The documentary Me and an Owl explores the lives of South Korean sex workers who live in the so-called camptowns that developed around U. In the film, these camptown women offer their perspectives on the U. By agreeing to show their faces, they have exposed themselves to ridicule and shame, but they also have allowed the audience to see them as real women rather than as unidentified victims, according to filmmaker Kyoung Tae Park.
Moon: This documentary introduces several Korean camptown women, and one of them, a year-old former camptown woman, is named In-soon. During one of her art therapy sessions, she drew a picture of herself and an owl and commented that she and the owl would be similar because both of them were working at night.
Who are the camptown women of South Korea? Camptowns developed soon after the U. In the s when the U. Initially, camptown women were daughters of impoverished rural and urban families. Camptown women have been pariahs who occupied the lowest rung of the society. Since the mid s, Korean women in U. Camptown club owners prefer these foreign women because they are cheaper and more vulnerable and therefore easier to control.
The majority of camptown women in South Korea now are Filipinos and Russians. How do these women end up as sex workers? To make a very long and complicated answer short, when we consider their positions in society as young and undereducated women in a gender-segregated structure of the labor market, they have few alternatives. Why does the United States have military bases in Asia? During the period of the Cold War, the United States had been building and maintaining a sprawling global network of military bases to protect its political, economic, and ideological interests.
Since the end of the Cold War, despite some changes in domestic and overseas bases, it has maintained this global network of military bases.
