The State's Sexuality: Prostitution and Postcolonial Nation Building in South Korea

In this talk, Park Jeong-Mi discusses her recent book The State's Sexuality. It uncovers how the lives and work of women engaged in prostitution, long considered the most abased members of society, have been strategically intertwined with the lofty purpose of building South Korea's postcolonial nation-state. Through a complicated, contradictory patchwork of laws and regulations, which Park Jeong-Mi conceptualizes as a "toleration-regulation regime," the South Korean state did not merely exclude sex workers from ordinary citizenship; it also mobilized them for national security, national development, and the making of a gendered citizenry. In the process, the newly independent state was constructed, augmented, and consolidated. Sex workers often protested such draconian policies and sometimes utilized state apparatuses to get recognition as citizens. Based on expansive, meticulous archival research and sophisticated interpretation of historical records and women's voices, Park rewrites the dynamic history of South Korea from 1945 to the present through the lens of prostitution.

This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP here.

About the speaker:

Park Jeong-Mi is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Chungbuk National University. After earning her BA, MA, and PhD at Seoul National University, she served as a Research Professor at the Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture, Hanyang University, and a Kluge Fellow at the John W Kluge Center, the Library of Congress. As a historical sociologist, she has analyzed the historical transformations of state policies, citizenship, and social movements in South Korea from a feminist perspective. She is the author of The State’s Sexuality: Prostitution and Postcolonial Nation Building in South Korea (University of California Press, August 2024). She has now embarked on her new book project on social policies and the making of ‘society’ in South Korea as a Fulbright Scholar at George Washington University.