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CITY OF WOMEN, CITY OF FOREIGN MEN: WORKING SPACES AND RE‐WORKING IDENTITIES AMONG FEMALE SEX WORKERS IN BANGKOK'S TOURIST ZONE
Author(s) -
Askew Marc
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
singapore journal of tropical geography
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.538
H-Index - 42
eISSN - 1467-9493
pISSN - 0129-7619
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9493.1998.tb00256.x
Subject(s) - tourism , agency (philosophy) , sociology , gender studies , centralisation , identity (music) , politics , value (mathematics) , sex work , economy , political science , economics , social science , law , physics , machine learning , acoustics , computer science , medicine , family medicine , human immunodeficiency virus (hiv)
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.