One day in June in the town of Olongapo, children playing in the streets stopped and looked skyward. Women may have gasped as they leaned out of windows to get a better look, and navy servicemen sitting outside bars paused mid-conversation to stare, as a thick column of dark, billowing clouds silently climbed into the atmosphere from the peak of Mount Pinatubo. Days later, the volcanic eruption itself forced over a cubic mile of material twenty-two miles into the sky. The year was 1991, and the cataclysmic event forced the closure of two of the largest overseas United States military bases in the world. Ending almost a century of their operation, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo was the giant exclamation mark that terminated the Military Bases Agreement between the US and the Philippines. The volume of ash dumped on the bases quickly rendered billions of dollars of military equipment useless at Subic Bay Naval Base and Clark Airbase, and accelerated the withdrawal of troops from the islands after the Philippine Senate barred the renewal of their leases.

Subic and Clark were evacuated in the aftermath of Pinatubo’s eruption, each leaving behind an adjacent town, Olongapo and Angeles, and emptying out their economies. Scripted into the urban spaces of these towns was a distinct bio-political zone of regulated sex work for overseas US servicemen between 1947 and 1991. Smoky bars, sparsely furnished boarding houses, and a busy main strip were organized around a body economy of race and nation under the proviso of entertainment. “Rest and Recreation,” meaning down time spent between the call of duty, had become—and remains—a part of overseas military life. During the war in Vietnam, vast aircraft carriers, floating islands of military space, could unload up to ten thousand servicemen into Subic Bay daily. For the maintenance of US-Philippine foreign relations, sex and its management were key themes in the discourse around overseas servicemen, and R&R therefore became part of the larger framework of “trans-pacific security.” While the policing of sexuality was often portrayed as a necessary evil of military security, it had wide-ranging and pervasive effects on the countries in which it took place. This text seeks to elicit how sexual economies functioned in urban spaces at these base towns, and to examine an overlooked aspect of the military-settler complex as it relates to the body and latent colonial relationships.

After the bases were evacuated in 1991, some fifty-five thousand women were left jobless, with Pinatubo achieving in hours what anti-base activists had for years been campaigning for. Like the collapse of aircraft hangars under the weight of volcanic ash, the trans-pacific intimate economies were revealed as the fragile structures they really were. These military spaces, interconnected by aircraft carriers, Foucauldian heterotopias moving “from brothel to brothel,” formed part of a larger colonial framework and imperial legacy.¹ The Military Bases Agreement, signed in 1947, was one of numerous treaties that tied the Philippines to the United States in the years following its independence from the latter in 1946, drawn up for the “collective defense … of peace and security … in the Pacific area.”² While shrouded in pacts, ratifications, and military verbiage, the way in which the US military and its new host country spatialized these relationships on land for the defense of the ocean entailed a series of “contact zones,” states of sovereign exception at each port of call.³

A feminist architectural history of base town sex work calls into consideration the fact that women were not passive victims of a dichotomous arrangement. Rather, sex workers and entertainers were in control of the spaces they occupied. The bar, the street, and the hotel were scripted spaces for a “corponomy,” to use performance artist Eisa Jocson’s term, that capitalized on their fleeting visitors.⁴ Understanding how these spaces were gendered reveals contradictions: vice, shame, power, and pretense were aspects of R&R that can be understood through the base towns’ urban program, while women working there organized advocacy networks such as the Women’s Education, Development, Productivity and Research Organization (WEDPRO) that also encompassed clinics and survivor centres.⁵ Just as sexually transmitted infections were, for the military, less a moral problem than one of efficiency, so too were collective action networks and advocacy support groups established to respond to a biopolitical situation.⁶ As a powerful rubric for understanding the histories of global body economies, colonialism often scripts the political as a see-saw, leaving the subject on the ground or in the air. Just so, the female Philippine subject was often left suspended without agency amid the base town economy.

The strip, bar, casa, and clinic help to illuminate how this phenomenon functioned. Information on them has been gathered from two primary sources: the first is a 1990 report titled Women Entertainers in Angeles and Olongapo, and the second, published in 2001, is Halfway Through the Circle. Both were created by WEDPRO, and while the first is a report that details the organizational structure of base town sex work based on a survey conducted among 150 women in Olongapo, the second is a series of eight oral histories from survivors of sex trafficking.⁷ Additionally, three photographs captured in Olongapo by Saundra Sturdevant, a photographer and activist who documented base town prostitution from the perspectives of women during the 1980s and 1990s, supplement this text.⁸

Limits on women’s movements were central to the organization of the casa. This meant that the space of the threshold became a part of the town’s gendering. In a context far removed geographically and temporally, Diane Ghirardo notes a similar spatial imperative at work, in which the “unexceptional architectural character of public and private brothels” in Renaissance Ferrara illustrated the contradictions at play. Sex work was a “private activity to be conducted under public scrutiny, and therefore not in other private settings, in a designated building indistinguishable from its neighbors.”¹ Part of the scheme of sex work common to both contexts, then, involved a visual urban literacy in order to follow the rules of the trade.

Such an arrangement can be understood through other transpacific examples. Lisa Lowe has identified a similar logic at play between the colonial British treatment of Chinese sex workers in Hong Kong in the late nineteenth century, where women were required to be registered to particular brothels, and those who serviced European clientele underwent mandatory inspections. This legislation, Lowe argues, provided for a classification of Chinese sex workers as “diseased,” which was a form of colonial knowledge production; “rather than a conquest of physical territory, it assembled through medical surveillance the information about the bodies of the colonized, thereby contributing to the colonial epistemology about the Chinese.”³ Efficiency, whereby biological and chemical oversight are part of the administration of a territory, was a technique of governance at Olongapo. The specificity of targeting health as a part of this structure is identified as a component of “settler militarism” by Juliet Nebolon, who uses the term to show how public health programs in Hawai’i during World War II were a “bio-political administration [that] strategically targeted health and hygiene.”⁴ Health, for Nebolon, was a matter of military surveillance, territorial organization, and population control, illustrating how wartime-style administration took place on the periphery of war itself across the Pacific. Olongapo, like Hawai’i, was organized under the suspension of ordinary laws (Hawai’i was under martial law during WWII) meaning that while sex work was illegal in the Philippines, it could be authorized through specific programs of protection, not of local women, but of military institutions and reputations.

Base town sex work was an issue of social and spatial justice. While patriarchy and poverty spawned the sex work that was prevalent at Olongapo, the bases institutionalized it.¹ The condemnable use of women’s sexual services deserves attention as part of a history of military urbanisms, and as a feminist architectural history of military spaces. The examples here foreground the ways in which women’s work took different forms in a highly programmed space. The onstage and offstage intertwining in the strip, bar, casa, and clinic pose some of the contradictions inherent to the economy of militarized sexual relations, yet they do not represent fixed subject positions. Does the pervasiveness of base town smoky bars or sparsely furnished boarding houses render them insignificant? Or is their significance due in part to their gendered architectural program: dull, overlooked, and thus globally recognizable?

In 1993, a class-action lawsuit was filed by the Filipino women’s advocacy organization Gabriela. It sought a lump-sum payment from the US Navy of 8,000 USD per child for some 8 600 children allegedly abandoned by US military fathers, amounting to roughly 69 million USD. Cecilia Hofmann, the group’s spokeswoman, noted that the “lawsuit is the result of our frustrations … the navy regulated access to these bars. They required women to go to the health clinic. What this implies is that the Navy felt it was ok for their personnel to have sexual contact with these women.”² The case, which was settled out of court, was led by case attorney Joe Cotchett, who described that “for more than fifty years the navy regulated the [sex work] traffic in Olongapo at Subic Bay. Now it’s time the navy lived up to its responsibility for these children.”³