Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present

Abstract

In 2009, the U.S. military possessed over seven hundred overseas military bases, and Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon’s edited volume, Over There, presents valuable new scholarship on the local politics and gendered relations that constitute and undergird this vast military empire. Building on groundbreaking works by Cynthia Enloe, Catherine Lutz, Chalmers Johnson, Katharine Moon, and David Vine, Höhn and Moon provide a comparative analysis of U.S. military bases in Germany and South Korea along with complementary essays on Japan, the Middle East, and the United States. By juxtaposing essays on U.S. bases in Western Europe and East Asia, Höhn and Moon argue against a monolithic conception of the U.S. military, advocating instead for a more finely grained and comparative analysis of military-civilian relations. Höhn and Moon’s argument that U.S. military power and control has been uneven, dependent on both geopolitical dynamics and local class and racial structures, is compellingly made by a range of essays and scholarly contributions. The majority of the chapters focus on gendered relations between military personnel and civilians, which varied from straightforward prostitution to romantic affairs and marriage. In “Crossfire Couples,” for example, Chris Ames makes a strong argument against a simplistic analysis that categorizes all Okinawan women who have relationships with U.S. men as either victims or traitors. Instead, he focuses on more ambivalent and ambiguous encounters, and he asserts that empire’s “strongest glue resides in the structures of ambivalence—co-optation—that bind local and imperial power” (p. 181).