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

The State's Sexuality 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 mobili...