City of Women, City of Foreign Men

Working Spaces and Re‐working Identities Among Female Sex Workers in Bangkok's Tourist Zone

Datos Bibliográficos

ID20153539
AutoresMarc Askew (Victoria University, autor de correspondencia)
Año1998
Volumen19
Número2
Páginas130-150
Fecha de publicación1998-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSingapore Journal of Tropical Geography (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0129-7619 • E-ISSN: 1467-9493
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1467-9493.1998.tb00256.x
OpenAlexW2119141555
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas13
Referencias citadas26

In this paper I propose that spatially‐informed and agency‐centred treatments of prostitution as a practice can fruitfully highlight the moral and symbolic economies operating in the lives of women as they engage and disengage with prostitution in the tourist sex trade zones of Bangkok. By reexamining and re‐contextualising the practices of prostitution in terms of interacting spatial/socio‐cultural fields, we can gain more useful insights than heretofore obtained through a mono‐dimensional political economy or gender‐culture framework. We must accept that women sex workers are part of the geography of socio‐economic transformation, responding to the centralisation and expansion of key sectors of the Thai economy. I conceptualise this broader geography as involving “oscillation” between urban and rural “places” (which represent key “fields” of value), and at the level of the city (and the tourist leisure infrastructure) as “movement” between different work sites and “arenas” of identity formation. Within this complex of circulation and engagement, women strategise to maximise what may be described as survival and status resources (conversion of income into cultural capital) aiming towards recovery of meaningful self‐identity

Agency (philosophy) · Centralisation · Economics · Economy · Identity (music) · Political science · Politics · Sex work · Social science · Sociology · Tourism · Value (mathematics) · Gender Studies · Law · Sex work and related issues · Socioeconomic Development in Asia · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies