Abstract
Jeong-Mi Park’s The State’s Sexuality: Prostitution and Postcolonial Nation Building in South Korea argues that prostitution has been central—not peripheral—to South Korea’s nation-building, shaping moral order, economic policy, and state agendas from Japanese colonial rule through military dictatorship and into today’s democracy. Located within the contexts of foreign military presence, export-led industrialization, and Cold War geopolitics, state laws and public rhetoric turned sex work into a disciplinary tool that governed women’s bodies, casting them as either symbols of national virtue or threats to social order. Synthesizing feminist political economy, postcolonial nationalism, and citizenship studies, Park shows how women’s sexual labor became a strategic resource for development and national branding. This relational lens recasts the nation-state as a moralized, gendered institution sustained by the selective inclusion and exclusion of female bodies, positioning prostitution as a key site where gendered labor, national identity, and state power intersect. The book thus enriches sociological understandings of Korean nationhood and offers new pathways for theorizing women’s agency and resistance within patriarchal structures.
Chapter One shows that after Korea’s liberation, efforts to build a new national identity were closely tied to how the state handled prostitution. The 1947 Abolishment of Public Prostitution Law officially banned brothels and criminalized sex work (p. 47), reflecting pressure from nationalist women’s groups who saw prostitution as a harmful colonial legacy (pp. 42–43). However, the law still kept parts of the colonial system—such as registration and medical testing for women in “hospitality” roles—leading to what the author calls a toleration-regulation regime, where prostitution was both banned and regulated (p. 47). Under U.S. occupation, venereal disease cases among American soldiers in Korea surged, highlighting how women’s bodies were managed not just morally but also medically for military interests (p. 49). This reveals how postcolonial states often reuse colonial systems to control women’s bodies and shows that women’s sexuality became a tool for both national legitimacy and military health, linking personal labor to state power.
Chapter Two shows that during and after the Korean War, the South Korean government and the U.S. military worked together to manage prostitution around U.S. bases. In 1951, the Korean Ministry of Health began officially licensing “comfort stations” for UN troops (p. 54). By 1953, medical exams for prostitutes had increased more than six times, showing how tightly the state monitored and controlled these women (pp. 61–62). After the war, laws required women working in entertainment or sex work to register and get tested for disease up to twice a week (p. 65). By the 1960s, the government had set up over 100 vice districts and built dozens of VD clinics and detention centers near U.S. military bases (p. 68). These facts show that the state treated women’s bodies as tools for military and diplomatic goals during the Cold War. While sex work was officially discouraged, it was actually managed and supported by the government to serve U.S. troops. This system reinforced gender inequality by targeting women for regulation, while failing to hold male clients accountable, thus framing women’s sacrifice as patriotic duty.
Chapter Three shows that from the 1960s to the 1980s, the South Korean government treated prostitution as a tool for economic growth and national image-making. In 1964, U.S. soldiers spent over $12 million on entertainment in Korea, making up about 80 percent of the country’s tourism income (p. 90). To capture this income, the government licensed over 200 bars and clubs for foreigners, most of them near U.S. military bases (p. 89). After diplomatic ties with Japan were restored, the number of Japanese visitors increased rapidly (p. 91), and the state responded by registering kisaeng and requiring weekly tests for sexually transmitted infection to medically monitor and control women working in the sex industry (p. 95). These facts show that women’s sexual labor was used by the state as an unofficial economic sector, helping to bring in foreign currency without being officially acknowledged. By regulating women as workers in the sex and tourism industries, the state embedded gender inequality into its modernization strategy—treating women’s bodies as tools for economic growth. Park argues that this system medicalized and moralized women’s bodies as instruments of national service, while masking the structural violence behind the language of hygiene, patriotism, and development.
Chapter Four shows that after the 1961 military coup, the South Korean government created “female reformatories,” where many women were detained by the mid-1990s (pp. 115–17). Although described as places of guidance and rehabilitation, these institutions operated more like prisons—inmate deaths rose (p. 125), and many women were sent there without trial. As part of its rehabilitation efforts, the state organized mass weddings, marrying off reformatory women to vagrants or homeless people and forcing them into state labor programs (p. 128). Job training programs were ineffective, since few women found employment after release, and the majority of women were simply handed over to guardians instead of gaining independence (p. 131). This shows how the state disguised control as care—using the language of reform to justify managing women from poor and working-class backgrounds. By closely monitoring and controlling women’s bodies, the state normalized a civic order in which social belonging was granted through feminine obedience and moral conformity, under the guise of national progress. Park argues that these institutions functioned not simply as welfare tools, but as disciplinary spaces that fused moral regulation with state-building, turning rehabilitation into a mechanism for producing idealized female citizens.
Chapter Five shows how Korean feminist activism placed prostitution at the center of national debates over morality, law, and citizenship. Shelters such as Magdalena House, founded in 1985, helped reframe sex workers from criminal offenders to vulnerable citizens (pp. 148–50), enabling new legal frameworks like the 1999 Youth Protection Act (pp. 160–61). These discursive shifts culminated in the 2004 Act on the Punishment of Arrangement of Commercial Sex Acts and the Act on the Prevention of Commercial Sex Acts and the Protection of Victims, which marked a nationwide crackdown. The sex industry became increasingly transnational, with a rapid rise in the number of women entering Korea on E-6 entertainer visas (p. 163), prompting new immigration controls and anti-trafficking efforts. Park argues that these reforms, while progressive in intent, ultimately reinforced state control over women’s bodies and shows that such efforts aligned with nationalist and neoliberal logics framed prostitution as a threat to social purity, blending gender politics with moral governance.
Park argues that South Korea’s long-standing “toleration-regulation” system for managing prostitution has outlasted both dictatorship and Cold War dependency, continuing to shape how the democratic state governs gender and sexuality. Sociologically, Park treats prostitution as a powerful lens through which to assess Korea’s democratic progress. She shows how national memory selectively honors certain victims while neglecting others, and how health policies continue to enforce gendered double standards by focusing on women rather than addressing the role of male clients. By placing sex work at the center of nation-building, Park challenges conventional narratives of progress and offers a bold, humane vision for more inclusive policy reform. Park’s book is a landmark contribution to studies of gender, state power, and postcolonial modernity. It should be read by scholars of Korean studies, feminist activists, and policymakers alike.