Going against a miserabilist vision of prostitution in the countries of the South, sociologist Sébastien Roux delivers the results of an ethnographic survey carried out among prostitutes in Bangkok. Adopting the indigenous point of view allows her to leave the register of moral indignation to understand the nature of the relationships that develop between them and the tourists.
Two years after being defended, Sébastien Roux’s remarkable thesis on sex tourism became a book, which will undoubtedly be a classic in the collection “ Gender and sexualities », for its scientific requirements as well as for its literary quality. The work combines a dense monographic description with original political and theoretical reflection. It consists of two complementary empirical studies: the first part, “ Intimate ethnography “, describes a tourist prostitution district in Bangkok (Patpong) from the point of view of the women and men who work there and those who frequent it, while the second, “ The genealogy of a prohibition », reconstructs the political history of moral mobilization against sex tourism. The two parts are linked by a questioning of the politicization and globalization of sexual issues and relations, posed at various scales, from local to national and international.
Working with ordinary categories, developing new ones
Observing the relationships that develop in a prostitution district involves prior work on ordinary notions of venality, prostitution, and sex tourism. We know the strength of the militant condemnations of “ sex tourism », presenting prostitution in a tourist context as an extreme form of modern exploitation, mixed with imperialism. As for the representations of prostitution, they oscillate between an abolitionist version, referring any circulation of money in sexuality to limitless domination, and a neo-regulatory version, considering prostitution as work and actresses/actors as workers. -are sexual. Eager not to miss the subjective experiences of the actors and the plurality of exchanges, Sébastien Roux recognizes that it is problematic to import the terms sex tourism and prostitution into the scientific field but decides to continue using them, because the notions make sense for the actors and structure part of their actions.
He proposes the notion of “ intimate economy », which aims to draw attention to the plurality of dimensions that run through intimate exchanges. Sébastien Roux follows in the footsteps of Paola Tabet (2005) but also of the anthropologist Denise Brennan (2004) and Viviana Zelizer (2007), even if it was Ara Wilson who coined the expression, in a different sense. of the one where he uses it (Wilson, 2004). Extending the theory of continuum of economic-sexual exchangeit includes in the economy of prostitution but also other relationships not classified as prostitution, not only the circulation of money and that of non-monetary material goods (gifts of clothing, jewelry or cell phones, invitations to restaurants or in the cinema etc.), but also that of immaterial goods, valued for their own sake, such as moral goods (respect for oneself and others, honor, loyalty, feeling of behaving well), emotional goods (love, friendship, jealousy) or social (access to other social and cultural worlds, residential mobility, even social ascension). In short, the theory of intimate economies has as its horizon a general economy of relationshipsa promising scientific field but difficult to develop.
The author invents a posture for field observation and constructs an original analytical style, which stays away from abstract denunciation, fascination, paralyzing proximity, but also the taste to disenchant. It combines sensitivity to point of view “ emic » (i.e. indigenous) and reflexive back and forth. The analysis does not make the actors disappear, who become characters. This objectification of subjectivity and behavior, but also of moral mobilizations, is in line with the work of Didier Fassin and Pierre Bourdieu.
Nature of relationships and practical reality of exchanges: continuum and discontinuities
The advantage of a spatial approach centered on a neighborhood is that it allows us to think about the diversity of practices observable in situ, independently of implicit classifications and judgments. Certainly, for middle-class people outside the neighborhood, the dancers and waitresses of Patpong are all prostitutes. But Sébastien Roux decides to favor the emic point of view – that of the women of Patpong and the farang (white foreigners) who frequent the neighborhood –, which classifies encounters in a more subtle way.
The relationships that form in the neighborhood are diverse, as are the places where they originate. They often include sex and money, but not always and not only. The reference to the feeling of love is frequent. Regarding their partners, women never use the term client, but depending on the case, friend (gik) and boyfriend (fen). That Western men dominate does not imply that local women are without resources and without a strategy.
The agreed opposition between sincere relationships based on love and relationships driven by interest hardly allows us to understand what is at stake. Sébastien Roux proposes to question the practical reality of exchanges, and the way in which actors qualify relationships based on the goods that circulate there. The shift from remuneration for the act to the payment of regular income, characteristic of ongoing relationships, erases, for example, the stigma of prostitution and normalizes relationships, the repute of which is thus ensured in the eyes of the actors. For the women interviewed, “ to love someone is to take care of them »: love and interest are not opposed. A significant part of the profits from prostitution is sent to the village of origin, to repay the moral debt of women towards their parents and to invest in a post-Bangkok era. A division of roles is thus established between women and farang, into which a certain number of men agree to enter. By showing empathy for the difficult lives of their “ girlfriends ” and a generosity which translates into regular payments of money from a distance, they protect themselves in their own eyes from the stigma of “ customer “. A traditional and unequal image of the couple is maintained, made up of a woman who fulfills her duties towards her family and a generous and protective man, even if both are aware of the fragility of this image towards towards the outside world.
For the women of Patpong, tourist prostitution thus appears to be a relatively honorable path to social advancement, allowing them to partially escape their social destiny: they dream of marriage with a good farang who would take care of them so that they in turn take care of their parents, but do not seek migration like women in other tourist regions (Caribbean, Brazil, sub-Saharan Africa). L’agency relative of this “ aristocracy of the profession » that Sébastien Roux describes would, however, benefit from being presented against the backdrop of the situation of prostitutes specializing in Thai clients, who are infinitely more constrained.
Globalization of sexual issues, transformations of politics
The second part of the book analyzes the processes of mobilization on sexual issues (notably sex tourism and AIDS) on a global and national scale, as well as their effects on a local scale.
An observation was carried out in a NGO local support for sex workers, Empowerbased in Patpong, which is the main interlocutor of the public authorities in the new regulatory framework for prostitution in Thailand. Sébastien Roux shows that this association, very dependent on international subsidies and requests and far from the reality of the majority of Thai prostitutes, acts as an expert speaking on behalf of a target population, but that the latter is not speech.
The history of international mobilization on sex tourism in the 1980s and 1990s shows how the initial radical criticism of tourist prostitution was depoliticized until it was reduced to a single form: moral indignation towards child prostitution, which leads to the police and judicial settlement of pedophilia. Highlighting extreme, spectacular and very minority cases is effective in short-term advocacy but has the effect of forgetting the more mundane nature of the problem and the vast majority of cases. The politics of the spectacular creates a hierarchy of the intolerable and the tolerable, to the point that “ the problematization of sex tourism has favored the development of prostitution districts which have only had to adapt at the margins » (p. 244).
The globalization of moral and sexual issues contributes to reproducing the hierarchy between a civilized central space and peripheral, lagging spaces, to which lessons are taught. At the same time, it produces unity through a diffusion of the ideal of sexual democracy (according to the expression of Éric Fassin), which is expressed for example in an international circulation of sexual identities, reorganizing and flexibilising by hybridization of local classification systems. In our opinion, we cannot nevertheless neglect the considerable gap which separates the theoretical ideal of sexual democracy and its practice, particularly in intimate relations between unequals (by class, “ breed » or the original space).
More generally, the globalization of sexual issues is part of a global dynamic of transformation of politics and forms of political expression, as evidenced by the increase in the role of the associative sector and lobbies, the mobility of debates, the privileged role of international conferences and the emergence of new political experts, advocacy specialists, built by and for debate. Ultimately, can we not say that mobilizations on sexual and moral issues do not differ that much, including in their ambiguities, from contemporary mobilizations which have other objects, such as mobilizations for the environment, humanitarian commitments or the climate negotiations ? Sébastien Roux’s masterful analysis of the economy of intimate relationships and the fight against sex tourism thus leads to a stimulating reflection on new forms of politics.