Assistant Professor | Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Duke University
Sung Eun Kim is an interdisciplinary historian of modern Korea whose research focuses on the racial and sexual politics of colonial soldiering at the intersections of transnational Korean militarism and U.S. imperialism in the Asia–Pacific region. His research draws from the fields of Korean studies, critical race and gender studies, and U.S. war and empire studies to expand the question of U.S. colonialism in modern Korean history.
He is currently working on his book manuscript, Augmenting Empire: Race, Gender, and the Making of KATUSA under U.S. Military Empire, 1945-2021, which offers a critical history of the Korean Augmentation Troops to the U.S. Army (KATUSA), a unit of South Korean soldiers that have been conscripted into the U.S. Army in Korea from 1950 to the present.
Queering ‘Freedom’s Frontier’: Homosocial Soldiering and Racialized Masculinity across Korea and Vietnam
Abstract
This article examines the intersections of race, empire, and homosociality in the transpacific Cold War order by analyzing South Korean soldiers’ homosocial alignment with U.S. military empire across the Korean and Vietnam Wars. While studies of militarized masculinity often center the heteropatriarchal subjugation of local women, I foreground homosocial bonds between South Korean and U.S. soldiers as sites of racial and gendered discipline.
By critically analyzing memoirs, propaganda, novels, and state documents against feminist and queer of color critiques, I trace how Korean soldiers’ proximity to U.S. imperial power hinged on a racial triangulation that aligned them with empire while positioning them against Vietnamese civilians and sex workers. Drawing on Jasbir Puar’s critique of homonationalism (2007), I argue that South Korean soldiers were both subordinated within U.S. military racial hierarchies and recruited into its counterinsurgent logics.
Their conditional access to imperial power was secured through violent military brotherhoods, counterrevolutionary violence, and entanglement in the U.S. military’s sexual economies, restructuring their racialized masculinity. Reframing “Freedom’s Frontier” as a homosocial regime of Cold War racial governance, I reveal how racialized masculinities were forged and weaponized within the asymmetries of U.S. imperialism, from Korea’s 38th parallel to Vietnam’s 16th.
