No Bases, No Problems? Sex Work, Crime, and Activism after US Base Closure

• In Event: Poster Session: LGBTQI+ Power and Politics & Human Rights
  In Poster Session: Celebrating Fifty Years of Queer Scholarship at APSA Mini-Conference: Poster Session: LGBTQI+ Power and Politics

Abstract

The US military, the largest basing nation in the world, maintains as many as 750 bases around the world. In many regions, the US is shifting to a “lighter footprint,” transitioning from permanent bases to more mobile and temporary arrangements. One reason for this shift is to reduce the burdens of hosting a US base on local communities, thereby decreasing domestic opposition to the US military presence. While several studies on US base closure focus on environmental remediation, few trace the impacts on the local sex industry. Furthermore, few explore how problems in the local community attributable to the US military presence differ across permanent and temporary deployments. Drawing primarily upon interviews and an original dataset of base-related crimes, we show through the case of the Philippines that some issues related to the US military presence, such as sex work and crime, persist even when the military shifts from permanent bases to temporary deployments. Sex work persisted in the host community of Olongapo because the infrastructure remained although the clientele shifted. When the US maintained permanent bases in the Philippines, the sex work industry catered to US troops and sex tourists. After the US bases closed, sex tourism remained and when the US military transitioned to a temporary presence in the Philippines under the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), US troops became customers of Filipino sex workers once again. Additionally, US servicemembers committed crimes in the Philippines both when the US maintained a permanent basing presence and under the VFA. While anti-US-military activism decreased when the US shifted the nature of its presence, it persists around these issues, at times coming to a head following major crimes such as the murder of Jennifer Laude in 2014, a transgender sex worker. Thus, we show that problems attributable to the US military presence and domestic dissent arise even in places where the US shifts to a temporary deployment.

Authors

• Karl Gerrard T. See, National Research Council of the Philippines, Manila

• Charmaine N. Willis, Old Dominion University