Chapter 27 - Sex Politics and Moral Panics  

ABSTRACT
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This chapter outlines the two dominant discourses around LGBT communities, sex/entertainment workers, and sexually-active youth in Cambodia that label them as either vulnerable, “at-risk” disease vectors in need of intervention, or as immoral delinquents who are influenced by the west and therefore threats to Cambodian tradition. There has been little focus, however, on the specific rights and social, emotional and political needs of these groups. This chapter is the first academic contribution of its kind to outline the ways in which LGBT communities, sex workers and young people are responding to, and resisting these discourses and addressing their rights and needs through community mobilization and self-advocacy.

I'm happy to announce that I have an article titled "Neoliberal Sexual Humanitarianism and Story-Telling - The Case of Somaly Mam" in the Special Issue of Anti-Trafficking Review:  Trafficking Representations (no. 7, 2016), edited by Rutvica Andrijasevic and Nicola Mai.  I want to warmly thank Nicola Mai, Rutvica Andrijasevic, Rebecca Napier-Moore, Carol Leigh, and two anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful feedback and comments on this article! 

Arrival of Hooters Raises Questions About ‘Girlie Bar’ Work

​BY HEIDI HOEFINGER | JULY 19, 2016

After years of conversations with Cambodian bar workers, I have learned that many women do find earning an income to support themselves and their families to be empowering—even when it’s through bar, sex or entertainment work. What’s important is that the women earn a good, livable wage, that they feel a sense of control over their work and that they have safe working conditions free from violence and coercion. Many of them have, in fact, been able to find that at local bar establishments.

—Opinion--

In The Cambodia Daily article “Risqué Business” (July 9-10), the manager of Hooters in Phnom Penh is trying to differentiate and create a false hierarchy between Hooters and other local establishments, which ultimately benefits him and not the workers themselves. From the women’s perspectives, they’ll be doing the same type of work, which involves chatting and flirting with customers while wearing revealing clothing in an attempt to sell food and drink. Indeed, not all “girlie bars” or hostess bars require women to have sex with clients; most times, the women make that decision themselves. The fact that the Hooters manager says he will terminate women if they work at other establishments reveals a strict, controlling working environment that will simply tie the women to Hooters even if the working conditions are poor and prevent them from exercising freedom of choice over other places of work.

For the article, I was asked whether I thought that Hooters—where female staff are “objectified by being dressed in revealing clothing that emphasizes breasts”—benefits the local bar culture. My response: I don’t think it’s useful to think about this type of work within the framework of “objectification” because women in Cambodia are objectified on a daily basis with or without their clothes on. It’s objectifying to be poor, beg for money, work on the street to sell fruit for a few cents, labor endlessly in garment factories, or just exist in a culture where one’s female gender places one lower on the social ladder. When women of any class can find strength and power in the ability to support themselves through whatever means works best for them amid a sea of gender and social constraints, that can, indeed, be very empowering.

The biggest problem I foresee with Hooters coming to Phnom Penh in terms of culture and economy, however, is the globalization and corporatization of the hostess bar scene. Large multinational corporations are known to exploit workers in favor of profit. I imagine that their menu will contain Western-equivalent prices for mediocre chicken wings, but the workers will not be earning Western-equivalent salaries—all this in an effort to gain ridiculous profits at any cost. Hooters will likely strive to monopolize the bar industry wherever it pops up in Phnom Penh and put other local establishments out of business, which only benefits them and not the local economy.

In the end, I agree with the Cambodian women that Hooters will likely be another glorified, overpriced “girlie bar” with international branding that imagines itself to be something it is not. That does not mean, however, that women shouldn’t make the most of the situation and take employment there if, after they’ve weighed their options, it seems like a good option for them at this point in their lives.


Heidi Hoefinger is the author of “Sex, Love and Money in Cambodia.” She is a professor of science at Berkeley College, NYC, an adjunct professor of anthropology at the City University of New York, and an adjunct lecturer on gender and sexuality at the Institute of South East Asian Affairs in Thailand.
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© 2016, The Cambodia Daily. All rights reserved. 

 photo by Alexandra Hoefinger

Cambodia
Understanding Intimacy and Economic Pragmatism in Cambodia

Hoefinger travelled to Cambodia as a backpacker in 2003, fell in love with the country and befriended many Cambodian women who worked in Phnom Penh’s bars.


Related Articles

• For Some Women, Sex Work Is a Choice, Not a Matter of Trafficking
• US Professor Examines the Idea of ‘Professional Girlfriends’ in Cambodia

Ten Soksreinith, VOA Khmer,      29 February 2016

PHNOM PENH--Relationships between ordinary Cambodian women and foreign men often are stigmatized as commercial or exploitative. But the truth is in fact multi-layered and complex, as in any relationship where intimacy and material benefit are in play, according to one researcher.

Heidi Hoefinger is a professor at Berkeley College, New York, and the author of “Sex, Love and Money in Cambodia: Professional Girlfriends and Transactional Relationships.” Her unique book examines very closely the lives of Cambodian women who have foreign partners to understand how these women use intimacy to seek socio-economic empowerment.

In an ironic twist in a conservative society like Cambodia, these women are often praised for having “transactional relationship” with foreign men, which bring in money to support their families. But they are also stigmatized for breaking social norms.

In a recent interview with VOA Khmer, Hoefinger explained in depth the interaction between intimacy and economic pragmatism in these relationships.

“In this context of transactional relationships…Cambodian women use intimacy as a tool to initiate and maintain long-term relationships with foreign men, not only to maintain their love, but also to secure material benefits,” she said.
Hoefinger travelled to Cambodia as a backpacker in 2003, fell in love with the country and befriended many Cambodian women who worked in Phnom Penh’s bars.

That turned into an extended period of research, during which she found that some women from rural Cambodia end up working at Western bars and night clubs in Phnom Penh because bar work gives more security, better pay and more freedom in terms of working hours. But the environment in the bars tends to encourage female bar workers to negotiate between their obligation to obey social norms and the decision to seek intimacy and material benefits from foreign partners, which means having premarital sex.

While it is considered taboo in Cambodia, pre-marital sex is widespread. Surveys of schoolchildren have found that 15 percent of boys and 11.2 percent of girls aged between 13 and 15 years old have already had sex, according to the U.N. Population Fund. Rates are predicted to be higher among those not enrolled in school.

For Cambodian women with foreign partners, Hoefinger said that love and material needs are inevitably intertwined. “For the women, emotionality and love are attached to material needs and economic pragmatism,” she said, noting that Cambodian culture has its own ideas about reciprocal exchange linked to marriage.

The colloquial term “milk money” is used to refer to a payment from the groom’s to the bride’s family, in effect paying for the price of the upbringing—or the mother’s milk—of the bride, Hoefinger explained.

“It’s still pretty much culturally expected that when a daughter is married, it brings the material back to the rest of the family,” she said. “So the idea of these Cambodian women desiring a man to help support her and her family should not be attributed to some forms of greed—but sometime it is—rather it is deeply rooted cultural expectation.”

In Cambodia, the line between marriage, transactional sex and prostitution can be ambiguous, she argued. Therefore, all relationships between Cambodian women and foreign men are often labeled as commodified and commercial, inappropriate and inauthentic.

Among Western men there may be a cultural expectation that a woman’s demands for material goods—jewelry and gifts, for example—represent insincere love or intimacy. “This is something that leads to mistrust and uncertainty, which leads to framing the women as ‘greedy whore,’ ‘thief’ and ‘liar,’” said Hoefinger.

Her research also found that, in some cases, “the cultural misunderstanding, the confusion and the mistrust, lead to a lot of different psycho-behavioral consequences,” including emotional and physical violence. This is even more problematic since mental health care provision is so lacking in Cambodia.

“One of my goals is that the research can be used to help facilitate the development of a local and international intervention program that focuses on cultural orientation for couples, relationship counseling, mental health services, depression and gender-based violence,” she said, adding that attention should also be paid to the risks of self-harm, abuse and even suicide among those in cross-cultural relationships.
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This February, for the first time in a few years, Cambodian (and international) news media refrained from over-exaggerating the "dangers" of Valentine's Day in Phnom Penh (see below for previous blog posts about this).  In a welcomed change, Ben Paviour of the Cambodia Daily instead published a more relevant piece on the intersections of contemporary dating practices and social media among young Khmers.  He cited my book and research!  The text of the article is cut and pasted below. The original article is here.


BY BEN PAVIOUR | FEBRUARY 15, 2016

Two years ago, 24-year-old Yi Sal was scrolling through his newsfeed on Facebook when he saw a pretty girl he’d never seen before.

“I added her and start chatting with her,” the mustached singer and drummer said on a recent afternoon at Hun Sen park in Phnom Penh. The two met up at a local coffee shop and hit it off.

“Before, I had a few girlfriends, but now only one,” he said.

Young, urban Cambodians like Mr. Sal are increasingly turning to their smartphones and computers to like, swipe and chat their way to romance, bucking deep-seated cultural norms on courtship in the process.

The digital platforms—which include local entrant Matchstix as well as international services like Facebook, Badoo and Tinder— are capitalizing on cultural shifts, along with technological trends.

“Traditionally, most marriages were arranged and therefore most relationships were deprived of the ‘romance’ associated with the individual autonomy of choosing one’s partner,” writes anthropology academic Heidi Hoefinger in “Sex, Love, and Money in Cambodia.”

Pop songs, karaoke videos, films and magazines have edged aside older cultural mores, according to Ms. Hoefinger. “The dominant sex­­ual culture for contemporary young people in Cambodia is filled with strong themes of romance, love, and heartache.”

One business hoping to take advantage of the changing times is Australian tech company Mobi­Media. When the company launched matchmaking app Match­stix last July, they pitched it as a way for Cambodians to meet new friends, out of concern that online matchmaking for overtly romantic purposes might be too risque.

“I think Cambodians are in theory very conservative, and their parents are conservative,” said marketing and operations manager Klara Grintal at Mobi­Media’s astro-turfed conference room—filled with neon beanbags—in Phnom Penh’s Boeng Keng Kang I commune.

“But if you go to the coffee shops, and you listen to conversations young Cam­bodians are having—and the kinds of messages they are exchanging—these are not very conservative at all,” she said.

Matchstix has been a relative success in its first six months, clocking nearly 200,000 users who have made over 70,000 matches as of February 8, ac­cording to Ms. Grintal.

Users of the app, which initially launched in Khmer and is now also available in English, are presented with photos of another user who fits their specific age, gender and distance criteria. They then swipe right on someone they’d like to know better—either as friends, or something more.

The interface resembles a bubblier, somewhat clunkier version of the dating app Tinder, which boasts more than 50 million users around the world. It’s a comparison Matchstix wants to avoid out of fear that Cam­bodians may find the latter service unfamiliar and unsafe.

In addition to focusing on a Khmer-­language audience, Match­­­­­stix’s visuals and marketing materials come in various shades of red and pink.

“So if you are—excuse my French—a sleazy 70-year-old trying to find a girl, it’s highly unlikely you’d use [Matchstix],” Ms. Grintal said.

She acknowledged that the app’s aesthetics cannot ward off all predatory behavior among the user base—which is currently almost three-quarters male—particularly if it happens outside the digital realm.

Some 21 percent of Cam­bodian men admitted to having perpetrated rape at some point in their lives, according to a 2013 U.N. report, which found that just over a quarter of Cambodian women had experienced physical or sexual abuse at the hands of a partner.

Though some young women in Phnom Penh said they would be fine meeting someone in person after chatting on the app, others were less sure. An 18-year-old who gave her name only as Vannarin said she found the idea “scary,” though three of her friends sitting in Wat Botum park said they would consider it.

Another 18-year-old, who asked to remain anonymous, said she would never meet up with a stranger she had met online.

“I almost got rape once, so yeah, you know?” she wrote over the messaging and matchmaking app Badoo.
Still, with more and more users signing up every day, Ms. Grintal said Matchstix has embraced its role as a matchmaker. “This year we are all about love, and dates, and ro­mance, and so on.”

But to win the hearts of Cam­bodia’s smartphone generation, Matchstix will have to pull them away from an online service not designed specifically for matchmaking: Facebook.

Vannak Ken, a 22-year-old Nor­ton University student, had never heard of Matchstix. In­stead, he has found partners on Face­book using a protocol now familiar to many Cam­bo­dians his age.

It starts when he gets a friend request from a stranger.

“The person adds me and comes to my profile to like a photo,” Mr. Ken said. “Then they chat to me or I chat to them. After a [few] weeks or days of chatting, we go outside—to the park, or to the cinema.”

The phenomenon has an analog precedent. For years, Cam­bodians have deliberately called “wrong” numbers to meet new people, ac­cording to Daniel McFarland, a Ph.D candidate at Australian Na­tional University who has studied the trend.

“This practice has produced new social connections that crisscross the country, leading to marriage, internal migration and a reshaping the the geography of kinship in the country,” Mr. McFarland wrote in an email.

Online matchmaking has some parallels, Mr. McFarland said, but trades serendipity for algorithms and smartphone “selfies.”

“Like elsewhere in the world, I think that physical presentation through photos will increasingly be part of the courting culture in Cam­bodia,” he wrote.

These rituals are a moot point for the millions of young, single Cam­bodians who still lack ac­cess to smartphones or the In­ternet. (About one-third of Cam­bodians were connected to the Internet last year, according to government data.)

But even among those who are connected, there remains a desire for real-world introductions to potential partners.
Seventeen-year-old Phnom Penh high school student Vin Ka has never experimented with apps like Matchstix. He met his current girlfriend at school two months ago.

“We teach each others while studying in Khmer class,” he said, adding that he hasn’t told his parents about the relationship. “They [will] worry that I think about love, not studying.”

And some young Cambodians still think parents are still in the best position to pick their future partners. Keo Kouch Savann, also 17, is single, but said the system of parental matchmaking had its merits.

“Maybe they find a good person for us, better than we would find,” he said. “They know a lot of things better than us.”
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[email protected]

This week, Ten Soksreinith from Voice of America conducted a radio interview with me about my research in Cambodia. The interview will be translated into the Khmer language and broadcast on VOA Khmer Radio!  A transcript of the interview can be found here.  I've included the text below as well. 

Ten Soksreinith requested that we conduct a series of interviews on gender, intimacy, and sex and entertainment work in Cambodia. So stayed tuned for the December installment!

       photo by Alexandra Hoefinger

Cambodia

US Professor Examines the Idea of ‘Professional Girlfriends’ in Cambodia​

“Sex, Love, and Money in Cambodia: Professional Girlfriends and Transactional Relationships” looks at the intimate lives of Cambodian women and the idea of “transactional relationships.”

Heidi Hoefinger, a professor in Science Department at Berkeley College in New York City, with her book, “Sex, Love, and Money in Cambodia: Professional Girlfriends and Transactional relationships,” about the strength and resiliency and challenges of female bar workers in Cambodia. 

Ten Soksreinith, VOA Khmer

12 November 2015

WASHINGTON DC--

[Editor’s note: A new book from a US professor looks at the world of “professional girlfriends,” Cambodian women who have gift-based relationships with foreign men. In her book “Sex, Love, and Money in Cambodia: Professional Girlfriends and Transactional Relationships,” Professor Heidi Hoefinger, who teaches in the Science Department of Berkeley College, in New York, looks at the intimate lives of Cambodian women and the idea of “transactional relationships.” Women are often praised for these relationships, which bring in money to support their families, but also stigmatized for breaking social codes. In an interview with VOA Khmer Hoefinger said the women are often seeking respect and recognition for their choices, something they don’t always get.]


What motivated you to write this book?

The first time I went to Cambodia was back in 2003. I was just a backpacker who had just finished teaching in India and wanted to tour Southeast Asia among many peers around my age during that time. It was at that point that I first entered one of the hostess bars in Cambodia and became friends with a lot of female bar workers there. We could identify over a lot of things like music, dance, pop culture, and boyfriends. I was drawn to the stories of their lives, and the frenetic energy of Phnom Penh. At that time I decided that I wanted to come back and research and spend time talking to the women that were basically at the heart of it all. I have been going back and forth to Cambodia since 2003.

What is the book about?

The book is ultimately about the strengths and resiliency and challenges of female bar workers in Cambodia, who are employed in the Western-oriented hosted bar sector, which is one sector within the larger entertainment industry. I write about how, amidst a sea of gender constraints—which include strict moral and social codes, sexual violence, corruption, domestic abuse—young women are using the tools around them, which in this case are sex and intimacy, to form relationships with foreign men as a means to improve their lives, make socioeconomic advancements, and ultimately find enjoyment in their lives. The book also sheds light on the relationships themselves that develop between Cambodian women and foreign men, which are multi-layered and complex, but often stigmatized as only ever commercial or only ever exploitative. After spending over 10 years talking to people, I found that often this is not the case, and that people are genuinely seeking true love and intimacy, and that intimacy and economics mingle in complex ways, as they do in any relationship, in Cambodia and beyond. Ultimately, I am trying to humanize and destigmatize the women themselves and the relationships that develop with their Western partners. 

How do female bar workers you talked to justify their actions in seeking intimacy with Westerners, either for love or socioeconomic gain?

Most of the women I spoke to at the bars migrate to the cities from the countryside, where their options are very limited, especially with gender disparities in education and society in general. Not many of these women have an education beyond the sixth grade. But they do feel a tremendous obligation to support and contribute to their family, as well. So a lot of them make the decision, a brave decision, to leave the countryside and leave the security of living with their families to move to the cities to seek out labor. So there is a feminization of labor migration in Cambodia.
The problem is when they get to the city, their options are very limited, as well. They can either work in a garment factory for low wages and with very long hours and poor working conditions. They can work in a home, doing domestic work, cleaning and caring for large families. Or they can do street trade, trading food or selling fruit, or have small size businesses that are street-based.

A lot of women have tried all of those options and ended up in the bar because they find them the most lucrative. They have more freedom, in terms of their working hours. The bars are often the places where they can work for a little while, and then quit, and then either raise children or go back to work. So there is a sense of security in those bars, especially when they have good working relationships with the owners and managers.

But doing this kind of work, and even the act of leaving their homes, goes against a lot of the gender codes that are laid out, in particular the Chbap Srey, the Women’s Code of Conduct, which was written historically. Although the codes are not really recited and memorized in the same way they had been in the past, their values are still passed on and reinforced. Even to leave one’s home is a challenge to the Women’s Code of Conduct. In many ways, the women defy the Chbap Srey and the gender code for women in every aspect because they are working late at night, they are working in the environment where people are drinking alcohol and consuming drugs, and of course, they are having premarital sex and relationships. So they are absolutely defying the social code for women in many ways.
However, I found that if they can earn enough capital and provide support to their family and buy homes for their family, which many of them do from their remittances, and pay for their siblings’ school tuition—sometimes they can savage their tarnished images. In the book, I talk about how they experience this double value system, where they are heavily stigmatized as “broken women” and as “criminal,” but at the same time are highly praised in their family if they can contribute to their family’s economic wellbeing. So it’s complex terrain for the women to negotiate.

By writing this book about gender and money in Cambodia, what have you learned about the country, especially the issues of your interest?

When I first went to Cambodia as a naïve backpacker and eventually a graduate student, I had a lot of my own naïve assumptions, preconceptions, and biases. I assumed that a lot of women that I met at the bars were negotiable for a particular price, and that they were controlled by bosses and managers, and that they have very little decision-making power, and that they were trapped in the bars—which is very powerful discourse that circulates in Cambodia and beyond, especially when you talk about female bar workers. I assumed that every inter-ethnic couple, Cambodian women and their western partners, were all commercially-based. So I had to confront all of my own biases and preconceptions quite quickly when I started to get to know the women and spend time with them in the bars, in their homes with their familes, helping them care for their children, and by doing in-depth intimate ethnographic research. It was through that that I realized most of my assumptions were wrong, and that women themselves were making clear decisions to do this work among limited options.

There were definitely active decisions being made to participate in this work and in this lifestyle. Most of the women were not controlled heavily by bosses and managers. They could make their own choices as to whether or not they would go with clients and what they would or would not do with clients. One of the main findings of the book was that most of them were not doing the kind of pre-negotiated sex-for-cash transaction that we often understand to be commercial sex work. It was more ambiguous than that. It was based in a grey area where sex, love and money were all coming together, but it wasn’t framed as commercial sex work – the women didn’t view themselves as sex workers, and the men didn’t view themselves as clients.

They framed each other as real boyfriend and girlfriend. Yes, of course, there were material expectations. The women understood and knew that these foreigners had more economic capital and social capital than they had. And the women themselves wanted to capitalize on that. So that was an important finding. All of the relationships really made me reflect on the relationships of my peers and friends outside Cambodia, and how all of us have relationships that mingle intimacy, economics and pragmatic reality, and that we should really stop thinking about how “our sex” here is fundamentally different from sex and relationship in Cambodia, or between Cambodian women and their foreign partners. Clearly, there are differences in class and nationality, and access to resources that the couples have to negotiate. But I really try to normalize these stigmatized relationships that develop, and the choices the women make.

How do you feel about Cambodian women seeking socioeconomic empowerment by becoming bar workers, girlfriends to foreigners, or sex workers?

What I am trying to do is destigmatize their choices. Often what happens in Cambodia is this very powerful discourse that these women are either social deviants who are breaking all the social codes, or they are victims that are in need of rescue. The work that they do in the bars is often conflated with trafficking, and it’s assumed they are exploited victims that have not made a decision to do this, and that they are exploited by Western patriarchy. These are the narratives that circulate among a very powerful abolitionist lobby in Cambodia that wants to put an end to all forms of sex and entertainment work as a means of addressing trafficking issues, which is, to me, problematic.

But the sex and entertainment workers themselves – many of whom, but not all –are involved in a sex worker union in Cambodia that has about 6,000 members, called the Women’s Network for Unity. There, they are mobilizing, and demanding rights and recognition for the choices they make. Their argument is: “We don’t want to be rescued by people who think they necessarily know better than us.” What happens when they are “rescued” is that often, they are put into these rehabilitation programs or vocational shelters where they are taught to learn to sew and handle a sewing machine, and then placed back in a garment factory. This is not the socioeconomic decision they are making. It’s one that is being forced upon them by people who believe this is a more dignified form of work. What the sex and entertainment workers are demanding is respect for the decisions they make under very constrained circumstances. Bar work is a viable means of labor and employment for some of them—that they choose—and what they are calling for is recognition and respect for those decisions, made within the environments that they are in and among the limited options that they have.

http://www.voacambodia.com/content/us-professor-examines-the-idea-of-professional-girlfriends-in-cambodia/3054958.html

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The departments of Anthropology, Gender & Women's Studies and the Honors Center have kindly invited me to my undergraduate alma mater, SUNY Plattsburgh (1998-2001), to give a book tour of Sex, Love and Money in Cambodia. This will include a book talk and signing, and guest lectures in the Sex & Culture, Global Gender Issues, and Doing Anthropology classes. Thank you to Anthropology Professor Deborah Altamirano for organizing! 

In January 2014, "Gendered Motivations, Sociocultural Constraints and Psychobehavioral Consequences of Transnational Partnerships" was published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality (Volume 15, Issue 1) in a special edition about sex work in Cambodia.  I was delighted to share the platform with my colleagues Trude Jacobsen, Melissa Ditmore and Joanna Busza.   My article has since been added to the PubMedCentral database under the National Institute of Health and can be viewed for FREE here!!

I'm super excited to share the first sex worker community review of my book, posted on the Kiss for Gabriela website, and written by filmmaker PJ Starr.  And what better day to launch the review than on December 17, the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.  A huge THANK  YOU to Laura Murray for her inspiring film and website, A Kiss for Gabriela, and to PJ Starr for writing such a warm and passionate review. 

The text of the review can be found below. The actual review can be found on the website:  
http://www.akissforgabriela.com/?cbg_tz=300&p=3717



Today is December 17. Globally sex workers, allies of sex workers, and organizations of sex workers are calling for an end to violence. December 17 is the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. Today sex workers challenge the notion that the violence committed against them and their communities is acceptable. They also challenge notion that to engage in commercial sex is a form of violence in and of itself. They resist the imposition of simplistic frameworks and “victimization” of those who do not yet accept that sex work is work.

Heidi Hoefinger’s “intimate” ethnographic study of “professional girlfriends” in Cambodia is the kind of book we need to read today in this spirit. Recently released in paperback edition in 2014, Sex, Love and Money in Cambodia is the author’s meditation on the steps students and scholars can take to respectfully engage with “the other.” (And who is more othered by American and European scholars/policy makers/pundits than South East Asian women engaging in what at first glance could be simplistically described as prostitution?) “I have adopted an ethical stance to take up [research] participants’ concerns, problems, desires and expectations as seriously as I take my own,” writes Hoefinger, who is also a member of the advocacy group SWOP-NYC and who has a long history of engaging in sex worker rights organizing, “to interrupt global discourse by channelling voices which are otherwise passed over and ignored.” The global discourse she seeks to unsettle includes misguided “anti-trafficking measures” promulgated by New York Times’ columnist Nicholas Kristoff who Hoefinger notes live tweeted a brothel raid in Cambodia with (now deposed) trafficking icon Somaly Mam. In the region sex worker organizations, such as EMPOWER Thailand, have made it clear that the “trafficking discourse” itself is a source of real harm and violencenothing that, “there are more women in the Thai sex industry who are being abused by anti-trafficking practices than there are women being exploited by traffickers.”

Hoefinger staunchly seeks ways for the “professional girlfriends” she befriends in Cambodia to tell their own stories and express their reality. These women are employed in the bars and clubs in touristy areas in the urban centers of the country. They do not see themselves as “sex workers.” Rather they negotiate a spectrum of “transactional sex” relying on one or more relationships as a means of livelihood, performing intimacy “whereby the professed feeling of love and dedication lie somewhere on a continuum between genuine and feigned, and where the meaning of the term ‘love,’ itself ranges from sexual, passionate and/or romantic, to caring, respectful and appreciative.” Hoefinger’s observations ring true. This sounds like real life. Sex, Love and Money in Cambodia reminds (and/or awakens) the reader to the idea that sex work–whether we want to speak about that as engagement in the sex trade, transactional sex, professional girlfriending, GFE, and even plain old prostitution–is at its core also about human relationships and human sexuality. No wonder that so many sex workers also consider themselves counselors and express pride in what they do. No surprise that in order to create “perfect victimhood” amongst sex workers, overly controlling social workers, the police and the saviors want to reduce the unruly lives of people into the sex trade to repress these discussions of love and desire.

As filmmakers, storytellers, and anthropologists we were impressed and intrigued by Heidi Hoefinger’s attempts to engage in new forms of ethnographic practice–the Global Girls Autobiography/E-literacy Project, brokering participation in an avant guard documentary–that were only partially successful, but enlightening all the same. Despite her reservations, the documentary film project (directed by an “eclectic French-Italian photographer), built trust and rapport. “In the end,” Hoefinger found, “the film project clarified precisely the concept of ‘intersubjective time’ which is central to my methodology and the project as a whole… the women were happy to be paid to do something artistic, and the small compensation I earned from facilitating the interviews was used to fund the expense of the Global Girls Project.”

Sex, Love and Money in Cambodia (Professional Girlfriends and Transactional Relationships) by Heidi Hoefinger is now available in paperback from Routledge.

PUBLICADO EM DECEMBER 17, 2014 BY ADMIN POSTED IN BLOG