Muckraking and Stories Untold: Ethnography Meets Journalism on Trafficked Women in the U.S. Military by Sea-Ling Cheng
Investigative journalism using visual media has become a dominant mode of knowledge production both in popular understanding of human trafficking and in policymaking. A 2002 Fox I-team report exposed the U.S. military in Korea as being actively involved in a transnational network of trafficking women into sexual slavery. The report circulated in policymaking arenas as evidence of the need to combat trafficking and prostitution via global U.S. initiatives. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from...
Read MoreInterrogating the Absence of HIV/AIDS Prevention for Migrant Sex Workers in South Korea by Sea-Ling Cheng
With a focus on HIV/AIDS prevention, the commentary focuses the marginalization of migrant sex workers’ right to health by both the state and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in South Korea (henceforth “Korea”). It first examines how state policy on migrant workers and migrant entertainers, in the sex industry in particular engenders human rights violations on multiple fronts. It then explores how relevant NGOs fail to intervene because of both ideological and practical...
Read MoreCommentary on Hughes, Chon, and Ellerman by Sea-Ling Cheng
Review of the article “Modern-Day Comfort Women: The U.S. Military, Transnational Crime, and the Trafficking of Women,” by Donna M. Hughes, Katherine Y. Chon, and Derek P. Ellerman, in the September 2007 issue of Violence Against Women. Commentary on Hughes
Read MoreAssuming manhood: Prostitution and patriotic passions in Korea by Sea-Ling Cheng
The Korean beverage market is saturated with male tonics. A 1999 TV commercial of one such tonic featured a gigantic bottle of drink making a thunderous landing onto the city, upon which toppled buildings become erected, together with throngs of Korean office men’s arms raised to the sky, cheering in unison to the male voice-over, “Korean Men! Rise! Korean Men! Rise!” The theme of rise from ruins in national and commercial propaganda has been prominent following the “IMF...
Read MoreWomen Work, Men Sponge, and Everyone Gossips: Macho Men and Stigmatized/ing Women in a Sex Tourist Town by Denise Brennan
This article focuses on gossip about Dominican womens sexual labor as an entry point into documenting shifting gender relations and ideologies in Sosúa, a sex tourist destination frequented primarily by German tourists. In Sosúas sexscape, new meanings of masculinity have emerged alongside womens earning capacity. While sex workers must temper their displays of monetary gains so as to not compromise their reputations as mothers sacrificing for their children, men openly enjoy freedom from...
Read MoreTourism in Transnational Places: Dominican Sex Workers and German Sex Tourists Imagine One Another by Denise Brennan
This paper considers how Dominican sex workers and German sex tourists imagine each other across national borders. They meet in a transnational space, Sosuacutea, a tourist town on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. Sex tourism has redirected migration patterns within the Dominican Republic to Sosuacutea, as well as off the island by building new transnational connections to Germany. I examine why Dominican women migrate to Sosuacutea’s sex trade, how they see German men, and what...
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