City of Women, City of Foreign Men

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

Dados Bibliográficos

ID20153539
AutoresMarc Askew (Victoria University, autor correspondente)
Ano1998
Volume19
Fascículo2
Páginas130-150
Data de publicação1998-12-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoSingapore Journal of Tropical Geography (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0129-7619 • E-ISSN: 1467-9493
EditoraWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1467-9493.1998.tb00256.x
OpenAlexW2119141555
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas13
Referências 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