Trafficking Women in Korea by Sallie Yea

Author:Sallie Yea [Yea, Sallie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781135008239
Google: N8AqBwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-03-24T05:02:33+00:00

Strategic intimacy

Intimacy, emotion and affect have generated a crescendo of interest in the social sciences of late, including in geography where they have nonetheless rarely led to a focus on commercial sexual labour or, indeed, human trafficking. This may be, as Viviana Zelizer (2005) explains, because the transacted nature of commercial sexual services tends to preclude its location within intimate and affective relations. Despite this, several recent anthropological accounts of sex tourism in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia have disrupted this view. Brennan’s (2004) account of the tourist town of Sousa in the Dominican Republic illustrates the significant role that open-ended prostitution plays in enabling women to attempt to achieve immediate goals of financial stability but also long-term ones associated with their movement beyond the site in which their sexual labouring takes place. Her analysis nonetheless highlights the precarity of such strategies, which for many women did not ultimately improve their situations either in Sousa or abroad.

Kempadoo’s (1999) analysis of sex workers in the Caribbean also explores the ways sex workers utilise strategies for social and economic advancement that hinge on sexual labour beyond the client-prostitute transaction. Re-working subjectivity through the expression of agency is a key theme in studies of migrant and tourist-oriented sex work. In tracing the historical situatedness of contemporary forms of sex work in the Caribbean Kempadoo (1999: 8) suggests that historically under slavery sex was a strategy by women to acquire freedom from oppression: “Exoticism, while constituting a form of control and domination over women of colour, was thus also strategically transformed through sex work to economically and socially empower women, men and children”, leading to the subversion and reconstitution of power relations since it “disrupts notions of prostitution as simply a relationship based on an exchange of sex for money or as a source of oppression for women”. Discussing Filipinas specifically, Hildson and Giridharan (2008: 612) also note the ability of those working in Sabah’s nightlife industries to “resist, negotiate and participate in forging their subjectivities”, rendering domination incomplete (cf. Scott 1985).

This work indicates that money is tied to intimate relationships with customers-cum-boyfriends, but not in ways that suggest sex is only a transaction or encounters are primarily about transacted sex. Visas as an emblem of onward and outward mobility, and sincere romance with a customer, further complicate these encounters as women attempt to enmesh their own transnational mobility and romantic aspirations within them. The concept of ‘strategic intimacy’ illuminates the ways in which women attempt to negotiate and resist their marginal circumstances in gijich’on clubs by strategically cultivating intimate relationships with selective customers. Cabezas (2009:23) applies the similar concept of ‘tactical sex’ to the sex tourism sectors in Cuba and the Dominican Republic in order to “capture the diverse, amorphous ways in which sex is deployed in tourist economies”. I found that most Filipina entertainers in gijich’on do not position themselves as sex workers, with intimacy being a more readily acceptable resource for their encounters with customers than sex. Moreover, while a tactic

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