Relational work and careers of intimacy: Rethinking the cultural interpretation of the sex trade in Vietnam

Abstract

Cultural interpretations of the sex trade are pervasive in Southeast Asia, in particular, the argument that daughters enrol in sex work to repay a debt of life and support their parents. While useful to illuminate the role of culture in shaping economic action, this narrative carries the risk of viewing people as robots guided by stable and supra-individual forces. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in Southern Vietnam and Cambodia on precarious and indebted Vietnamese families that encourage their daughters to sell sex, this article disturbs deterministic cultural accounts of sex work by describing how families interpret, negotiate and (re)produce cultural scripts through relational work. More specifically, it shows how these families draw from familistic scripts about hierarchy, duty and sacrifice conveyed in popular culture to assemble relational packages. Deeply imbued in affective undercurrents and power asymmetry, these packages allow families to negotiate taboo trades like the repayment of debt through the sale of their daughter’s virginity. Overall, a relational work framework provides a better understanding of female participation in the sex trade in Vietnam than explanations based on normative accounts of culture or problematic trafficking binaries.

Thailand’s Sex Entertainment: Alienated Labor and the Construction of Intimacy

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The interplay between intimacy and commodification: Queer agency and vulnerability amid neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics

“…Constable (2009) argues that intimate relations, which include but are not limited to those involving sex, marriage, reproductive labour, and/or care labour, have become increasingly inseparable from commodified relations in capitalist society. Empirical work has demonstrated how intimate relations are intertwined with commodified relations in various domains of work in different contexts, including sex work in the USA, Europe (Bernstein, 2007), and Vietnam (Lainez, 2020), service work in the UK (Pettinger, 2011), and domestic work among migrants in China (Fu et al, 2018). In these work domains, women tend to exercise certain degrees of agency to reflect upon and negotiate cultural scripts, and yet remain vulnerable to financial precarity and social exclusion (Fu et al, 2018;Lainez, 2020).…”

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“…The interplay between structure and agency in the contexts of intimacy, family, and E-ISSN: 3041-8550 contemporary close relationships has been analyzed, highlighting the complex dynamics at play within intimate relationships (Ketokivi, 2012). The relational work and careers of intimacy of sex workers within families and broader sociocultural structures have been explored, shedding light on the intersection of intimacy, family, and political economies (Lainez, 2020).…”