Sex Work in Southeast Asia

The Place of Desire in a Time of AIDS

Lisa Law

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415218054
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134602100
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Southeast Asian sex workers are stereotypically understood as passive victims of the political economy, and submissive to western men. The advent of HIV/AIDS only compounds this image. Sex Work in Southeast Asia is a cultural critique of HIV/AIDS prevention programmes targetting sex tourism industries in Southeast Asia.

1

RETHINKING THE PROSTITUTE SUBJECT

Bodies, subjectivities and space

By body I understand a concrete, material, animate organisation of flesh, organs, nerves, muscles, and skeletal structure which are given a unity, cohesiveness, and organisation only through their psychical and social inscription as the surface and raw materials of an integrated and cohesive totality…The body becomes a human body, a body which coincides with the ‘shape’ and space of a psyche, a body whose epidermic surface bounds a psychical unity, a body which thereby defines the limits of experience and subjectivity, in psychoanalytic terms through the intervention of the…Other or Symbolic order (language and rule-governed social order).

(Grosz in Longhurst 1995:98)

While there remains little consensus on the question ‘what is the body?’, the subject of the body has captured the attention of social theorists for the past decade. In concert with critiques of Enlightenment rationality, many argue that the belief in a disembodied, rational knowledge silenced—or at least severely muted—the role of the body in social life. The body thus became the container for consciousness, the impediment to reason and, ultimately, the site to be transcended. This mind/body split encouraged the conviction that there was only one ‘pure’ or ‘perspectiveless’ kind of knowledge—that there was only one Truth.¹

The gendered character of the mind/body dualism has inspired some feminist writers to locate the body at the centre of analysis. Departing from notions of universal experience and truth, these subject—centred theories emphasize the fluid construction of personal identity and accentuate the ways individuals make sense of the social world from unique and variegated ‘subject positions’. Rather than depict the mind as the irreducible unit of subjectivity, the body is recognized as a crucial site where power and knowledge are negotiated. The experience of subjectivity is therefore bound up in orders of power where bodies are moulded and policed by social, psychic and cultural norms, and where the power/knowledge nexus interpolates the subject.

Recognizing the existence of multiply constructed realities, and identifying the power/knowledge regimes that allow particular views to gain currency, is important in the context of power, sex work and HIV/AIDS. On the one hand, there is a need for a language of power and position, since sex workers have become the targets of local, national and global HIV/AIDS education campaigns. The normativities of HIV prevention assume sex workers require education, thereby ascribing a stigmatized sex worker identity: the female, Southeast Asian prostitute is understood as infected and infecting. On the other hand, these regimes of power and knowledge have resonance in everyday life. They police the practices of commercial sex, for example, as well as the experience of inhabiting a body coded as diseased.

Thinking through the specificities of bodies and spaces provides a means to imagine a sex worker subject which is simultaneously located in rigid grids of power, meaning and identity (e.g. male/female, Western/Asian, healthy/diseased), but is also fluid, multiple, and capable of change and mobility. By focusing on the prostitute body as an object of power, a site of resistance, as well as a site where identity is fluidly constructed, this chapter provides a less deterministic approach to understanding the relationship between sex workers and HIV/AIDS.

The body and Foucault

I wonder whether, before one poses the question of ideology, it wouldn't be more materialist to study first the question of the body and the effects of power on it. Because what troubles me with these analyses which prioritise ideology is that there is always presupposed a human subject on the lines of the model provided by classical philosophy, endowed with a consciousness which power is then thought to seize on.

(Foucault 1980:58)

Understanding the human body as both an object of power and the site at which power is disseminated and resisted owes much to Foucault's work on the normalization of bodies in prisons, schools and hospitals. Foucault's work on regimes of disciplinary control—notably his writing on criminality, sexuality and mental illness—highlights how the sociopolitical structures which organize the practices of everyday social life produce knowledge about particular bodies and influence the ways bodies experience time and space. For Foucault, the body is a ‘surface of inscription’ marked by dominant cultural norms (of criminality, sanity or sexuality), but holds the possibility of inscribing itself on social practices through resistance. Instead of emphasizing how bodies resist and subvert power, however, Foucault's emphasis is on how particular forms of power can manipulate the ‘political economy of the body’ to produce bodies which suffer systemic subordination.

In The History of sexuality, for example, Foucault (1978) examines the relationship between the body and sexuality, critiquing the ‘repressive hypothesis’ of the Victorian era and arguing for a different conception of the relationship between changing sexual norms and the power of discourse. He differentiates between sexual practices (which are performed by the body) and sexuality (which is discursively constructed), arguing that it was the Victorian era which named diverse sexual practices, assigning them values and meanings, so that particular bodies were observed to contain particular socio-sexual identities. It was in this discourse of scientia sexualis, that powers of surveillance and regulation produced knowledge about particular kinds of bodies. Similarly, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1977) argues that the disappearance of bodily torture and its replacement with institutions of discipline was correlated to the state's need to control individual bodies (e.g. at work and in schools, the military, hospitals, etc.). The institutionalization of the power to punish—in this case, the rise of the French penal system—was more effective in producing knowledge about a pathologized subject (‘criminals’), however, than it was in reducing the crime rate. Bodies in the prison were enclosed, partitioned and ranked, and their activities were controlled in time (timetables) and in space (the panopticon) to produce what Foucault terms ‘docile bodies’. This meticulous control produced bodies that served as the intermediaries of punishment; that is, the prisoner's body was disciplined in order to correct their behaviour (or what Foucault refers to as the ‘modern soul’).

It is tempting to use this approach to understand the context of prostitution and HIV/AIDS in Southeast Asia. A pathologized sex worker subject is clearly discernible within a series of institutional discourses that seek to identify, name and regulate the sexual practices of these bodies. There are libraries of demographic and social information describing the places and people of sex work, and groups ranging from the World Health Organisation to academics to community—based organizations have been involved in data collection and surveillance. In naming the sexual practices that sex workers engage in with their clients, as well as testing their blood for HIV antibodies, the discourse of AIDS prevention constructs a socio-sexual sex worker identity and produces knowledge about prostitution in Southeast Asia.

A Foucauldian analysis of sex work relies on a very specific conception of power, however, one which has come under increasing scrutiny (Hartsock 1990). Sex workers merely resist the power of institutional discourse, rather than pursue different ways to redefine their social world. Furthermore, Foucault conceptualised power-knowledge-pleasure—and more specifically, desire—within a framework that neglected how gender and race were constitutive of particular workings of power (Stoler 1995). Because sex tourism and HIV/AIDS prevention are issues which are simultaneously about gender and race, a purely Foucauldian analysis neglects the place of desire in imagining sex worker bodies.

The body and feminism

As soon as knowledge is seen as purely conceptual, its relation to bodies, the corporeality of both knowers and texts, and the ways these materialities interact, must become obscure.

(Grosz 1994:4)

The issues of power/knowledge, exclusion and invisibility have been theorized by Western feminists for several decades. Broadly speaking, these feminists have sought to identify and redress the inequalities of a patriarchal culture that denies women a meaningful role in the production of social, economic and cultural life. While homogenizing Woman as a universal category was a strategic (and contingent) move with its own imperatives, prevailing modes of representation and knowledge formation tended to reproduce this Woman within the realm of masculinist discourse. As a result, the imperatives of only some women were theorized and represented under the assumption of a dominant reality of female oppression. Resistance to such exclusion became evident through critiques from women of colour, lesbians and women in the sex industry, and the ethnocentric, heterosexist and middle-class character of Western feminist analyses was revealed. In response to these critiques, and by accepting the fiction of unity, some feminists redirected attention to how ‘gender’ is multiply intersected by race, class and sexuality. This is a positive and productive move that encourages a re-imagining of Woman, but the possibility of relativism is always present: what are the political risks of deconstructing Woman? Does multiplicity become a chaotic proliferation of voices that produce a noisy babble?² These questions are in concert with the current unease over the fate of ‘the subject’.

Feminists of difference—that is, feminists inspired by psychoanalysis, Derridean deconstruction and Foucauldian genealogy—have taken a less pragmatic approach to the issue of female oppression, producing complex philosophical readings of Woman within a highly spatialized language of bodies, subjectivity and sexual difference.³ Feminists of difference conceive the female object/male subject dichotomy in terms of a psychoanalytic understanding of ‘othering’; that is, where ‘othering’ is recognized as a mapping of self. Within this framework Woman is defined in terms of her negativity (as not-Man) in the dominant Symbolic order and, in a more spatial sense, forms the boundary to what constitutes masculine identity. In this way, Man cannot exist without (the exclusion of) Woman. Instead of focusing on how women appropriate, resist or subvert this negatively defined subject position, feminists of difference seek to transgress the dualism though imagining what might exceed these analytic processes. ‘Bodies’—or corporeal subjectivities— constitute this excess, and are important in imagining what a more autonomous feminine subjectivity might look like. This is a contested move which has been criticized as essentialist, but if understood as situated and contingent, holds the possibility of imagining a space for a female subject outside masculinist discourse.

Bordo (1992) is correct in asserting that it was not Foucault who ‘discovered’ the politics of the body, but it was during the late 1980s and early 1990s that feminists began conscientiously experimenting with the concept of a ‘corporeal feminism’ (Gatens 1988; Gallop 1988; Bordo 1989; Grosz 1989, 1994). Feminists had been aware of the bodily nature of women's disempowerment— exemplified in protests against pornography and calls for the self-control of reproductive functions (e.g. birth control, abortion)—but had been reluctant to theorize from the body, as an embodied subjectivity, for fear that it would naturalize Woman's social position. Much discussion in the 1970s and 1980s was therefore devoted to the social construction of gender. It was not until the critique of the sex/gender split emerged (Gatens 1988; Haraway 1991; Butler 1990, 1993), however, that sexed bodies were seriously considered as starting points for feminist analysis.

Broadening Foucault's conception of the dialectical relationship between power and knowledge—and the role of the body within that relationship– some contemporary feminists seek to theorize the role of the sexed body in the production and evaluation of knowledge (s). Indeed, Foucault has been criticized for neglecting precisely this issue (Probyn 1991; Grosz 1993). This means understanding the construction of the female body not only as the site of the ‘other’—that is, the site of difference categorized as irrational and emotional in the quest to equate masculinity with rationality and vice versa—but more generally as a politically inscribed and discursively constructed object of power, and as a site of discipline and disempowerment. This emphasis denaturalizes women's bodies and social position by focusing on the technologies of power which ‘create’ women as ‘subjects’ in the first instance.

This imagining is taken further by Irigaray (1985) and Grosz (1994), who argue for a ‘corporeal feminism’ which uses the female body and an embodied, non-dualist subjectivity as starting points for analysis. This approach reduces the likelihood of the feminine being reproduced within the realm of masculinist discourse, particularly the reproduction of the male/female dualism where Woman is considered a knowable object, and Man the knowing subject. Instead, it opens the space for multiple corporeal subjectivities. This has serious implications for feminist thought, however, because it means dispensing with the universalizing category of Woman. Deconstructing Woman further problematizes the position of the knower, and in so doing critiques particular kinds of knowledge formation. Unlike Foucault, therefore, feminists offer a more dialectical and transformative understanding of the body. According to Grosz (1993:187–8),

[if] the body is always sexually specific, concretely ‘sexed’, this implies that the hegemony over knowledges that masculinity has thus far accomplished can be subverted, upset, or transformed through women's assertion of ‘a right to know’, independent of and autonomous from the methods and presumptions regulating the prevailing (patriarchal) forms of knowledge.

There have been various interpretations of the placement of the sexed female body at the centre of political and theoretical debates (Grosz 1994:14–19). These interpretations, Grosz argues, can be broadly categorized as emanating from three sources: egalitarian feminism, social constructionism and those advocating a conception of sexual difference. Egalitarian feminists⁴ perceive the female body and its attendant reproductive functions as simultaneously a hindrance to equality between the sexes and an opportunity for women to gain special insights to life. This perspective therefore perceives a conflict between woman as mother and woman as political being (i.e. private and public roles), necessitating reproductive technologies that enable women to participate more fully in the public sphere. As Grosz points out, however, this perspective adheres to the notion that the body must be transcended, maintains the public/private dichotomy, and does not question why maternal or potentially maternal bodies are excluded from the public sphere in the first place.

Social constructionist feminists,⁵ on the other hand, have focused more on the gendering of productive (i.e. male) and reproductive (i.e. female) roles, aiming to minimize sexual differences and reassign new and more positive values to the latter (e.g. child rearing). While this is a more positive attitude towards the female body, it presumes that sex is a fixed category and gender is the area of transformation. This sex/gender opposition adheres to the body/mind dualism, however, where ‘real’ bodies and the representations of them are mutually exclusive. Finally, to feminists who adhere to the notion of sexual difference,⁶ understanding the lived body is central not only to transgressing this mind/body split, but to contemporary (political, sexual and intellectual) struggles. These feminists argue that the body is the object of power, but also the site of dualisms themselves, and are therefore more concerned with the body as a political, social and cultural—as well as discursively constructed— object: ‘a body bound up in the order of desire, signification, and power’ (Grosz 1994:19).

I am uneasy with such a rigid categorization of feminists, since there is more epistemological similarity between these perspectives than I account for here (cf. Fuss 1989; Rose 1993a). But there is an important space opened up by feminists adhering to the notion of sexual difference. Within this perspective, there is a possibility of multiple types of bodies, and hence types of subjectivity, thereby allowing the body to be the ‘mediator’ of experience. By conceiving of the body as ‘a point of mediation between what is perceived as purely internal and accessible only to the subject and what is external and publicly observable’—that is, by problematizing experience as access to Truth—this allows a remapping of other dualisms such as inside/outside, public/private, self/other, and a host of other binary pairs associated with the mind/body split (Grosz 1994:20–1). In Southeast Asia, understanding the lived body allows me to conceptualize sex workers without separating out categories of class, race and gender as if they were mutually exclusive. It also allows me to interrogate and transgress the dualisms implicit within current debates on sex tourism and HIV/AIDS, such as rich/poor, west/east, agent/victim, healthy/diseased, and so on.

Feminists who advocate an embodied subjectivity as a starting point for analysis have been criticized as essentialist, for conceiving of the body too excessively as a text, and for being too concerned with rewriting the body as a positivity rather than a lack (Bordo 1992; Rose 1993a; Mortimer 1994/5). As Grosz (1993:195) points out, however, accounts of bodies are not only anatomical, physiological, or biological, they can also be sociocultural. ‘nonbiologistic, non-reductive accounts of the body may entail quite different consequences and serve to reposition women's relations to the production of knowledges.’ Furthermore, if power is seen to operate directly on bodies, then understanding the relationship between bodies, power and knowledge production acknowledges the (negative, subordinated or excluded) term body as the unacknowledged condition of the (dominant) term reason (Grosz 1993:195). Finally, and with regard to rewriting the body as positivity rather than lack, at issue is the question of agency. Grosz (1994:viii) has suggested that ‘the notion of agency…can be remapped, refigured, in terms of models and paradigms which conceive of subjectivity in terms of the primacy of corporeality, which regard subjectivity on the model not of latency or depth but of surface.’ In terms of concrete political action, however, there is concern that this approach does not emphasize the structures that impede women's agency. Indeed, and particularly in the case of women employed in the sex industry, there is a need to devise frameworks for understanding women's autonomy and agency which transgress the structure/agency dichotomy.

There is overlap between Foucault's ‘intermediary’ bodies of discipline, and Grosz's body as ‘mediator’ of experience; indeed, they are the sites at which the performance of power, knowledge and resistance are worked out. Their emphasis differs, however, in that Foucault is interested in the classical age's discovery of the body as object and target of power, while Grosz is more concerned with elaborating a corporeal subjectivity to critique particular kinds of knowledge production. Both concepts can be...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Sex Work in Southeast Asia
• Routledge Pacific Rim Geographies
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Series preface
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Rethinking the prostitute subject: bodies, subjectivities and space
• 2 Cartographies of desire: mapping Southeast Asian sex industries
• 3 Negotiating the bar: sex, money and the uneasy politics of third space
• 4 Beyond the bar: lives, community and transient identities
• 5 Sex work, HIV/AIDS and blame: mandatory HIV antibody testing
• 6 Prostitute victim/sex worker agent: the global discourse of NGOs
• 7 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index