CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2011
| Author | Schober, Elisabeth |
|---|---|
| Title | Violent Imaginations: Liminal Encounters from Camp Town to the Inner City. Seoul and the United States Armed Forces in South Korea. |
| Summary | The Korean peninsula is one of the most heavily militarized regions on this planet, where the armed face-off between the Northern and Southern parts of the formerly united country has now entered its 60th year. With large troops facing each other in a permanent lock-down along the Demilitarized Zone, a contingent of app. 28,500 U.S. soldiers (most of whom are young, male and single) prominently figures into the equation of (in-)security as well. This foreign military presence has increasingly raised much dissent inside South Korea ever since the brutal murder of a Korean sex-worker by a U.S. soldier in an entertainment district 30 kilometers north of Seoul in 1992. Over the last few decades, criminal acts of U.S. soldiers stationed in South Korea have been amplified by an outraged Korean public as a stand-in for the putatively uneven relationship between the United States and Korea. These “violent imaginations” that have GIs at their center are to be contextualized and further complicated through the exploration of three types of entertainment districts in and near Seoul that are nowadays popular with United States Armed Forces in Korea (USFK) personnel. Adult Entertainment districts – practically the only non-military spaces in which U.S. Armed Forces personnel and South Korean civilians come into daily contact with each other – are in the Korean media often portrayed as having been “contaminated” by the presence of foreign soldiers, with female locals being particularly at risk to fall prey to the young men that are nowadays typically depicted as aggressive (sex-)offenders. During my 21 months of field research in and near Seoul, I sought to explore both the violent imaginations held about GIs, and the actual encounters that take place in entertainment districts that often drastically contradict, essentially confirm or extensively diversify preconceived notions. |
| Supervisor | Kalb Don, Monterescu Daniel |
| Department | Sociology PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2011/schober_elisabeth.pdf |
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