Sex and Borders
Gender, National Identity and Prostitution Policy in Thailand
Leslie Ann Jeffrey 2002, Introduction, p. x – xiii.
In particular, the debate over prostitution policy in Thailand is a debate over women’s bodies, which are seen as markers of national boundaries that are to be controlled by the state. In today’s Thailand, the debate over prostitution involves a struggle over modernity and tradition, over masculinity and femininity, over the role of the state and the identity of the nation. In this era of globalization, as in the era of imperialism, states have responded with both resistance and acquiescence to global pressures and influences. These global pressures have not been simply economic or military but also discursive. Prostitution policy, as the site of the creation of the gender and sexual identities that undergird national identity, is shaped by the need to respond to Western representational power. Today, for instance, prostitution policy is guided by the desire of the Thai middle class to shape Thailand into both a modern state (as represented by the masculinity of the men who govern it) and a traditional nation (as represented by Thai women). In other words, prostitution policy seeks to discipline women, to regulate women’s bodies, and to see that they occupy the “correct” cultural roles (e.g., mothers to the nation). In the particular history of the formation of Thai national identity, prostitute women have come to be interpreted as unable to control their own futures. In the discourse of the Thai middle class, prostitute women are icons of the decline of tradition and the (negative) result of a rush to modernity without the proper guidance of their “betters.” In this way prostitutes’ own voices and demands have been drowned out in the modern Thai polity, and these women have become the objects of policy rather than the subjects of politics. Continue reading…
