Selling Fantasies of Rescue: Intimate Labor, Filipina Migrant Hostesses, and American GIs

• In Event: 362 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Paper Session. The Business of Desire

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research in an American military camptown in South Korea, this article examines camptown sexual commerce as a manifestation of shifting global hierarchies amid Asia’s economic ascendance and the decline of American hegemony. Challenging the dichotomous constructions of American GIs as powerful agents and of migrant club hostesses as trafficked victims, I highlight their shared conditions of “indentured mobility” (Parreñas 2011) as constrained subjects bound by migrant labor contracts in their quest for mobility. Revisiting the persisting power asymmetry between American GIs and migrant hostesses, my ethnography reveals the ways in which power differentials are deployed by hostesses and club owners as a resource to incite the discourse of benevolence and rescue that attracts American GI customers to the clubs. By engaging American military camptowns as a space of migrant encounter, this article illuminates how global geopolitics, uneven capitalist development, and transnational migration are entangled with intimacy, power, and emotions to shape intimate labor at a critical juncture of the changing global order.

Author

• Hae Yeon Choo, University of Toronto