Sex Work in Southeast Asia

Studies literary and cinematic representations of sex work in Cambodia and Vietnam to rethink claims about the ‘truth’ of sex work

• Reveals different dimensions of the sex industry broadly conceived (i.e., sex work, sex trafficking, sex tourism, brokered marriage) and the often-overlapping forms of physical and emotional labour that constitute such work (e.g., sexual acts, filial care)
• Examines sites of exchange primarily between France, Cambodia, and Vietnam, but also among other Asia-Pacific nations (i.e., Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia), bringing different histories of empire and differing manifestations of imperialism into dialogue and revealing persistently sexualized dynamics in postcolonial Southeast Asia
• Expands, and often subverts, the expectations attendant to particular media and genres (e.g., the documentary film, the colonial novel), staging the unstable connections between viewing, knowing and acting in relation to the spectacle of suffering and exposing the challenges facing any attempt to study or regulate an industry notoriously difficult to track
• Resists essentialism and undermines the primacy of authenticity, contesting the codified frameworks that deny agency, complexity and dignity to all those who participate in sex work

Examining the ambivalences that mark Southeast Asian sex industries under global imperialism, this book explores the multi-layered subjectivities of sex workers, procurers and clients, and interrogates the frameworks in which discourses surrounding sex work circulate. Engaged with debates concerning the status of transactional sex, Leslie Barnes explores the symbolic force and concrete conditions of sex work in Cambodia and Vietnam, considering how these debates and the figures they ensnare are mediated by fiction and creative nonfiction. The book’s scenes of ambivalence show how the aesthetic treatment of sex work stretches the paradigms we use to make sense not only of sex work, but also of art, the evidentiary status of testimony and the spectacles of pleasure and suffering. Contesting essentialism and authenticity, and working to suspend judgement, these scenes encourage a re-examination of what we think we know about sex work, how we know it and what we do with that knowledge.