Sex Work in Southeast Asia (Edinburgh UP, 2025) examines the ambivalences that mark Southeast Asian sex industries under twenty-first-century global imperialism, exploring the multi-layered subjectivities of sex workers, procurers and clients, and interrogating the frameworks in which discourses surrounding sex work circulate.
Engaged with debates concerning the status of transactional sex, it 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. Its scenes of ambivalence show how the aesthetic treatment of sex work stretches the paradigms with which we make sense not only of sex work, but also of art, the evidentiary status of testimony and the spectacle 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.
The book is accessible through JStor, and a detailed discussion can also be found on the New Books Network podcast.
Asie du Sud Est Research Network 