Description
Book SynopsisIn An American Brothel, Amanda Boczar considers sexual encounters between American servicemen and civilians throughout the Vietnam War, and she places those fraught and sometimes violent meetings in the context of the US military and diplomatic campaigns.
In 1966, US Senator J. William Fulbright declared that Saigon has become an American brothel. Concerned that, as US military involvement in Vietnam increased so, too, had prostitution, black market economies, and a drug trade fueled by American dollars, Fulbright decried an arrogance of power on the part of Americans and the corrosive effects unchecked immorality could have on Vietnam as well as on the war effort. The symbol, at home and abroad, of the sweeping social and cultural changes was often the so-called South Vietnamese bar girl.
As the war progressed, peaking in 1968 with more than half a million troops engaged, the behavior of soldiers off the battlefield started to impact affect t
Trade Review
An American Brothel is an indispensable study of transactional, consensual, and violent sexual relationships between South Vietnamese women and American men during the US War in Vietnam. Boczar's arguments are so persuasiv[.]
* Michican War Studies Review *
In An American Brothel, Boczar forcefully argues that such conceptualizations fall far short of gaining a fuller appreciation of what "war" actually entailed in Vietnam.[A] powerful yet compact book.
* H-Diplo, Gregory A. Daddis *
An American Brothel is an important work, one that historians interested in any one of these fields should read. Boczar has provided an invaluable path for other historians to follow as we continue to examine these questions. In sum, An American Brothel is an outstanding book that bridges several fields of historical inquiry and demonstrates unequivocally that sex plays a vital role in wartime foreign relations and experiences.
* H-Diplo, Kara Dixon Vuic *
Boczar convincingly argues that gender, sex, and intimate relationships were at the center of military life during the Vietnam War.
* H-Diplo, Ariel Natalo-Lifton *
Boczar's sobering analysis of the human toll of the Vietnam War on America's key ally should serve as a warning to current and future policy makers[.].
* H-Dilpo, Kelly Wilson-Buford *
A compelling history of the significance of sexual encounters in warfare[...] offers a fascinating foreign policy and military history of the Vietnam War from the bottom up, detailing points of tension and cooperation between the two allies over intimate relationships.
* Choice *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Political Legacies of Personal Encounters
1. Vietnam in the American Mind from the Colonial Erathrough the 1950s
2. Morale, Morality, and the "American Brothel"
3. Vietnamese Eradication Efforts and the Americanization of Sexual Policy
4. Love and Companionship
5. The Policing and Policy Problems of Sexual Violence
6. De-Escalation and the Collapse of an Industry
Conclusion: Reframing the Diplomatic History of the Vietnam War
