Becoming cosmopolitan women while negotiating structurally limited choices: The case of Korean migrant sex workers in Australia

Abstract

International labor mobility holds the promise that one can become a cosmopolitan citizen of the world. But this interpretation of mobility rarely features in research and media focused on Asian women who travel and engage in sex work. In both arenas, the dominant narrative is that migrant sex workers are poor, the victims of sex trafficking, and pose a risk to public health. This narrative is laced with Orientalist overtones of the Asian sex worker as the alluringly exotic ‘other’, passive and particularly vulnerable, and in need of rescue. However, the interviews of 11 Korean women sex workers based in Sydney, Australia, challenge this narrative. These women engaged in a transnational quest to become cosmopolitan citizens of the world, albeit making logical choices from structurally limited options shaped by their multiple identities as women, sex workers, and Korean, and their relative precarious position in the Australian labor market. Their stories highlight how migration and work can be an agentic process of self-expression and self-actualization of identity. This identity has emerged against the backdrop of shifting meanings and practices of social reproduction in Korea, a country that has experienced a highly compressed transition from developing, to modern capitalist state. Theoretically, the article draws on post-colonial feminist theory to shed light into the conflicting views on migrant sex workers in existing research, by focusing on the women’s voices, which have been neglected or silenced.

Unfinished Decriminalization: The Impact of Section 19 of the Prostitution Reform Act 2003 on Migrant Sex Workers’ Rights and Lives in Aotearoa New Zealand

“…At the center of our study are both the acknowledgement and the analysis of the enduring role of whiteness and racialization in the implementation of anti-trafficking policies and interventions (Kempadoo 2001;Doezema 2010). These considerations are reflected in the fact that Asian cis women tend to be represented as passive victims and as such targeted by law enforcement and immigration controls (Lam and Lepp 2019;Ham 2017;Dalton and Jung 2019;Hoefinger et al 2020;Mai et al 2021) through their explicit and implicit racial profiling in Australia (Selvey et al 2018;Macioti et al 2020) New Zealand (Ting 2018;Tichenor 2019) and the US (Cheng and Kim 2014).…”

On ‘being Australian’: Korean migrants in ‘post-multicultural’ Australia.

“…There has been very limited research conducted on the Korean diaspora in Australia, as with other distinct, recent waves of migrants to Australia (Noble 2017). More recent studies have examined work and employment experiences, gender specific experiences of Korean migrants (Lee 2013;Choi et al 2015;Dalton and Jung 2019) and the psychological impact of acculturation on Korean Australian families (Kim et al 2020). What appears to be a consistent finding of research on Koreans in Australia, is their highly valued 'Koreanness' and the importance of a Korean community.…”

Framing young South Korean working holidaymakers in Australia: A longitudinal analysis of South Korean newspapers from 2000 to 2018

“…I have never wanted to have babies, but I could have two to three children in this environment. (Chae, 2015)Cosmopolitan aspiration has frequently been used to explain transnational mobility motivations (Jung and Jung, 2019; Dalton and Jung, 2019; Jung et al., 2017). The analysis of newspaper articles implied that these young people held mobile aspirations.…”