Abstract
While scholars have long documented the histories of Korean Americans in major urban centers and metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, few have looked to those living adjacent to U.S. military installations like Fort Campbell in Clarksville, Tennessee. 4 As communities whose Korean populations comprise mostly intermarried Korean women, a large proportion of mixed race individuals, and very few Korean immigrant men, the lack of urgency to document military bride communities is telling of the field’s own implicit biases privileging patriarchal and ethnic nationalist con- ceptualizations of the Korean diaspora. Indeed, the almost exclusive scholarly focus on mainstream Koreatowns suggests that Korean men are primarily re- sponsible for Korean diasporic community formation through their political, educational, and entrepreneurial ambitions that have set Koreans in motion across the globe. But it was Korean women rather than Korean men, whose marriages, migrations, and subsequent immigration sponsorships accounted for the vast majority of the Korean American postwar population in the twentieth century. 5 Furthermore, many of these sponsored migrants settled first into towns like Clarksville, Tennessee, with their military bride sponsors before venturing off to rural suburbs, major cities, or mainstream Koreatowns elsewhere in the United States.