CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2012
| 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 | 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. I explain such contestations through the emergence of ―Violent Imaginations – that is, widespread negative depictions of GIs as violent (sex-)offenders on the loose in the entertainment areas in and near Seoul, which I analyze as both a counter-hegemonic discourse and a popular frame deployed by political actors from the country‘s nationalist Left. Violent imaginations, it will become clear, are part and parcel of a longer-term political project through which U.S. soldiers have firmly been positioned within a long historical line of intruders that repeatedly violated Korea‘s national sovereignty, its terrain and its women. In order to disentangle the drastic changes of the last few decades that saw South Korea go from being one of the most U.S.-friendly nations in the world to a country that is fraught with public controversies over the permanent U.S. military presence, I deploy a political-economic perspective on Korea‘s turbulent history and present. Leaving the realm of discourse and social movement analysis behind, in the latter part of my thesis I contextualize and further complicate the notion of violent imaginations through an ethnographic exploration of three (types of) entertainment districts in and near Seoul that are popular with U.S. Armed Forces personnel. Adult entertainment districts – practically the only non-military spaces in which U.S. soldiers and (female) civilians come into daily contact with each other – are spaces in which preconceived notions held about GIs are often drastically contradicted, essentially confirmed or extensively diversified. Urban entertainment spaces in many instances embodied and enabled particular modalities of engagement between locals and the young soldiers, with the reciprocal, albeit highly volatile socialities shaped by such urban spaces also fundamentally working against the logics and directionalities of both the U.S. military and the South Korean state. |
| Supervisor | Kalb, Don; Monterescu, Daniel |
| Department | Sociology PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2012/schober_elisabeth.pdf |
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