIFE Students. Mingyu (Matthew) Joo is a senior majoring in International Comparative Studies and Political Science.

Intentions, Background and Theory – Beginning the Research

I first came to Seoul with the goal of broadly understanding how the United States—where I grew up and was educated for most of my life—affected the development of South Korea, my homeland. I wanted to investigate how the most socially marginalized groups were affected by the double-degree overlay of authority in the US-ROK alliance and initially focused on the presence of permanent US military bases and their influence in nearby local communities. I first started with Itaewon, a geographical and cultural center of Seoul where a huge American military base was located before its recent move to a more suburban area outside the city.

It is not too well known that South Korea, the country of the global K-pop and K-everything as we know it now, is militarized as much as it is globalized. A trip to Seoul Station will guarantee the spotting of more than a handful of young Korean men in uniform likely visiting their families for the few days a year that they are given as military off-days. All men—and only men—of a certain age that are able-bodied and able-minded are required to serve in the military for an average of a year and a half, sometimes much more depending on the position. Men are carefully screened in a sterile, standardized method to ensure they are of the ‘correct’ identity, ideology, gender, sexuality, health and physical capability as required by the Republic of Korea’s armed forces. If you stay in Seoul for long enough, you will likely also see American soldiers strolling around the city in their American uniforms. The presence of the military, both domestic and foreign, is ever-normalized, its issues internalized, and its necessity continually justified.

Today, South Korea hosts the largest American military base outside of the United States (Camp Humphreys, which was once Yongsan Garrison in Itaewon, better known as the famous Eighth United States Army), and the number of American soldiers permanently stationed in the country number above twenty-thousand. South Korea’s Wartime Military Operations authority is still held by joint American forces, the South Korean National Security Law actively prosecutes any activity hostile to its militaristic ideologies, and more than 200,000 young Korean men are enlisted into the military every year. Though there are many more things to be said about this militarization of a nation, one aspect worth noting—the inquiry of which fuels my research question—is the effect this cemented ideology of militarism has on the people that the ideology never intended to include. Not only does the South Korean military require all abiding men to serve on its bases, it imprisons, institutionalizes, and prosecutes those that do not abide by its inherently ideological conscripting, whether this non-abidance be intentional or unavoidable for the subject. Of course, the outcomes here are immediate and visible: conscientious objectors are thrown into prison, gay and trans individuals identified through mental screenings are subjected to institutionalization, physically ‘unfit’ men are put on a long waitlist for non-active duty military assignments. Militarism not only excludes, but kills: Byun Hee-Soo, a transgender woman, committed suicide in 2021 after the army dismissed her and repeatedly rejected her from rejoining the armed forces for being transgender. However, the ideology surrounding militarism and its required masculinity does not end at the conscription office and neither does its effects, which grow harder to trace for the uninformed eye.

Ideologies of militarism are sustained through the rhetoric of “safety.” A nation’s safety, by definition, implies soldiers, weapons, and military power used to physically protect its borders, but this logic inevitably extends beyond the barracks. As Foucault argued, the governance of modern society operates on a hostile, exclusionary notion of how society should be “protected” and kept “safe.” In a country defined by war and a constant volatility to war, the rhetoric that safeguards nationalist order gains increasing authority. Combined with the Americanist, neoliberal vision of a “good society” imposed since post-liberation occupation, this rhetoric extends into all domains of social life: heteronormative and patriarchal order, anti-communism and liberalist freedom, binary gender distinctions, the nuclear family, reproduction, and sanitation (Jeon, 2025). In this discourse, “safety” no longer refers only to borders or barracks—it extends into everyday life: all bodies are subject to scrutiny as any body can be a threat to the social safety of everybody. Thus, anyone or anything that does not adhere to this standard—the ‘others,’ political dissidents, sexual/moral deviants or ‘queers’ and many more alike—is pushed out of the realm of what is deemed worthy of protection, and simultaneously sewn into the veil of terrorism that can ‘dismantle’ the very foundation of this nationalist ideology and the nation itself.

I use the term ‘queer’ in the last instance to not only mean a certain gender identity, but a broader reference to people that exist outside of the social norm as well as the practice of resisting the norm itself, as proposed by Butler. Under this interpretation, ‘queer’ communities and spaces have adjacently existed for as long as Korean/American military presence and its ideologies have occupied the nation, with commonalities in their ways of resisting, exploiting and sometimes internalizing the double degree of violence enacted upon their bodies. The site of Itaewon, a liminal space caught in the midst of very visible societal change, is living evidence of the ways queer communities have existed and continue to exist under scrutiny. For one, the story of ‘comfort women’ in 50s to 90s Itaewon gijichons (meaning literally ‘camptown,’ its connotation suggesting prostitution and red-light districts) exemplifies the way militarism’s ideologies intentionally neglect as well as exploit the subjects deemed to be the ‘other.’

Archiving and Secondary Source Research – Military Comfort Women

Before its recent relocation to Pyeongtaek, the Eighth United States Army—the largest and most significant of its kind—was located in Itaewon, the center of South Korea’s capital city. Women in war-torn Korea were coerced into servicing American soldiers at ‘comfort stations’ directly built by the American military (with Korean collaboration) or sponsored by the military for civilian operation in Itaewon and throughout the nation. In a country where prostitution was declared illegal and painful colonial memories of Japanese sexual slavery haunted public perception, such state-led projects in gijichons were made possible by the use of the rhetoric of ‘safety’ and othering. The Korean government had effectively declared these bodies to be ‘unsanitized’ and thus outside the realm of society’s laws for protection. Their presence worked as a necessary buffer between foreign soldiers and other ‘respectable women’ of Korean society, and the safety of foreign soldiers and the rest of ‘respectable society’ then justified the violent control of the women’s bodies: to minimize the spread of sexual diseases, routine physical checks and penicillin injections took place regardless of the women’s health or consent, and many women from these camptowns died or suffered permanent injury from these injections. But this ideology behind safety is never concrete, as the state continually manipulates its own rhetoric to extract the most benefit from this system of exploitation: the women were later praised as ‘patriots’ and ‘dollar earners’ as the Korean government shifted its ambitions to the global stage, and Itaewon’s history as a camptown was erased to make way for its new ‘Special Tourism District’ title. The ‘free,’ ‘westernized,’ and ‘globalized’ Itaewon that Koreans know of today was built on the backbones of an inherently hypocritical ideology.

The focus here, however, is not how women were victimized by violence; much significance lies in the ways they have acted with a sense of agency and ‘queerness’ under severely restrictive circumstances. In an environment where basic human dignity was routinely stripped from them, the women practiced alternative familyhood to preserve and protect a sense of humanness. The women lived and worked in the comfort stations, placed outside the traditional notion of a family and its requisite ‘sanitary’ womanhood; through the practicing of pseudo-familyhood and kinship systems, the women reshaped a sense of familiarity and dignity in the absence of traditional family structures. Terms usually meant for family labels like ‘unnie,’ ‘mom,’ and ‘mama’ were used to refer to each other while more traditional workplace labels were left intentionally unused. ‘Families’ were created and reinforced outside state-sanctioned forms of familyhood, defined by mutual survival and care under duress, resulting in a mode of queerness outside structural norms (Cho, 2025).

Archival Research, Interviews and Ethnography – Itaewon’s Queer Communities

This symbolic form of queerness against marginalization perhaps finds the most parallel in today’s queer (as in sexual minority) communities of Itaewon. Their initial commonality lies in their shared space: the ‘comfort’ provided to the soldiers of the Eighth United States Army included not just sex but ‘Rest & Recreation’ services (albeit closely entangled with sex work), where many transgender women that now live and work in Itaewon first got introduced to the practice of training and performing for the Western audience. It is in these ‘red-light’ spaces where K-pop’s entertainment and trainee systems culturally originate (Kim, 2024). As the number of American troops declined after the war, the areas that provided ‘comfort’ and recreation to the soldiers emptied out and left behind unsanitary relics. It is in these discarded, cheap buildings (like the Nakwon Shopping Center and areas near the Yongsan Garrison) where oppressed—and unsanitary due to sexual deviance—gay men and transgender women of the 50s and 60s found refuge and seemingly adopted the language of queerness inherited to them through shared space. Korean gay men, to this day, use coded language in Itaewon (and other queer spaces) like ‘unnie’ to refer to each other, directly going against sexual and gender norms, as they laugh about wanting to get ‘sold’ at the clubs, and transgender showgirls with roots in the Eighth Army perform with stage names that are always followed by ‘mama’ or ‘eomma,’ echoing kinship practices of earlier camptown women.

But how does this abstract ‘inherited queerness’ translate to today’s climate? The chosen route to resist marginalization through the embracing of ‘queerness’ is as diverse as the people that live in Itaewon: some perform resistance-queerness without even knowing it (merely partying at Itaewon’s gay clubs and watching drag shows, one might argue, apply here), some make it their life goal and career, and some enshrine their messages in works of art. Artist Jun’s 2025 exhibition in an Itaewon club titled ‘Strong Power (강한 힘)’ shows a poignant case of how queering, thereby reclaiming, the very ideologies that act to silence the existence of the ‘other’ can be done through the medium of art. In his works, conventionally masculine-looking gay men are painted with military uniforms on, some of them behind chains, some of them showing their body in lustful lighting. His works offer a route to resisting and exploiting the forced militarism that still punishes homosexuality on- and off-base (i.e. Article 92-6 of the Military Criminal Act). In his artworks, rigid ideals of masculinity and comradeship are re-appropriated and made into subtle symbols of fetishization under the queer gaze. Thus, this form of ‘queering militarism’ allows one to subvert the tools of oppression into a language of desire, satire and resistance. Other forms for queer resistance are more pronounced and long-term: a worker at the Korea Federation for HIV/AIDS Prevention recounts his time in the military and how it catalyzed him to take on the role he has now. As a proudly out gay man (even to his family, which is very rare in today’s Korean society), his year-and-a-half period of military duty was marked by a perpetual sense of insecurity and internal resentment. Not only did he have to hide his sexuality from the authorities, he had to assimilate into the heteronormative, hypermasculinized sociality of his peer soldiers, whose ruthless hatred against the ‘others’ was justified and encouraged by the nature of the military. Once discharged, he was determined to create a queer space that was separate and safe from the violence that he saw in the barracks. Though his initial intentions were unclear, his eventual work in AIDS prevention signified an important milestone in queer resistance: confronting the long hypocrisy of the state’s exploitation of ‘health’ and ‘sanitation.’ Similar to its treatment of military comfort women, the Korean government selectively acknowledged and silenced the health of queer people: the Seoul Olympics led to foreigners’ exemption of then-required HIV tests to keep up the sex tourism boom, but when the AIDS scare hit Korea, the state forced gay men in Itaewon who had been in contact with foreigners to test for HIV. Thus, the AIDS prevention organization signified a reclamation of a lost dignity through the ability to elevate and safeguard the community’s health on its own terms, away from state hypocrisy. But not all resistance is triumphant. Candy Mama, a middle-aged transgender woman who has lived in Itaewon for more than a decade, expressed her dying wish to “die as a man.” Acknowledging that her life as an “other” would never be accepted, she hoped at least to be remembered as part of society’s customs. She also lamented that trans women in Korea remain largely confined to red-light districts and that even within minority communities, divisions persist. Yet her hope for future solidarity across lines of difference reveals both the fractures and the possibilities of queer resistance.

Thus, militarism in South Korea is not confined to bases, borders, or barracks; it permeates everyday life, shaping who is deemed worthy of protection and who is cast as a threat. Through the rhetoric of “safety,” it has continuously justified exclusion and exploitation of the ‘other,’ the effects of which are inherently invisible for the majority but often devastating for the minority. Yet the stories of Itaewon’s others—from gijichon women to queer communities—show that spaces of marginalization can also become sites of agency and resistance. What remains uncertain is how such forms of resistance will be remembered, or whether they can be sustained in a society still bound to militarism. Questions of the paradoxes inherent in a globalized yet militarized modernity and its implications in belonging, safety, and survival must be examined to continue this conversation.

Cho, Y. (2025). Queer Companionship: The Intimacy and Resistance in the Red-Light District of Paju, Gyeonggi Province. Korean Association for LGBTQ+ and Queer Studies. (work-in-progress presented at the Korea Association for LGBTQ+ and Queer Studies Seminar)

Jeon, W. (2025). Arriving at Safe Queer Studies in South Korea. Korean Association for LGBTQ+ and Queer Studies. https://queerstudies.kr/lastissue/?q=YToxOntzOjEyOiJrZXl3b3JkX3R5cGUiO3M6MzoiYWxsIjt9&bmode=view&idx=163605157&t=board

Kim, D. (2024). History of the Gay Community in Jongno 3-ga. Chingusai. https://chingusai.net/xe/newsletter/634210

* All information in this essay was collected through research on secondary sources and archival materials, attendance at exhibitions and lectures, interviews with relevant subjects and fieldwork at relevant sites conducted during the summer of 2025. Though factual integrity was respected throughout the process, the nature of such research may lead to slight incongruencies with historical fact. For more specific information about its sources, please contact the author or refer to his other written works.

From Jun’s exhibition in Itaewon

A view of downtown Seoul

From Jun’s exhibition in Itaewon

Transgender performer, Sekja, lecturing at Imoogi lecture series on transgender history in Itaewon