Sex Work in Southeast Asia : Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film (New Directions in Francophone Studies: Diversity, Decolonisation, Queerness)

Barnes, Leslie

Edinburgh University Press（2025/12発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 256 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781399532884
• DDC分類 306.74

Full Description

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.

Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Imperialism, Ambivalence, Sex
1. 'Why my story?': Sex Work and Rithy Panh's Cinematic Image
2. Survivors, Celebrities and Saviours in the Cambodian Rescue Industry
3. Of Markets and Mediocrity: Sex Tourism and Michel Houellebecq's Neocolonial Antihero
4. Kiều Refracted: Sex Work and the Evolution of a Vietnamese Heroine
5. Vietnamese Brides: Marriage, Migration and the Body
Conclusion: Dispassionate Reading

Works Cited
Index