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226 11 Romancing the Club Love Dynamics between Filipina Entertainers and GIs in U.S. Military CampTowns in South Korea Sealing Cheng Love . . . is always an interrogation—a series of questions about the self and the other. —Peggy Phelan (1993:21) Work You need many boyfriends in the club. Otherwise, no one will buy you drinks. —Anna, 18-year-old runaway Filipina entertainer Play Well, it’s a game that we play. You know, you have got what these women want and they have what we want. —Roy, 34-year-old GI (staff sergeant, U.S. Forces in Korea) This chapter examines the discourse of romantic love in the negotiations and identity construction between service providers and customers in an industry known for the sexual objectification of Asian women—clubs in the R&R (rest and recreation) industry for U.S. military in South Korea (henceforth “Korea”). In Korea , these clubs are found around U.S. military camp towns (gijichon) that constitute pockets of U.S.-dominated territories in the Korean nation. The ethnographic discussion here has three purposes. The first is to illustrate how “love” enters into the gijichon club industry between the Filipina entertainers and their GI boyfriends and how this cross-cultural “game of love” works in a situation of dislocation and a meeting of social and economic unequals. For GIs away from home, the illusion of intimacy enfolds their interactions in the club and their everyday lives in gijichon . It analyzes how political economy is “implicated in the production and reproduction of desire and is implicated in even the most minute and intimate levels of interaction” (Constable 2003:143). A second purpose is to analyze why “love” is an important discursive instrument for the Filipina entertainers to manage their labor and their vulnerabilities in an exploitative situation. In this sense, love is a “weapon of the weak” for female entertainers. The third purpose is to throw into relief the blurry lines between play and nonplay in the game of love, and the potential of Romancing the Club 227 “love” going beyond its intended performativity to have unpredictable emotional consequence on its players. Love in R&R Talking about love in any R&R industry for the U.S. military may seem ironic if not superfluous. R&R is frequently equated with military prostitution and considered contiguous with war rapes and sexual slavery, as exemplified by the issue of Comfort Women. The deployment of female sexual services for military men has been analyzed as an effect of aggressive male sexuality legitimized by military hypermasculinity (Enloe 1983, 1989, 2000; Harrison 2003; Higate 2003). Studies by political scientists and concerned critics (Enloe 1989; Moon 1997; Sturdevant and Stoltzfus 1993; Cummings 1992) on U.S. military prostitution are premised on exposing how masculinist state projects rely on the mobilization of women’s bodies. The issue has become increasingly emotive and politically sensitive as challenges to the American political and military role in the Asia Pacific region have escalated. Furthermore, since the late 1990s, antitrafficking activists and policy makers have drawn increasing attention to the migration of women from developing countries into these R&R venues, condemning military presence for generating the demand for “trafficked women” and in the process condemning the military and war as institutionalized gender violence for the reproduction of state and capital on a global scale. In this period also nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the media have criticized the United States for its involvement in the trafficking of women for the purpose of sexual enslavement.1 In this light, the image of burly young American men in uniforms sexually overpowering helpless third world women makes the notion of love—with its connotation of romance and mutuality—unthinkable. While indebted to the cogent analyses of gender ideology and violence in military institutions cited earlier, this chapter departs from this body of research by looking at the everyday interactions between military men and women entertainers in an R&R industry since the late 1990s. Specifically, it explores the discourses and experiences of romantic love between Filipina entertainers and their regular GI patrons who meet in their displacement in Korea between 1998 and 2000. As such, it examines the importance of love as a discursive and emotional site for the exercise of individual agency and the interactive creation of social reality in the context of globalization. The presence of U.S. military in Korea and the entry of Filipinas as entertainers to serve this military are the products of different stages and types of globalizing dynamics—the former a result of the Korean...

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