The Camptown Origins of International Adoption and the Hypersexualization of Korean Children

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Why do so many Korean American women recall being told as young girls that had they not been adopted, they would have grown up to be prostitutes—just like their mothers? This essay addresses that troubling question by reorienting our understanding of the history of international adoption from South Korea. It centers the camptown—recreational spaces around US bases infamous for military prostitution—and the mixed-race children who constituted the vast majority of those sent abroad in the program's initial years, to help explain how adoptee bodies have been coded in the American psyche ever since.